Advice for Beginners

 This website has a lot of information which I expect our senior students to read and look at for their homework. The Internet has hundreds of videos and articles about Wing Chun so a beginner often does not know where to even start. The same goes for this website. So I have organized the website a bit.

Above is one of my versions of the form. We were asked to do the form in less than a minute for as Chinese New Year show so I was practicing a quicker version. The slow version of the form can take 30 minutes to do and nobody likes to watch that. Totally boring. Wing Chun is not an art for nice looking forms. My form characteristics has changed over the years. This is my version at age 74.

For the beginner just learn the 108 movement form which I have at the start of my class notes section and also at the start of my videos section. Practice this form daily as well as a few hundred punches a day.

After that learn the basic mechanics of Wing Chun’s sticking hands exercises. If you don’t have a practice partner, then still do them by yourself in front of a mirror. Try to understand what you are doing and don’t just copy or mimic any teacher’s movements. The important things are the ideas. The sticking hand basic mechanics come from the first 108 movement form. You should learn in this order:

Single Sticking Hands
Rolling Hands
Lap sau or the Grabbing hand exercise

After this learn the simple fighting techniques based on the 18 defense hands and various attacking hands which are all in the first 108 movement form. To do this, have one partner just punch and the other applies the various hand techniques.

If you don’t have a partner then practice by yourself in the air in front of a mirror or find a friend to train with. You both can learn at the same time.

Don’t use SPEED or FORCE or neither of you will learn anything and injury could result!

If you can’t find anyone then build yourself any kind of a wooden dummy to practice movements on. If you cannot do this then go in the woods and find some tree with low hanging branches and practice on those. I’m not kidding, this will help train your muscle memory. Read the book Psycho Cybernetics to understand why it works.

If you were only going to practice one thing, then practice 1000 double punches every single day. Make sure you always train in the proper stance. Look up “The stance” in my student notes section.

Lot’s of martial arts are good and fun but if a beginner jumps around trying to learn several arts at the same time then they will not learn any art very well. What you can learn in one year of dedicated Wing Chun training will take you at least five years to learn if you hop around for example learning MMA and Wing Chun at the same time. These two arts conflict. One is for street self defense and the other is for ring or tournament fighting. We have seen this a lot. If you don’t like forms or don’t like sticking hands then don’t do Wing Chun.

My teacher’s teacher Master Wang Kiu asked me in a letter which I have posted on this website to help him to spread Wing Chun around the world by using the “Power of the Pen.” It was always Ip Man’s dream to make Wing Chun a household word and to make it accessible to every kind of person and not just for people who like to fight or who are very athletic, big, strong and fast. Most people cannot achieve this. Most videos are by experts and the average person doesn’t usually have the time these days to achieve these kinds of skills. we hope to address the void.

Not everyone can have access to a Master or has the funds required to learn from top people. So we have always charged very little to lean this art.

Over the years, we have generated more than 40 students, male and female who could teach the art of Wing Chun.

If you are only interested in fighting, then you don’t need to read too much on this website. Just practice punching, moving and fighting.

But if Martial art to you also has an intellectual thinking side then many of the articles on this website might interest you to study more about Chinese philosophy and martial arts theory. If you ever want to teach martial art then you will have a variety of students with all kinds of educational backgrounds. To cater to them all then it’s good to know more stuff.