Our Wing Chun Curriculum

Our Wing Chun curriculum is divided into just three levels: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Most people finish the beginners level. Some finish the Intermediate level and just a few have the time to finish the Advanced levels of the art.  

Our training curriculum has changed over the years as we gained more knowledge. The curriculum often depends on what kinds of students we have. In the 1980’s, most of our students were already proficient in various martial arts. Quite a few were at the black belt level in one or more arts and a couple were even at the Master level but they wanted to add some Wing Chun ideas to what they already knew in order to round out their skills.

How we teach also depends on why the student would like to learn a martial art. Roughly speaking, maybe 1% thinks seriously about competition or reality fighting on the street. The other 99% actually would get turned off by martial arts if they really knew what fighting was about.

Most people like the social aspect to learn something with other people and the fitness aspect to get healthy or to lose weight or to reduce stress.

Learning some basic self defense skills is also something that most people enjoy because it is something that is more interesting than just jogging or doing Yoga poses or pumping iron in the gym. In martial arts, you are learning a skill and gaining knowledge about something.

Martial arts were designed for fighting but unless you are in a violent city that is ridden with crime or in war torn countries, people don’t generally think about the fighting aspect too much. In the violent places, it is more useful to learn how to use a gun or other weapons and somehow to move out of the country you are in.

The training time to learn the complete system of Wing Chun, can be as short as a solid week of 10 hours a day of training, to a crash one month course, to a one year course, to a six month military combat course, then to the traditional three to five year program like Karate has. Various schools have even stretched out the teaching to a 20 year program.

In the army you don’t have 20 years to learn how to fight. You have a few weeks to six months and that’s it. In Hong Kong various students only learned about a year or two of Wing Chun and then they went out and fought. For many classical Kung Fu styles at least ten solid years of study was required though before you could be called a real fighter that was representative of that fighting method. Traditional Kung Fu styles included punching, kicking, grappling, locking and all the kinds of weapons and every weapon against every other weapon. That can’t be learned in a short period of time.

Typically Chinese Kung Fu systems did not use any belt program but everyone knew who was the senior student and they always were respected for what they knew and by the fact that they joined the school before you did. As schools got larger then some kind of formal ranking system was good to keep more order in the training and to split the class into groups of people who were at the same skill level. If that was not done then the beginners would get confused and frustrated and quit and the senior students would get tired of teaching the beginners and never learning anything new, so they would also quit. However some interaction is good so that beginners can feel what a more advanced student is like and so that the beginners don’t think the seniors are a bunch of snobs. Of course if there are lots of students, then each skill level can train at a different day or time.

The Wing Chun system is already organized in a logical way for learning and teaching. The various forms provide the way. Our Wing Chun system has five parts consisting of the first , second and third form and then the wooden dummy and then the weapons which are the long pole and the Butterfly knife. Each piece has 108 movements.