I don’t do much kicking and the thought struck me that I could use my Wing Chun dummy to practice my kicks on. After a few beers I created this kicking exercise!

Face the dummy square on, with one hand forward, one back, as in long wu sau, normal wu sau. Step to the left, as in the start of the dummy form, but instead of stepping forward with the right foot, kick the dummy with that right foot. Just a low kick, but make it short and snap it out quickly. Keep you hands up in wu saus as you kick, and immediately after the kick remain balanced and upright. The kick should connect on the dummy with the heel. Shake it, don’t break it.

As the right foot comes down after the kick, move into gaan sau, as you would do in the dummy form. You can follow the form here and do a kwan sau after that. After the kwan sau, though, repeat the kicking action on the other side by stepping right with the right foot and kicking the dummy with the left. We’re just repeating what we did on the other side now.

Basically, all you’re doing is stepping to the left and kicking with the right, then stepping to the right and kicking with the left. Each time you step and prepare to kick, you are facing the dummy but from one side. Doing these movements seems to fit in well witrh the early sections of the dummy form, so why not use something familiar to practice your kicking?

This exercise is one that you can just cycle over and over. When you’ve finished one kick, step into gaan sau and repeat.

I’m in a different training groove at the moment. Previously, I had been trying to balance mornings and lunchtimes between my Wing Chun training and working on my websites. What I had been doing was alternating mornings (when I have a full hour and a half to work with) between “doing Wing Chun” and “doing websites”, and whichever activity I did in the morning, I would do the other one at lunch.

So I had something like this:

This was good for Wing Chun, as I got 3 mornings devoted to training, and I could spend an hour and a half (less travelling/changing time) doing it. The problem was that I have a sedentary job that involves me being stuck in front of a computer from 9 to 5:30. Lunchtimes are ideal for getting a real break from sitting down staring at a computer monitor. Having a break halfway through the day where you do some physical exercise is a great way to relieve stress and stop you from going mad.

On the other hand, sitting in front of a computer at lunchtime doing more computer work, when I’ve already done half a day of the same, is a great way to build up stress levels and go stir crazy.

So, I’ve decided to sacrifice my huge morning Wing Chun sessions for working on my websites and I’m now doing my Wing Chun training every lunchtime. In real terms, this reduces my WC training time from one hour to half an hour. That might sound like a big cut, but one of the benefits is that I keep my sanity. Doing an extra hour and a half of computer work before I start my real job and having a physical break at lunchtime feels much better than having the physical break in the morning and then working all the way through.

As for Wing Chun training, 30 minutes every day is not as much as I’d like but it’s more than nothing, and more than a lot of people put in. And it’s consistent, regular training time.

This is turning into a pep talk.

I also work on my dummy on Monday nights, Tuesday nights, alternate Thursday nights and Fridays nights too. These little sessions are maybe 20 minutes to 30 minutes long. Add on to that my Saturday class and I’m looking a little less lazy.

I think “little and often” summarises my training plan at the moment. But there’s a lot to be said for doing a little bit of Wing Chun every day. I think also that the way you train makes a big difference. I’m focusing more than I used too (take, for example, my new method of training Tsum Kiu). I’ve got 5 half hour slots every week. If I decide to practice one different thing in each session, that’s half an hour for each one. I don’t know about you, but 30 minutes of punching practise is enough for me. 30 minutes of leg training is also adequate. So you can actually get a lot done in those 5 slots.

As always, it’s all about structuring your training to get the best use of time. Train smart etc.

During the last week, I’ve been Tsum Kiu mad. But I’ve changed my training tactics in a subtle way. Ordinarily, I would do the whole form in its entirety maybe 10 times in a practice session. This is not a bad way to go. Practising more is the road to perfection, after all.

Over the last week or so I’ve been really isolating small sections of the form and I’ve been focusing on those. For example, after the opening sequence of Tsum Kiu, we do 4 jun mas (turning).  Instead of doing 4, I’ve been doing 10 to really polish the technique. There are several places in the form where you can just keep repeating the movement more times than usual, and the places I’ve been focusing on are (in order performed in the form):

• 4 jun mas become 10
• 3 palm strikes become 11 (you need to keep the number odd to use the correct hand on the subsequent waahng laahn sau
• 3 turning bong saus become 10
• 4 stepping bong saus become 10 – or however many you can fit in the space you have. You don’t need much space for the turning bong saus because you don’t travel, but you are restricted by how far you can move in a straight line on the stepping bong saus.
• 4 dai bongs become 10 – or, as with the stepping bong saus, however many space restrictions allow.

I find that isolating and repeating movements in this way really helps to, firstly, scrutinise what it is you are actually doing and, secondly, to tweak it. Close scrutiny makes for better fault finding. If I’ve discovered that my turning bong sau needs changing, simply performing it 3 times as per the form is not enough to embed the “new way” into my muscle memory. I use the term”muscle memory” simply because it’s an idea that most people are aware of, but there is more to it than that.

If I need to, I’ll repeat the bong sau 20 times or more. Sometimes it takes that many repetitions to get it right and then get used to the feeling of getting it right. If I limit myself to only doing 3 turning bong saus per form, then I have to wait the entire length of Tsum Kiu before I get to practise the bong sau again.

Also, doing many repetitions gives you a chance to identify faults you’d perhaps not noticed before. Last week I couldn’t make my mind up whether my upper arm was high enough in the bong sau. It went like this:

• bong sau 1 – look at that bong sau, it’s the mother of all bong saus. I feel invincible. I’ll just send a photo of my bong sau to all potential enemies. Maybe bong sau t-shirts to advertise my deathly skill…
• bong sau 2 – yep, not bad that bong sau.
• bong sau 3 – my upper arm is trailing down a little though, it looks a bit low. Hmmm.
• bong sau 4 – actually, I’m not happy with that at all.
• bong sau 5 – I’ll raise my upper arm a bit and see how that looks. It looks better, but it feels weird because I’m not used to it being that high.
• bong sau 6 – same bong sau as last one. I’m not sure…
• bong sau 7 – I think it looks better. Maybe I’d got lazy and just hadn’t noticed how low my bong sau had become.
• bong sau 8 – it’s starting to feel more “natural”. i.e. the more times I do it now, the more comfortable I’ll feel with it.
• bong sau 9 – yes, now I’m sure this is the True Bong Sau.
• bong sau 10 – this is definitely better than my previous bong sau, which, it turns out, was a mere imitation of the mother of all bong saus that I’ve now developed.

It’s good to have a little variety in your Wing Chun practice, but this exercise has more value than merely adding variety. Already, the close scrutiny encouraged by performing numerous repetitions has helped me to identify crapness and correct it. And not only correct it in the current iteration; the large number of repetitions allows me to get more familiar with doing the technique properly, so I’m more likely to preform it like that as a reflex action.

This idea of “isolate and focus” can be transferred to other areas of practice too. You can break down Siu Lim Tau into smaller sections and repeat those till you do them in your sleep. It’s the same with the dummy, too.

I think Donnie Yen is a magnificent martial artist, and I think he did a good job of cramming his Wing Chun studies to the point where it looks like that’s his chosen art. And he looks good in the films. He looks good doing Wing Chun in the clip below, too.

But I’m not sure about the bong sau he throws at 3 seconds:

It’s a nice looking bong sau, but I’m not sure it’s the best response to his attacker’s punch. He’s got his right leg forward and he uses his right bong sau to block across himself. It’s obvious that he’d already decided to use a bong sau because his left hand is actually up and forward when his attacker punches. He could quite easily have used a tan da (left tan sau, right punch simultaneously) with better results. His right side is exposed and vulnerable. I’d love to have a go laaping that bong sau!

You might say that it’s understandable for DY to prepare his move beforehand, given that he’s under the pressure of being on stage under those intense lights and with no time to think. However, this is what chi sau trains us for. Cultivating unconscious reaction at lightning speed baby.

Told you leather jackets and martial arts were “in”.

I’ve seen this clip of Alan Goldberg chi sauing a few times in the past, but this is the first time I’ve been able to pick out something I could use. It’s pretty interesting to watch all the way through, but the “combination” I’m going to use starts at 36 seconds:

Let’s pretend you’re Alan Goldberg, doing the technique exactly as he shows it. Here is the run down:

1. you start with one hand inside and one hand outside and just roll
2. as your right tan sau changes to the outside on the way up, punch forward with it (instead of changing to a fuk sau, as you normally would).
3. this punch is not an attempt to hit your partner; it’s simply to provoke a bit of resistance from them.
4. as they push back against your punch, laap their resisting hand with your punching hand.
5. bring your left hand over to laap their arm (the same one). The good thing here is that your left arm is covering both of theirs. One hand controls two and you have a spare hand.
6. draw your right hand back only enough to punch them for real this time.

If you look at the video again, you can see how smooth Goldberg is in his actions. He’s obviously done this move a few times. It’s a fairly simple one to introduce to your own chi sau, so I’ll be using this in my next class.

You could do your initial right hand punch at any time as long as that hand is on the outside. The reason Goldberg does it immediately after changing from in to out is to “mask” what he’s actually doing. His partner is used to the changing action from in to out and so thinks that’s all that’s going on.

As with most chi sau techniques, this one isn’t a killer technique that you can use to “finish it”. If anything, it’s a tool to get you used to a concept that you can transfer to other situations. What’s the concept? Push to provoke some resistance from your partner and then take advantage of their energy. The technique won’t work unless your partner uses their strength to push against you. If your partner’s Wing Chun is any good, they probably won’t be pushing against you, so you have to create a situation where they are. That is, push them first.

My training this week is going well. I know it’s only Tuesday, but hopefully, I’ll maintain my fortitude throughout the week.

Yesterday I had the usual argument in my head on my way to work about whether to go to the gym for an hour before work or whether to do something else (also constructive). In the end, Wing Chun training lost out to learning PHP but what I did do was an hour of Chi Sau at lunch and an hour on the dummy in the evening. That’s not bad going for me. Two whole hours in one day. It would have been three if I’d gone to the gym in the morning, but I do have a life outside of Wing Chun that I’m trying to hang onto.

Doing three one hour chi sau sessions a week looks like becoming an established routine now, which is brilliant. My only concern is that chi sauing with the same person all the time gets you used to their way of working. Just because you can handle yourself in chi sau with that person, it doesn’t mean that your Wing Chun will stand up to someone else’s chi sau. But I do get to chi sau with other students during and after my weekly class, so it’s all good. And, up to a point, I think that doing a lot of chi sau with the same person is better than doing none at all.

This morning I did 30 minutes of Chun Yuen and 15 minutes of Siu Lim Tau. I also got an hour in on the dummy later this evening.

The dummy is going well. I read on a forum yesterday that the tan sau -> gaan sau -> kwan sau in the first section of the dummy form mirrors the third section of Siu Lim Tau. I’d not thought of that. I read somewhere else that a particular teacher’s method is to teach “the next bit” of the dummy every time students learn the the next form. So it sounds like the dummy is a way of practising the application of the forms in the absence of a partner. And it looks like maybe 0.01% of the crap I read on Wing Chun forums turns out to be informative.

Random Youtube Video

I think I was looking for “fast hands” when I found this. I’m going to ask sifu if we can start wearing biker jackets in class.

 Crack that power baby!