Cliff Rogers, one of my Sihings who also does competitive powerlifting, recently posted a video on his Youtube channel that’s of interest to Wing Chun people.  He discusses using a “Swiss bar” (a barbell with many handgrips for doing exercises at various widths) to develop speed in the Chain Punch.

NOTE: I asked him what the bands are attached to – he said there are pegs on the floor at that station but that you could use dumbbells to anchor the bands.  He added that the bands are cheap.  I found some Workout Bands on Amazon for $12 that have a resistance of 50-75 pounds.  I could do this with a bar and not too much extra weight (Cliff does 500+ but I only do a 185 Bench at the moment!).

Check it out.

“If the best in the world are stretching their ass off in order to get strong, why aren’t you?” – Christopher Sommer

One of the big differences between Wing Chun (and other Chinese fighting approaches) and sport approaches to fighting such as MMA, Boxing, and Muay Thai, is the focus on longevity.

In the UFC, Randy Couture was a phenomenon for lasting into his 40s.

The MMA approach relies on the fighter being in top physical condition (which means young).   You need youth to recover from all that training, which is, like most things in the West, directed at short term gains.  UFC training camps are not designed to help you reach your sixties intact; they are designed to maximize your capacity to take out a specific opponent in three months.

In Chinese martial arts, fighters can sometimes reach their fighting peak in their 50s (as was the case with Ip Man).

The ancient Chinese were always taking the long view. Practices such as Muscle/Tendon Changing (Yi Jin) and Brain/Marrow Washing (Xi Sui) Qigong (practiced since the 4th Century) were meant to be started as early as possible and practiced for life with an eye on retaining youthful capabilities well into middle age.  There are many stories of the physical (and sexual!) exploits of elderly Chinese sages with rosy cheeks seducing maidens and defeating all opponents.

While some of these approaches involved rules about preserving “Jing” (sexual energy), many Qi Gong practices focused on development of the connective tissues, such as the tendons, ligaments, and joints. The Chinese sages knew about Sarcopenia (Muscle Loss With Aging) and the other ways in which the body declines over the years. Their solution was to develop the other non-muscular elements of the body, because these structures develop and decay at a slower rate than the muscles. They developed systems which promoted the investment of training hours during youth in order to collect the dividends (with interest) in middle age and beyond.

Wing Chun practices (such as stance training and the various forms, especially the pole, and Chi Sao) are known to develop Qi (circulation) and build these connective tissues. They stress the tendons and other tissues a little bit at a time and the movements also bring blood to the area to heal (and build).  Similar practices are used to modify the structures of the hand (in wall bag training ) to make them ready for bare knuckle strikes to the head.  Slow and progressive development of the tissues and bones are the way.

The key to these systems of development is patience.  Development of the hand for striking takes at least two years (and this must be maintained).  Development of the tendons takes two years just to collect the first wave of benefits.

I was very interested to find a comparable philosophy voiced by a world-class U.S. gymnastics coach in a recent interview.

Christopher Sommers spent 40 years as a USA JR National Team Coach, prepping many athletes on their way to the Olympics. In his recent interview on Tim Ferris’s podcast, he explained his approach to the development of strength.

“Most beginners want to base all their training off muscular fatigue, which is a problem. Its problematic because muscle tissue regenerates about every ninety days, from end to end, all the cells, everything’s done in ninety days. But connective tissue takes two hundred to two hundred and ten days. So we have a huge gap…I’m not a big fan of beginners training to failure, simply because their structure isn’t mature enough yet to handle it safely, and by mature I mean enough productive structured hours under their belt…the vast majority of injuries are joint related – it’s extremely rare for someone to have a muscle belly injury – it just doesn’t happen, yet their training, especially in the beginning is all skewed toward muscular development and not connective tissue development…and that’s where they get into trouble.”

He noticed the problem in himself first, after he left competitive athletics as an young man, and then saw the pattern of how it happens to everyone else.

If you are never active and never stress your system enough to develop it, you will have problems much earlier. All the problems of old age can be yours as early as your late twenties.

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This is a nice intro to wallbag training, this section focusing on getting the stance right.

What Sifu Jonathan Petree from Atlantic Warriors Wing Chun shows here is in line with my training.

This is an except from a video being sold on Everything Wing Chun.

I wrote an article about this subject HERE.

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