Sticking Hands 1 - Overview

 Various articles to come about what I learned from various Wing Chun Masters about this topic.

Sticking Hands or Chi Sau (in Cantonese) is the bread and butter of Wing Chun. Master Wong Shun Leung who mostly taught Bruce Lee said that in Hong Kong, everything was taught out of Chi Sau. My teacher Dr. G.K. Khoe taught this right away so that students could get the right kind of feeling right away, and to train the stance and the suppleness and the idea of always going forward to wards the opponent. The first part of the “Little Idea form” is all about these ideas as well. The form and the sticking hands go hand in hand.

Master Gary Lam said , “If you don’t like Sticking Hands, then don’t do Wing Chun.” When Master Wang Kiu gave a seminar on the wooden dummy, he said unfortunately if the attendees don’t know the sticking hands, then they will not be able to apply anything that they have learned. He said the Sticking Hands basically teaches you what to do once contact with the opponent has been made.

Very few Masters have ever talked about Ip Man’s Sticking Hands. The only one is probably Hawkins Cheung and his student Robert Chu wrote a very good article for our Wing Chun Viewpoint magazine from the 1980’s. Hawkins Cheung has some excellent videos on Youtube talking about some experiences with Ip Man and about the experience of a small 105 pound guy like himself to handle people double his size.

Wing Chun is an attacking art. we go in and get in close. But so do all the grapplers. If you go in and don’t know what to do next, then you will be in big trouble. The Sticking Hands training is meant to address that problem.

I would say that the Sticking Hands training is the most interesting part of the Wing Chun curriculum. The Sticking Hands is like a laboratory where all the various Wing Chun theories can be analyzed with your training partner. Sticking Hands is not meant to be a competition to see who can hit who the fastest. Nobody fights with the mechanics of sticking hands. A real fighter doesn’t even let you get close.

Balance is important. If you don’t train Sticking Hands enough,, then you will easily be demolished at the close range. But if you train Sticking Hands too much then you will start to build in muscle memory patterns which is also no good because we don’t want the opponent to be able to predict what we are going to do. So that’s the dilemma.

In fighting, there are thousands of techniques. You can train these for years and years and the technique you train may never happen in a real fight. So sticking hands is kind of like a stand up wrestling where it doesn’t matter what the attack is but somehow you will find a way around the attack to neutralize it. For Women’s Self Defense course it is great that the ladies are studying this but in reality the poke to the eye or kick to the groin or smash to the nose may not work. It it does great and everyone should know those options but if the technique fails then you are in big trouble. The Sticking Hands training tries to take care of that by enabling one to continue fighting no matter what technique has been countered. It gives you the confidence to handle the close range attack. Typically Hong Kong street fights with multiple opponents never went to the ground because there your mobility is limited and the other gang member will kill you. But with the advent of MMA the talk is that the fight always goes to the ground. The Wing Chun people don’t agree this is the case if the fight is not a ring fight. Multiple opponent fighting and fights involving weapons or military combat, typically do not involve ground fighting. But any kind of fight training , stand up or ground fighting will give one an advantage against someone who is not a real fighter.

Sticking Hands is like a two people chess game. It develops some fighting skills but against a good fighter, it is not enough.

How Master Wang Kiu looked at it was that Wing Chun has two parts. One is you are in contact with the opponent and the other is you are trying to make contact with the opponent or they with you. Once your close range skills are very good then the only thing you have to think about is how to get in. Against a top professional boxer or against a top TaeKwonDo expert that ability is not easy and few can pull it off. Wang Kiu said that one of his students trained seven years to get into the highest level TaeKwonDo black belts. One person who read that comment thought that was totally stupid but I am sure they never had the chance to try and fight the TaeKwonDo elite. They can kick you in the blink of an eye.