Inevitably there have been some changes in my approach to my Wing Chun training since I decided to return to weight training. The extra demands on my time mean that some adjustments to my routine were necessary, but there are also changes taking place to my body.

The Effect Of Weight Training On Wing Chun

The first change is in how my body feels when I train Wing Chun. Previously I'd usually felt relaxed, straining and shaking Siu Lim Tau legs aside, but now my shoulders ache and get tired more. The weight training is doing that. When I, as a lot of weight trainers do, train in the gym, I do the exercise to failure so that the "gains" are greater. If your muscles ache the following day, this is a cause for rejoicing because then your muscles will grow more as they recover! The downside is that when I pull my elbow in during Siu Lim Tau the strain on my shoulders is more painful than before. This is not a show stopping problem, just something that causes discomfort.

Likewise, when I'm chi sauing for any length of time, my shoulder muscles suffer. I'm predicting that this is a temporary problem just from past experience of weight training. The next-day-aching is the goal but eventually your muscles get so used to the exercise that this aching disappears and you "plateaux". This is why weight trainers vary the exercises and routines they do; so that they can get work their muscles in a slightly different way, and getting the next-day-ache is a signal that you've pushed yourself. I'm thinking that after a short while my body will have been conditioned enough that there won't be any aches the following day and I won't have such painful shoulders when I do my Wing Chun.

Optimising Your Wing Chun Time

The second change is a sad one really. In doing more exercise I've had to sacrifice Wing Chun time. Instead of doing  an hour of Wing Chun every morning, as I did for the first 6 months of this year, I'm now doing just 2 sessions per week of maybe 30 minutes each. This is just to fit 3 mornings of weight training and two mornings of cardio combined with Wing Chun (the cardio serves as a warm up before my Wing Chun practice). I've experimented with doing some Wing Chun after weight training, but that is just laughable! My muscles are so exhausted that there is no way I can do anything with precision! I never noticed that before.

Actually, this was a sad change as I've now found a room that I can practise in at work in my lunch hour. This is excellent news because it means that I can virtually reinstate that lost Wing Chun hour. It appears that you can have your cake and eat it. I can weight train and train Wing Chun. Even on my weight training days, my muscles have recovered sufficiently by lunchtime so I can then train. I've just done 20 minutes of Tsum Kiu in the Secret Room and boy do I feel better for it. Scared the **** out of the secretary when she came in for some paperclips though...

Over the past few weeks I've been practising one particular thing over and over again to improve my coordination. The meaning of coordination changes from one subject to another: in football I suppose coordination might be specific to the ability to do things like run, pick up a ball and pass it quickly. In Wing Chun, the coordination I'm talking about is the ability to put combinations of techniques together in a smooth and flowing manner.

The combination I've been practising is this:

• tan da (tan sau block and simultaneous punch).
• yan jeung (palm strike) with the tan sau hand. Other hand becomes a guarding wu sau.
• pek jeung (chop) with the other hand. Other hand becomes a wu sau.
• Repeat on the other side

All the strikes are performed against an imaginary foe directly in front of you. At first the movements may seem strange and you might feel uncoordinated. It's important to break down the movements and perform them so slowly that you perform them correctly. Speed is not important at this stage. Only when you can perform the movements correctly should you try and speed things up. There's no point in being able to do lightning fast strikes with sloppy technique.

You may never find yourself in a position where you can use a tan da - palm strike - pek jeung like this, but that's not the point of the exercise. The aim is to become familiar with the transition between techniques with alternating hands. The fact that you can flow smoothly from a palm strike with one hand to a chop with the other means that you will be able to flow easily from a punch with one hand to a palm strike with the other (more or less!).

I remember when I first started WIng Chun, I felt really awkward doing even simple tasks like punching with my left hand. It felt awkward, simply because I'd not done it enough times. Through repetition, though, you can build familiarity with a particular technique so that you can use it at any time, quickly and efficiently.  Through building familiarity with how the technique feels, you can know when the technique is appropriate to the situation you find yourself in. Without that familiarity, you may find yourself trying to showhorn a technique into a situation that just doesn't fit.

Variations On A Theme

I've tried putting the focus on different things when I do this exercise, like the following:

• turning (as in Tsum Kiu) when using the technique. So with left tand sau, you turn to the left etc.
• picking one technique and increasing its power in that technique only. For example, put the power into the punch only. The difficult one for me to put power into is the palm strike  after the tan sau. It takes a concerted effort to make it look like I'm not just wiping something off!
• try and get a flow going so that all techniques are performed smoothly at the same speed, and there is no break between cycles.

After hammering the combination above for a few weeks, I'm amazed at the speed and ease I can now execute it. It now looks like I do kung fu!

The last two weeks have been horrendous for training, with last week being especially bad. Problems at work have meant that instead of being in the gym doing Wing Chun at 7am, I've actually been in the office working at that time.  And this is working without a break until 6pm. I've only managed one class per week, which I suppose isn't too bad, but I really felt the absence of the morning sessions.

However, the crisis is over (for now) and I was back in the gym this morning.

More Cardio!

With my routine getting back to normal again, I've decided to change the focus of my training. Instead of dedicating my gym time exclusively to Wing Chun, as I have been doing for the last 5 months, I'm going to compromise and include some "proper exercise" too. My Wing Chun training doesn't include any aerobic exercise and I think that that's an important component to consider. My job is sedentary in the extreme and so I need a structured approach to getting aerobic exercise, otherwise I just won't get any. Therefore, in the 90 minutes or so I have in the gym before work, I'm going to balance things out by reducing my Wing Chun time and increasing (err... starting...) my cardio time.

This morning, for example, I did the following:

• 5 minutes walking on the treadmill as a warmup
• 15 minutes on the stair machine for aerobic exercise
• 5 minutes doing pressups and situps for brick-like pectorals
• 20 minutes siu lim tau

For the sake of vanity, I thought I'd do something about getting my pecs back, hence the pressups! Well, the holidays are coming, after all...

Provisional Training Timetable

Here are my thoughts on how I'm going to split my Wing Chun training with my conventional gym training. Monday, Wednesday and Friday will be my cardio days, consisting of routines similar to that outlined above. As I get fitter, I'll increase the stair machine time (or time spent on a similar aerobic machine). Tuesday and Thursday will be weights days. Yay!

The cardio exercise will be easier to combine with the Wing Chun because after 20 minutes of earobic exercise I'm merely out of breathe. In contrast, after a hard weight training session, my muscles are quivering like jelly and thoroughly exhausted. Imagine holding out your tan sau still after you've wreaked havoc on your biceps doing curls! This means that whatever Wing Chun I do on the weights days must come before the weight training. No problem.

Because I'm only doing two days of weight training, I'm going to do full body workouts on those days. Otherwise I'll be training a particular body part only once per week.

Ha ha, I was checking my traffic stats just now and it appears that someone found my site after searching in Google for "chi sau does what". That just cracked me up. To me, this sounds like someone who is completely perplexed by the whole idea of chi sau and just wants to know what its purpose is. I can imagine, and clearly see in my minds eye, someone watching me do chi sau with my partner, and wondering why on earth we aren't actually hitting each other properly. Well, for at least one  person out there, here's my take on Chi Sau Does What!

Chi Sau Is Not Sparring Or Fighting

Chi sau is merely an exercise in which you practise with the help of a partner to develop the following:

• correct technique (bong sau, tan sau etc). Yes, you may be able to defend against your partner's attack but what hand is that? Are you using proper hands?
• good footwork - you move around in response to your partner to adopt the best position.
• range. This could possiblybe linked with footwork. I had a wake up call recently when someone pointed out that although I'd laap saued them deftly and snapped out a precision perfect punch, I actually couldn't reach them. My fist was still a few inches short of their face, with my arm fully stretched and at the time I was thinking I'd been "successful". I realised that for a while now I'd been thinking I could hit my partner when really I was out of range. Duh.
• sensitivity - you must be able to feel accurately what your partner is doing and respond automatically, and quickly, in the most appropriate way. Obviously, automatic responses can only develop from much practise.
• softness. Strength is not usually the best response, at least not brute strength. Better to redirect your partner's force, which is especially important if your partner is stronger than you. It's very interesting to see what happens when you try and maintain your softness when practising with a partner who does use strength. I'm still finding it difficult, because, of course, my ego gets in the way! My ego will not let me appear to come off worse against someone who is "doing it wrong". Duh x 2. I need a mindset change. Every difficulty presents a learning opportunity, and in a case like this it's better to remove emotions entirely from the equation.

Chi Sau Misunderstood

I've seen chi sau competitions on Youtube. The 'competition' aspect comes from the fact that you score points when you hit your opponent. So the chi sau tends to degenerate into a wrestling match. I say degenerate, but actually it starts out that way.

The whole idea of "winning" by getting a strike in is contrary to the chi sau ethos. Yes, there is some value in sparring, or even full contact practise, but that is different from chi sau.

Not many tan saus in ths one:

Certain people are beating me up when I chi sau with them! So obviously I need to improve. The question is, "how?". Well, I could just take the non-specific approach and trust that my consistent - and generic -  training will help me improve so much that I 'lose' less. And this will probably work.

But let's take the scientific approach! For example, one guy is really quick. He's so quick that I just don't have enough time to react to his attacks. Let's break it down. What are the components of my reaction to his attack? I need to do these two things:

1. sense the attack
2. process the stimulus
3. respond to the attack

I said "two things", didn't I? You could argue that 1 and 2 are so similar that they are actually the same thing. You could even lump them both into the sensitivity category. So obviously I need to improve my sensitivity. I need to be able to sense more quickly that an attack is taking place and how it's taking place.

Improving Sensitivity

Your sensitivity will improve as a matter of course if you keep practising chi sau properly. But surely there must be a way to fast track this enhancement of sensitivity? Well, there is. Often, when chi sauing, I will adopt the role of responder and let my partner do all the attacking. If you do this, you don't need to worry about executing your own attacks well, because all you're doing is defending. This means that all you have to do is block and move your feet. Yes, I'm oversimplifying when I say that, but the point is that it's easier to focus on feeling if you only have to defend, as opposed to defending and attacking simultaneously. With this extra focus on the contact between you and your partner, you can really heighten your sense of awarenesss.

Additionally, you can focus on yielding. If your mission is to offer no resistance and avoid meeting force with force, you have to listen very carefully to your partner's hands. There are no two ways about it. If you don't sense what your partner is doing, sooner or later you will end up 'fighting' their energy with yours and meeting force with force. Bad.

The above two exercises are very good for improving sensitivity. Of course, being relaxed all the time makes it easier for your hands to sense what your opponent's hands are doing, so being relaxed is an integral part of those exercises.

Responding More Quickly

This is the easy one in that you can speed up your responses simply by drilling them over and over again. Pick an attack and response combination and repeat it over and over again. Pick another combination and drill that to death too. Mix them up and randomise. Drill, drill, drill!

You can also practise set responses on your own too, speeding up the transition between the different hands. For example, I like to do a kwan sau with the left hand in a tan sau and the right hand in a low bong sau. I then reverse the kwan sau as quick as I can so the right hand is now in a tan sau. I then keep repeating that transition - left, right, left, right - as quick as I can. If you practise this yourself, you will find not only that your kwan sau becomes lightning fast, but it becomes an instinctive response too.

As we're already one third of the way into this year, I thought I'd do a progress report on my training. Well, I've not reached the lofty heights of a consistent 10 hours a week that I was aiming for, but I'm averaging more hours than my lazy alter ego managed last year. It seems I'm doing on average around 6 hours a week, which is roughly one hour a day. There's two ways I can look at this. Being a perfectionist I can berate myself and say it's nowhere near enough, and certainly not as much as I could easily do. But also being a postive person, I can see the value of setting targets that you don't hit. If setting a target of 10 hours means that although I don't reach it, I'm still doing 3 times as much as I was before, how can I complain?

The Cardio Connection

One way I am changing my training routine is by adding some cardio exercise. My wing chun training doesn't give me enough aerobic exercise and I know I need it. I've found a way to integrate some into my training so that it actually helps the Wing Chun aspect. I thought I would start doing two long siu lim tau sessions per week (maybe 30 minute ones). The problem is, I really need to be warmed up for them or injuries prevail. So, in order to both warm up and get my aerobic exercise I'm going to precede my long siu lim taus with maybe 20 - 25 minutes of cardio work. Win win.

Also, I like having the muscle tone I used to have when I weight trained so I've started doing a mere 5 minutes of pressups and situps at the end of my Wing Chun training. Just as a compromise. Without breaks in between I do 5 pressups, 5 situps, 10 pressups, 10 situps, 15 pressups, 15 situps. I then have a little break to avoid passing out before doing 20 pressups and 20 situps. It's not much for now (certainly not much compared to what I used to do), but I'll aim to keep increasing that last pressup/situp cycle.