The Muay Thai Cover

The Muay Thai cover is useful for “Street Self Defense".

In the 1990’s our Wing Chun club which had been operating since 1978 decided to become more well rounded by learning how other arts did their attacks and how they defended against their attacks and how they did their workouts.

Primarily we stuck to Wing Chun but we felt the best way to understand other arts and how other Wing Chun lineages did things was to get experts from these arts to show us. I have documented some of these things elsewhere on this website.

One useful thing we learned from the Muay Thai people, beside their excellent fitness program and use of pads was the technique of covering up up against non Wing Chun attacks. These are attacks that are more likely to occur in street or ring fighting. The way Wing Chun people punch is not the way that untrained street people attack nor how trained boxers and Muay Thai fighters attack.

The Wing Chun training method is not based on ring fighting. It is based more on military combat ideas where you just go in and attack. Straight line attacks are perfect for this. Just think of a Pit Bull going for the throat, to get the idea. All animals fight that way.

Recently one of our members was attacked out of the blue by two large individuals in the middle of daylight on a downtown Victoria street. As he was just walking home from work, two people who he thought were just passing him suddenly decided to attack him for a thrill.

The first person sucker punched him to the side of the head with a strong hook punch. But already being slightly aware of impending trouble, he manged to defend and used the Thai cover approach to shield against the punch and immediately retaliated with two chain punches and a left hook to knock out the attacker.

An instant later the next guy also came in for the attack which was met with a kick to the groin and knee to the head. Both were knocked out but with no life threatening injuries. Our guy just ran after that.

This guy always liked to train ring fighting with fast boxing footwork. When asked if any of that was applicable in this particular fight, he said “No, there was not even time to get into an kind of posture or stance like even the people in this video advised. everything just happened too fast.

In a recent seminar that our some of our club members attended by Sifu Cliff Au Yeung, this defensive technique was also taught. In my day the cover technique was not taught as part of the Wing Chun curriculum.