Beginners of Wing Chun

To learn a martial art or any art for that matter, takes dedication, time and patience. You must slowly learn one step at a time.

Beginners often are in a rush to learn the art. In practice they are in a rush to get through the form so that they can get into the fighting part which they consider more practical and more fun. However soon the student reaches a limit. Their learning stops. They can no longer progress. Impatiently they jump around to other arts.

Most drift from classical arts to the MMA world. There they quickly can progress and really fight. Then the pain of combat slowly makes it’s mark. The student has a sore back, a damaged knee or elbow. A nagging headaches from being hit too much. Eventually they decide that martial arts is just not for them so forever they give it up.

There is nothing wrong with the competitive route because all of life is a competition anyway. We compete in school to get good marks. The best students can go on to University. The best people get the jobs. The best suitor gets a girlfriend or boyfriend. The best business makes the money and succeeds. The other businesses die out.

So one has to decide why they want to learn martial art and what they want to get out of it. Is it for “dojo” or club kind of fighting? Is it for street self defence? Is it for the military or police , bodyguard or security work? Is it just a social activity? Is it to get fit and in shape? Or do you really like to learn an art and then later decide to apply that to different circumstances or to teach or to compete?

For each of these the training is different. What you do in the military, you cannot do on the street without going to jail, even if it was self defence. What you do in ring fighting is different from what you do on the street because sitting on people and arm bars do not work when there are multiple attackers or armed attackers. There is no time for arm bars and rear naked chokes. Nobody punches in the way you train to punch in class (as a beginner.

Probably in most cases the student does not really know what he or she wants. In that case you pick one. No matter the route, the classical way gives you the most options. In piano for example you can start with popular music but then you create certain habits which can prevent you from learning any other style of music such as rock or jazz or classical. But if you start with the classical; approach, you cover the fundamentals of any kind of music and later can branch out and study any of these. Such is the benefit of the classical approach. The classical approach has great depth. It takes time and dedicated effort to acquire.

The word Kung Fu does not just mean to fight. It means a skill that you acquire from doing hard work. Any skill takes time and attention to the smallest detail. everyone can fight, play a sport, play some simple songs, do a rough crude drawing. But what is the difference between that and what the professional does? It is the attention to the very small details of the art.

Olympic competitors know this very well. To shave 1/100ths of a second off in a race requires attention to the smallest mechanical errors. Even having hair on ones head or wearing the wrong type of swimming suit can make the difference between being number one and number two. But if you have low standards, then everything is ok.

When I first learned Wing Chun from Chow Lok Ji, a private student of Ip Man, we just did the slow part of the “Little Idea Form” for 7 months straight. In fact we mostly just did the slow palm up hand and bridge hand sequence over and over again.

At the time, I didn’t understand why. Any explanation still would not have made any sense. Only after years of training and after meeting various masters of Wing Chun did I realize the importance of what he taught.

Still I thought, “my Wing Chun was not too bad!”, but then in every seminar I wondered why did my techniques not work against any of these masters? Zero % worked! The answer was in the fine details and subtleties of execution that came from 10,000 to 20,000 hours of practice. Like a chess master they could read ahead the slightest intention I had. The could foresee every attack I was about to perform. These experts had mental databases of thousands of hands. I did not have this. My time put in was not enough to reach even 10% of their level.

Like everyone, I had excuses. I was busy. I was going to school. I had a job. I had a family and children. My back was sore. It was snowing so I had to miss my lesson. My sister was visiting me from a far away place. But all the masters I met also had all of these constraints yet they did not let that stop them from training and thinking daily about the art. every artist who succeeds, does not succumb to all these kinds of excuses.

If a student cannot find the time to spare a few hours a week to do some sports activity or to learn something outside of school, then I think something is wrong. The excuses may later translate into academic failure as well. For example if you do an undergraduate degree in biology and don’t have an hour to spare for anything else but want to study medicine which is ten times the work, then what do you do? How can you do it? You have to manage your priorities and your time. Your excuses will not help you. No one will feel sorry for you.

I am impressed with some dancers I know. They go to school and get A’s in their subjects yet they have dance classes 6 days a week and the classes are 3 hours in length. Each year a good dancer learns ten dances in modern, jazz, contemporary or ballet. Each dance consist of hundreds of intricate movements. Somehow they can do all this and are able in two hours to learn such a dance. Yet back to Wing Chun world, students often even after several years cannot memorize the very simple Wing Chun forms which are equivalent to what a beginner dance student must learn.

I think it is because students don’t understand the need for forms in martial arts. So they do not consider learning forms a priority. Boxers don’t do any forms and MMA practitioners don’t do any forms, so why learn forms? Just practice fighting, that’s good enough.

But martial art was meant for life and death fighting where the slightest mistakes meant a loss of life. So in that case attention to detail became very important for real combat. This attention to detail cannot be learned by just playing around, wrestling around or sparring with protection. One small cut with a knife and you’re finished. A millimeter mistake in close range combat will result in your death. A six inch mistake in an MMA match doesn’t matter. The two are different.

This is why Aikido is so exacting and looks so precise. It was meant to be used against a Samurai sword. These swords move at incredible speeds and are razor sharp. Almost impossible to defend against but that is the mentality required to study Aikido to a high level. That is potentially what you are facing.. If that is in your mind , maybe still you can never be able to defend against a true Samurai but your art will be much better than someone who just comes for socializing and fun and games.

My Hung style teacher always said if you want just fun and games, if you want to have all kinds of excuses of why you don’t make it regularly to class, then just stay home and watch TV. He said don’t waste your valuable time doing a “half-ass” job of learning martial art. He said “isn’t that more fun?” Don’t embarrass us with your lack of skill. (we used to perform a lot in front of thousands of people!).

One of the best Wing Chun fighters that I have met, was the number two bodyguard for a high level underworld figure in Hong Kong. He learned from the Jiu Wan lineage and many of the bodyguards did. He knew only the first form, the foot movement and a few movements of the wooden dummy. He knew the form inside out. He could handle multiple opponents, because that is what he fought against. He was a small individual who packed the power of a baseball bat in every movement he did. He was super relaxed. He was super rooted and super precise. He was always a movement ahead. I saw that he put in easily the 10,000 hours to reach the expert level.

For him Wing Chun was a matter of life and death. He said in Hong Kong you needed this art to survive. He said in Canada you don’t don’t need it so unfortunately he stopped teaching his art.