Trying to make a point about fighting multiple opponents, I mentioned Ip Man, and asked my students if they had all seen it. To my surprise, several had not seen it.

Taking a Wing Chun class and you haven’t seen Ip Man? WTF?

Below is the centerpiece fight from that excellent film.

I often refer to this fight in regard to form in training. I tell my students they should try to look like Donnie Yen in Ip Man – upright, with clean lines, as if any moment could be captured on film and put on the cover of Wing Chun Illustrated. If you are not going for perfection in training, what’s the point?

In the fight, you will only be able to muster some fraction of your training self, so the training self should be as good as possible.

My other point about this scene is that in a real multiple opponent fight, they will not take turns if you start really hurting people. If I were these Japanese guys, after Ip took out the first three or four, I might have tried for a group effort rather than waiting my turn to be crushed!

And here is a pretty funny parody: