Wing Chun in Sydney

  If you are a follower of this Blog and wonder where it has gone we have moved to a new address that should of linked you through from the old site,

https://closerthanhongkong.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/counter-attacking-part-1/?preview_id=476&preview_nonce=fd240d948d&_thumbnail_id=-1&preview=true

If you wish to still follow the blog and be informed of new postings please hit the follow this blog…

The 3 stages of learning the Sil Lim Tao Form.

  Does this mean we can all do anything we want?      To a very large extent the answer is YES.

In the early training with my teacher, Sifu Jim Fung {Chuen Keung}, when he was instructing us in how to approach the Sil Lim Tao Form he said to us all “this is the way my teacher, Sifu Chu Shong Tin, taught me to approach the Form and the way his teacher,Sifu Ip Man, taught him to approach the…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: PARAGIGM CLASH.

  Many of the people there considered themselves to be ‘Big Time Movers and Shakers”, some less than complementary mumblings could be heard about the “You are doing it backwards” comment.

I approach Wing Chun from a different perspective than many other Instructors, this is due to life experiences that I have been through that changed me both mentally and physically, real things like high…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY; THE COUNTDOWN IS ON

Ironically it was because I thought Wing Chun to be stupid and ineffective that I could approach it from a position that allowed it to be what it was and not what I wanted it to be, what I found amazed me then and still does today.

  TO UNDERSTAND WING CHUN WE MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND OURSELVES.

As an old man I can assure you that this is in fact the essential ingredient to every undertaking we…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: WHATS THE DEAL WITH CONTROL?

WHO IS REALLY CONTROLLING WHOM?

  If we can become capable of seeing control through the filter of Fist Logic, nothing controls an opponent as effectively as a solid punch to the ribs immediately followed by three or four good smacks to the head.

  I often refer to Chi Sau as being the laboratory of Win Chun and it really does have this potential if we can resist the temptation to turn it into…

IS WING CHUN REALLY A CONCEPT BASED MARTIAL ART?

  “students tend to mistake the messenger for the message”.

This post is really a bit of a pointer towards the direction that the thinking in the new Blog will take.

Talk to any Wing Chun student and they will proudly tell you that Wing Chun is a Concept Based Martial Art, asked to expound upon these concepts and usually all you get is them…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY; UPDATE TO NEW SITE.

  PEOPLE WITHOUT QUESTIONS NEVER LOOK FOR ANSWERS.

This page is still getting new visitors and some old visitors have been enquiring when the new edition will be live, what it will cover and why I felt the need to change.

The new improved Wing Chun Sydney is planned to go live on February 1st 2019, this is the 9th anniversary of Wing Chun Sydney so an auspicious date, it also gives me plenty of…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY; UP STUMPS AND OFF TO THE PAVILION.

  more a passing comment than a conversation

  I have been writing this blog for more than 10 years in one format or another, and it has been a great journey, I have been able to organise my own thoughts in such a way that I have become a far better instructor than I was previously.

Blogs by their very nature are brief snapshots, in terms of interpersonal communication they are more a passing…

WEEKEND HEAD SPIN; COMPRESSION.

All intrinsic force is compressive by nature, especially on a planet governed by gravity, our body structure is always being compressed and in a direct result of this compression our body is in a constant state of expansion.

Compression is the default state necessary to perform effective Wing Chun, to achieve compression we have to activate expansion, they are two sides of the same coin, two…

WING CHUN WEDNESDY: TRAINING BACKWARDS.

  It is a confusing, challenging dilemma but it is not insurmountable, understanding that IDEAs do not need specific orientation is the key,

  WE ARE DOING IT BACKWARDS.

A few of my guys are doing a lot of technical and free sparring at the moment and certain things are becoming pretty obvious, namely that nothing works the way we train it, this is no big surprise to me I have known this for…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: MOVING OUR MASS.

  Some things move and somethings get moved, understanding what this term means can make effective even dynamic movement really easy

We cannot move bones, it is not how our body works, muscles move bones, however it is an easy interface, a decent frame of reference but we should recognise it as nothing more than a useable form of shorthand.

Moving the Hips, moving the Spine, moving the Centre…

WEEKEND HEAD SPIN. TAKING THE WING CHUN OUT OF WING CHUN.

I have a few relatively long term private students that train with me who are deeply committed to other styles, deeply involved, as much in awe of their own style as I am in Wing Chun, yet still they train one on one with me. 

What we work on is the body method at the heart of Wing Chun, we do not go near any of the Forms, not a single one, we do not do Chi Sau, we do not work on the Wing Chun…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: APPROACHING SOFTNESS.

    How can we ever hope to understand softness without some element of resistance to measure it against?

  Softness and not using strength are a really tricky things to introduce students to, partly because of the difficulty of articulating what it is we are really doing and partly because it is counter intuitive.

It is important to understand that we always use strength and we are never soft,…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: THE WEAPON SETS.

  It is the weapon sets and not the dummy set that allow us to combine all of the aspects of the earlier sets and ultimately discover the “Little Idea”.

  Saturday morning training is all about deeper understanding, my senior students attend and to be honest I learn as much as I teach most of the time, this week we worked on the Baat Cham Do.

The first thing to understand about the Baat Cham Do,…

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: DO YOU THINK YOU ARE READY?

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

  A few weeks ago I reinstituted technical sparring, some things never seem to change, and that is a real problem.

      WHAT KIND OF DAY IS IT FOR YOU?

WING CHUN WEDNESDAY: THE ROLE OF KICKING IN WING CHUN.

  Our kicking is meant to distract or disable more than it is intended to damage

Where does kicking reside in a style governed by Fist Logic?

To answer this we should look to how kicking is presented in the Forms, the only Forms that have kicking are the Chum Kiu and the Dummy, the Chum Kiu is more about the IDEA, the role kicking plays, while the Dummy is closer to the practice or application.

WEEKEND HEAD SPIN: FORMS ARE NOT KATA.

  If you see the Forms in the same way today as you did 5 years ago what have you been doing for the last 5 years?

  Wing Chun Forms are the blueprint for how we move, they are not Kata, they are not shadow boxing sets. There comes a point in our training where our understanding of the Forms changes so much that we see in many ways they go nowhere and do nothing and are all the better because of…