Duke: You know all there is to know about fighting, so there’s no sense us going down that same old road again. To beat this guy, you need speed – you don’t have it. And your knees can’t take the pounding, so hard running is out. And you got arthritis in your neck, and you’ve got calcium deposits on most of your joints, so sparring is out.
Paulie: I had that problem.
Duke: So, what we’ll be calling on is good ol’ fashion blunt force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy-duty, cast-iron, piledriving punches that will have to hurt so much they’ll rattle his ancestors. Every time you hit him with a shot, it’s gotta feel like he tried kissing the express train. Yeah! Let’s start building some hurtin’ bombs!
Rocky Balboa , 2006

When all is said and done, you have to learn how to hit hard.

Your amazing Chi Sao isn’t going to be much good if you don’t learn how to damage your opponent when you get the chance.  In Wing Chun, we have a whole range of techniques and drills to develop this capacity.

I’ll start with one of the basic techniques to build your wrists.  Your wrists are one of the weak links in the chain that leads from your contact surface (the last two knuckles of your fist) to the ground via the heel of the foot on the side you are “sitting” on.

Wing_Chun_Butterfly_Knives Wing Chun trains two weapons: the Luk Dim Boon Kwan, or “six and one half point pole” and the Baat Jam Do or eight-cut knives (aka Butterfly Swords).

In an article (apparently no longer available on the internet!) by my teacher Greg LeBlanc and his Sifu Gary Lam, they make the point is made that the structure of the Knife form is “significantly different” from the pole form.  The  pole “relies heavily on the development and use of internal power and therefore the bodies correct structural alignment” while the knives are “almost entirely dependent on the sharpened edge of the blade for power.”  The knives rely not on power but on position and technique.

However, the earliest training you receive for the knives is in using the Heavy Baat Jam Do.  In Chinese martial arts, it is traditional to train with a bigger, heavier version of your weapon.  So when you use your actual weapon, it is lighter in your hands and the various angles and radius turns available to you are all smaller and easier.

In the Gary Lam tradition, we perform all of the basic actions for Knife training described in the article above using the Heavy Baat Jam Do:

  1. Qi-Stabbing
  2. Jam-Chopping
  3. Gan-Block and cut
  4. Kwan-Double block
  5. Bon-Deflection
  6. Biu-Line deflection forward
  7. Jaam-Stopping
  8. Tan and Qi-Deflect out and stab

Heavy Baat Jaam Do How to build a heavy Baat Jam Do.

Go to someplace like Home Depot to the heavy pipe plumbing section.
Get two 1 1/4″ x 8″ Galvanized steel pipe (threaded on both ends)
You need a “reducer” (that part in the middle which “reduces” the size for 1 and a fourth to (I think) one inch.
I think the handle is one inch pipe – you can check this out at the store.
Then you need end caps of the right size for both ends.
I’m pretty sure the handle is one inch, which means one inch end cap and 1 1/4 inch end cap for the other end.
All this stuff is in a section of Home Depot right next to each other, so you can piece it together right there.
Mine cost me a little over $20.
How to train with the Heavy Baat Jam Do.
I’ll just describe the important moves to develop your wrists, which are the first two actions: the Qi (stabbing) and the Jam (chopping).  Hold them out straight-armed in front of you, about 18 inches apart, leaving a slight bend in the elbows.
For the Qi, hold the BJD straight up and down, then thrust forward in a stabbing motion, one at a time, returning each “knife” to its position before stabbing forward with the other.
For the Jam, hold the BJD straight up and down, then bend your wrist so the knife bobs down to a nearly horizontal position.  What you are looking for here is a kind of pecking motion.  If it were a knife, this would be a snap of the sharp front edge of the knife to the weapon-hand of your opponent.
Note: be careful and read my disclaimer on the sidebar.
This is a hard exercise and you have to start slow and be careful.  Don’t use a lot of ballistic force or you will hurt your tendons.  All Wing Chun training is meant to be developed slowly and carefully.  You build yourself up slowly, progressive resistance style.  Eventually you can do things like lengthen the “blade” pipe and fill the pipe with sand to make the exercise more difficult.