…it all becomes useless if you do not have sufficient punching power.

Philipp Bayer, Wing Chun Illustrated

Wing Chun Illustrated makes some of its articles available on its site and this article from 2016 is a must-read.  In it, Sifu Philipp Bayer makes the fundamental (and really, it should be obvious) point that without punching power, you have nothing.  You can be amazing at Chi Sao, but ultimately, Chi Sao is about learning to get through obstacles in order to hit.  But if your punches have no power, what good is it to get past obstacles.  Chi Sao is not teaching you to evade getting hit — its teaching you how to get past the opponent’s defenses  (instinctively, thus at high speed) so you can knock them out or otherwise incapacitate them.

I think Bayer is one of the clearest and most to-the-point writers on Wing Chun.  This is somewhat ironic since he’s German and English is his second language.  However, I lived in Germany for two years and I found most Germans speak excellent English, since they all learn it in school from an early age.  But Mayer’s clarity comes more from his mastery of the language and more from his mastery of the fighting technology and his no BS approach to trying to communicate its secrets.

Many thanks to Wing Chun Illustrated for making this article available. 

Make the Punch Count: Power Development (Part 1)

Paraphrasing a quote from Sam Lau’s website:
If you fry fish on a slow fire, you’ll get a meal worthy of your appetite.
If you try to fry the fish too fast, with a “vigorous fire,” you’ll get a fish superficially fried on the outside but raw on the inside. “So it is the same as your Sifu with finite Kung Fu. Even he has taught you hand in hand for ten years, it is useless.”

Sifu Sam Lau is another Wing Chun master who, like Wong Shun Leung, started training in Western Boxing in Hong Kong and then switched to Wing Chun. He lived near Ip Man in Hong Kong and was placed with Moy Yat for training.

The video below is of a couple of his guys in his school – he is the one with the glasses circling the training session.

In this video, he is interviewed about his school, which has a hostel attached. Apparently, at the time of the video, it cost about $800 a month for a room in their hostel plus training fees. Not bad!

These guys are doing what is also called Gor Sau, which is a pretty unstructured Chi Sao session, in which the two trainees either takes turns or both go at once. What I like about this session is they are competitive yet good-natured. This is always the problem point in training – how do you “sort-of” fight without dangerous competitiveness or angry feelings?

When you leave the kwoon, you are only keeping the skill you developed and the changes in your personality – nobody in the real world will care whether you “won” or “lost” in Chi Sao drills! Chi Sao is a drill which pressure tests your skills for deployment in the real world in life or death situations. Its also a drill which requires that you overcome your ego in order to make significant progress.

“We’re talking about using this for fighting, not for a game or sport, and as a result it’s designed for the street environment, for self preservation….It’s about hitting your person and shutting them down before the fight can build up…You want to hit in one action.”
Sifu John Smith

John Smith studied with Wong Shun Leung in the 90s and brought what he learned back to Australia, where he founded the Illawarra Ving Tsun School.  Here he teaches what he terms ‘the “Wong Way.”

I was fortunate enough to attend a seminar with Sisok Smith  (I call him Sisok because it represents my relationship to him – he, like my teacher’s teacher, Gary Lam, was a student of Sifu Wong Shun Leung).   His teaching style, as exemplified in the clips below, was clear and to the point.  His goal is to present Wong Sifu’s teachings without adornment or complexification.

What I recall from the seminar was a lot of drilling and a lot of useful tips for making the drills functional to developing the attributes of the system.  He put a lot of emphasis on what he called “the waist.”  Stabilizing yourself with the waist.  Integrating your elbow to your waist, in both Chi Sao and in doing work on the wall bag.  Finding that link to the ground through the waist to the elbow.

He has an interesting vocabulary which lends his teaching a unique flavor, from a combination of his Australian phrases and his strong knowledge of Wong Sifu’s approach to the system, including a lot of the Chinese words for everything (not my strong suit!).

I remember he also spoke quite a bit about distance fighting, about how you get from the outside (out of contact) into Chi Sau range.  He said that distance could w”wreak a lot of havoc” on a Wing Chun fighter if they didn’t learn how to manage it, something I talk about on this site a lot!  Too many Wing Chun people only train Chi Sao and somehow think they will be able to just walk up and get a couple of bridges without getting hit on the way in.  You need to train bridging that distance and train it a lot!

Sisok Smith has a lot of interesting turns of phrase for Wing Chun ideas.  He talks about “taking the line” of your opponent.  Untangling your hands from your opponent’s with Chi Sao concepts.

I’ve emdedded some of his videos below the fold (which are, like his teaching in general, to the point) – see more videos at Sifu Smith’s Youtube channel: Illawarra Ving Tsun School

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