Sticking Hands 2 - in Hong Kong

This note will talk about about some of the motivation to learn sticking hands. (黐手)

Sticking hands or Chi sau in Cantonese is the bread and butter of Wing Chun. Sticking hands provides a safe environment to develop various attributes related to real fighting but it is not a way to fight. A simple example is that boxers hit a speed bag but they never box like that. Some football players run through tires but they never do that in a game. So training methods are not fighting methods. A good tournament fighter does not let you touch him. So if you only train sticking hands, then you can hardly ever use your art.

We will lay out our program for sticking hands in part three of the series of notes on sticking hands. This will match the video that we also have on this subject. We also have talked about various aspects of our sticking hands on the various Youtube video clips that we have uploaded on our channel.

Train sticking hands sooner or later?

There are various schools of thought regarding the teaching of sticking hands. I think all the ideas are OK and depend on what kind of students you have, how often they train and what their end goal for training is.

In my day we had about a 4 to 5 hour classes on Friday evenings and two shorter two hour classes on two other days. So there was lots of time to train everything we needed to train. The training model in this case was to cover the whole system within a year and each year after that to refine what we have learned.

One reason for this quick method of training was that the teacher was only in Vancouver for one year because he was just on a sabbatical leave from a Dutch University. He wanted to establish a club that he could come back to. Also his idea was that right away the student should get the correct feeling, positioning and idea about the art rather than having to fix student’s tense and stiff actions and maybe other bad habits at a later date. Once Dr. G.K. Khoe returned, he stretched out the program to a three year program to complete the art. By complete the art, it does not mean to master the art. Few people can be said to master the art.

These days students seem to have more school pressures or home and family pressures do once a week training seems more like the norm. This is still good, but the time to complete all the things in the system , just takes longer.

England vs Hong Kong training.

In Reza’s school in England they did not train Sticking hands for maybe four years after joining the school. They believed in developing more useful fighting skills early on and then to transfer those skills to the sticking hands program. Most students were there for the self defense aspect, probably because England had more of a fighting mentality at the time. In the end from what I see, the results are probably about the same. eventually everyone learns the same thing. There are always many different paths to the top of a mountain.

Wing Chun for Hong Kong violence

In Hong Kong in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, Wing Chun was called a “gangster fist” because the gangs found that learning this art was useful as a quick way to learn how to fight. The mental attitude was like a military art that you train for six months and then you could go and fight. However these students spent most of each day training Wing Chun. According to my teacher’s teacher, Master Wang Kiu, the Wing Chun students, ate, drank and slept Wing Chun. Wing Chun was always on their mind. There was no such thing as training once a week if you wanted to survive a beating by your fellow students or on the street from the students of rival Kung Fu schools.

In Hong Kong, in those days, gang fighting and violence was all around so you needed to learn how to fight sooner than later. Gang fighting involved usually more than one opponent who also were usually armed. Shootings were not always a problem because gang people didn’t want to go to jail.

The motivation for sticking hands

Fighting often started with one or more people in your face, a few more people around your back. This kind of fighting is unlike a tournament fight where you have some time to move around or you take some guy to the ground. You never do that in a gang fight. Often bodyguards had Wing Chun training. Fights could occur anywhere. One Hong Kong bodyguard told me that it was not unusual to come down a long flight of narrow stairs from some tall building with a client and have three guys rushing up the stairs to take your client out. In fact that was one of his bodyguard tests. He said kicking or grappling hardly made any sense in that case. That’s where Wing Chun excelled.

According to Master Wong Shun Leung 99% of the time in Wing Chun was spent in training the sticking hands. everything was built into the sticking hands training system. The mentality was that for a fight to happen, contact had to be made. The instant there was contact, you wanted your automatic muscle memory to take over. There would be no time to thing, only to react. This training was supplemented with developing short range hitting force in various ways. Most Southern Kung Fu systems trained the short range force. Speed just came from repetition of basic actions thousands and thousand of times. Serious fighters would do maybe 4,000 punches a day according to another teacher I had by the name of Patrick Chow.

Foot mobility was also very important

Sticking hands training was not just immobile hand patty cake training. To carry on a real fight involved being mobile as well. Being mobile was the most important part. The footwork involved came from the second form of Wing Chun called Chum Kiu in Cantonese or in English the “Bridging the Gap form.” Essentially the Chum Kiu form taught hand, foot and body coordination. The attacking footwork was much like the footwork in Western fencing which is known for it’s speed. More advanced student of the art learned further footwork with the third form (circling and sweeping footwork), the wooden dummy and from the weapons of the art. After the first form, all other forms involved footwork. Ip Man was apparently the best of his class at kicking skills but he rarely taught that to anyone. A few students of Ip Man (Patrick Chow and Wang Kiu) told me that.