According to my sources (internet rumour!), the Ip Man movie was released on Blu-ray on 13th February 2009 via Yesasia. I've done a bit of searching on that site and only the Hong Kong version of this movie seems to be available. Still, it's not going to be too hard to figure out the plot, is it!

Ip Man Movie Review - Yesasia

Here is a summary of the comments on the Ip Man movie found on the Yesasia site (for those who need comments to go!). Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first.

There is some dissatisfaction with the quality of the English subtitles:

...the English subtitles are so horribly and unprofessionally done that they are laughable.

Shocking, I know, but someone questions Donnie Yen's acting talent:

Donnie's acting is static and the rest of the movie. Too much Donnie lately. He was great in supporting roles in the old HK movies. As the lead ???

Another was disappointed in the quality of the Blu-ray release:

i am VERY dissapointed with the Blu-Ray release. It has a very ghostly effect in dark scenes and very grainy, i would just say get the DVD version. I watched it on the PS3 and havent tried it on any other player yet. HDMI cables etc and still a distorted picture at times.

OK, onto the good bits. Good fight scenes:

I bought "Ip Man", "champions" and "Legendary assassin" I think "Ip Man" is BEST!
The fight scenes are amazing, powerful and lifelike compared to the other two movies

i really enjoyed the movie. the story was beautiful and the fight scenes were well done

Another viewer sees a natural progression in the intensity of the fights:

So, all the fight senses is well organize. The first fight is entry level and funny because his son. Second fight mid-level with more power and intense. The later fights, you can expect more power from it.

From looking at the comments, I would say that if you can live with poor quality, acting and subtitles, and you want good Wing Chun action, this film is for you. From my point of view, I don't really care about the subtitles, it's just the Wing Chun I'm interested in. Obviously the quality of the sound and picture are a factor, so maybe Blu-ray isn't the way to go. I don't know. I'll be able to give you my own subjective opinion when I've actually seen the Ip Man movie.

Ip Man Movie On Amazon

You can get the Ip Man movie on Amazon.

Although the emphasis in my class is usually on good positioning via good footwork, good technique and not speed, I thought that today I would focus on hand speed. When I say hand speed, the problem isn't really that my hands are slow, it's that they are uncoordinated. There is a particular sequence of moves that we've had to practise a couple of times that thwarts me every time.

If you are executing The Move you start by chi sauing with both hands on the outside. When both hands are roughly at the same height, you perform a sharp jut sau with both hands to disrupt your opponent's balance. They should rise onto their toes as they are off balance and you take advantage of this by:

1. Covering both their hands with one of yours to trap them. They are both low after the jut sau, so this shouldn't be a problem.
2. Chop to the neck with your free hand.
3. Swap hands so that the chopping hand then traps their hands and the other hand chops their neck.
4. Rinse and repeat.

My sifu can do this with superb coordination and speed. I, on the other hand, can perform the jut sau perfectly so that my opponent is off balance ..... and that's it. There is no strike after that because I can't coordinate my hands. My partner gets off scot free.

The first problem I have is that I can't move my hands quickly enough from the jut sau to the first trap. The second problem is that somewhere along the way I need to chop with my left hand. I'm right handed and my left hand is really slow and awkward. This is not a good move in general for me!

So I resolved to practise something which I'm sure will help. There is a weights rack in the room at the gym where I practise and part of its frame is at a similar height to my opponent's hands. How fortuitous. This morning I spent 15 minutes on a very simple routine. I stand facing the weights rack squarely. One hand rests on the weights rack (mimicking the initial trap) and the other chops forward at neck height. The chopping hand then laaps down onto the frame whilst the other hand chops. Keep swapping hands in the way. I started doing 10 reps on each arm, resting, then another 10 reps. Then I just kept doing a total of 50, rest 50, rest etc.

At first when I chopped with my left hand, I was just flinging my arm forwards very awkwardly. After a few repetitions though, I became a little more coordinated. Towards the end the laap became crisper and snappier and coincided with the chop reaching its full extent. Nice! The left is still a little clunky, but I reckon if I spend 15 minutes on this every day for a week, it will make a big difference.

In contrast, my right hand when it chops makes it look like I've done kung fu before

My current wing chun training regime requires me to do my training before work just to be able to get an hour in every day. I get up at 6am and start training at 6:40 in my gym. Training so early has its pitfalls, so I thought I would list them here and also list my solutions to problems I've encountered.

Preparation Is The Key

To avoid stumbling around the house half asleep looking for stuff I need to take to the gym, I pack everything the night before. This includes:

• gym clothes laid out
• gym bag filled and ready to go
• packed lunch
• carb booster bar for pre-breakfast
• water bottle

Then all I have to do in the morning is brush my teeth, put my clothes on and go. In fact thinking about it, if I sleep in my clothes in my car, all I have to do is wake up and drive! Necessity is the mother of invention. Being ultra prepared in this way has the added benefit that I have no time to talk myself out of training. No decisions need to be made, everything is ready. Clothes on, brrrm brrrm.

No Energy

Because of the food famine we endure when we sleep through the night (the way I made it sound like a crisis comes from my earstwhile interest in body building, where any interruption in feeding is deemed an emergency!), our energy stores run dry quickly in the morning. For that reason, I think we should eat at least something before an early morning session. The problem is, if you eat too much or you eat the wrong food, you'll feel sick when you exert yourself. Enter the chocolate chip oat bar. This isn't the kind of food I normally eat, but it's small and light and delivers a lot of carbs quickly. Because it's processed food, my theory is that its glycemic index is high and the carbs will be absorbed and ready to use more quickly. For that reason I'm willing to eat this otherwise crappy food and put up with any sugar crashes that hit me. Porridge is my breakfast of choice but oats take longer to digest and I only have 40 minutes between digestion and action. Digestion to action: wow, this is the James Bond diet!

Stiff Myscles

I can barely move when I get out of bed because my muscles are so stiff. Then I have 30 minutes of more inaction while I drive to the gym near where I work. When I walk through those gym doors, my body is still asleep. To immediately jump into any vigorous exercise, or even Siu Lim Tau, whilst my muscles are so cold and stiff would be madness. For this reason, I take the warm up period very seriously. Personally, I like to walk on the treadmill for 5 minutes, starting at 5.2 Km/h and increasing the speed by 0.2 every minute. Then I do a low intensity 5 minute warm up comprising gentle stretches. After that comes a slightly higher intensity warm up that consists of different kinds of swinging kicks. This warm up takes around 15 minutes in total, and although I'm still coldish relative to my body's state later on in the day, I'm just warm enough to start training (gingerly) with less risk of injury.

Manipulate The Sequence Of Exercises

Even after that 15 minute warm up, I'm still nervous about attempting something strenuous like Siu Lim Tau. Siu Lim Tau puts enormous stress on your legs and shoulders if you do it properly and for the length of time I like to do it for, so for this reason I like to do Tsum Kiu first. Tsum Kiu is not as pysically demanding as Siu Lim Tau and I find that doing it at normal speed is good for warming up the body. After 15 minutes of doing Tsum Kiu, I'm pretty much ready for doing anything.

Think About Rehydration

If you're training for an hour, you really should drink during that time. There is a water fountain in my gym, but to use it I'd need to leave my cosy little room, walk past all the other gym-goers on their assorted machines, get a drink and walk back. Unnecessary interruption! Instead I just take a bottle of water into my training room with me and save on those many walks to the fountain. I combine breaks between exercises with taking sips of water, texting my girlfriend and sitting in horse stance. Time is money, after all.

And Balance Is Buggered

I don't know about you, but this early in the morning my balance is buggered. Some of the exercises I do involve me standing on one leg, or turning (as in Tsum Kiu) and invariably I fall out of the stance like it's drunken monkey style and not wing chun. Actually, I look more like this guy when he gets up off the floor. I get really annoyed with myself and sometimes punch myself in the head when my balance goes but I know it's important to just accept the fact that your balance isn't so good when you're still half asleep. Threatening myself with an iron bar just seems to make it worse, so I'm trying to be a little calmer about things.

If you were to ask me how much training I do, I would tell you I do an hour of Wing Chun every morning before work, I do Chi Sau 2 lunchtimes a week for an hour each and go to 3 classes per week. However, this is only the plan. The reality is often different from the plan. For instance, I might have an impromptu mid week drinking binge that makes one of my early morning training sessions unviable (or so uncomfortable I just don’t bother). Similarly, my training partner might not be able to meet up for chi sau (and in reality, hasn't been able to for 2 weeks now). I might also have to change my evening timetable around due to unforeseen circumstances, meaning that I can’t get to one of the mid week classes.

Because my real number of training hours may differ from my planned number, I thought I would keep a definitive record of how much training I really am doing. I was shocked at how few hours I estimated that I’d put in during my first 3 years of training (a pitiful 429). Hopefully I’ll have a more pleasant surprise at the end of this year.

In this post I will keep a record of how long I trained, what date I trained and what my training consisted of. In writing it down, there will be no hiding from the truth!

I have a dilemma, though. Do I include my warm up in my training time? Because I'm still stiff from getting out of bed so early in the morning, I walk on the treadmill for 5 minutes to wake my body up, then do a gentle 5 minute warm up and then a slightly more vigorous warm up. Should those 15 minutes be included in my total training time? They probably should, but for the purposes of this 'study' I'll just include the Wing Chun specific training. For that reason, my morning training time will probably be less than one hour. I know I'm selling myself short but that's just the kind of guy I am. Modest. Yet capable. Like Ip Man .

I'm not ruling out using an excel spreadsheet for this, given that on a good week there will be 10 entries! A 520 row table might just fit on a web page...

Update: I give up with updating this table! I'm now using this wing chun training record in an excel spreadsheet instead. It'll make totalling up the hours easier.

Surprisingly, I returned from the Wing Chun instructors' course feeling deflated and disappointed.

There were tests of my knowledge and I failed some that I thought I would pass easily. Ha ha, a dented ego! Of course, this jolt is good for me. It's made me look again at the things I thought I knew. The problem with practising things over and over again on your own is that sometimes you become blind to your mistakes. You stop seeing what you are actually doing and there grows a distance between how you perform a technique/form and how you imagine you perform it. At least, that's how it was in my case.

So the course was good in that it has destroyed my complacency. It was good for other things too, like forcing me to look more closely at what I'm doing, even if what I'm doing has been practised to death. To examine it meticulously.

Although not billed as a chi sau day, I couldn't just stand around and not chi sau with all those available seniors I'd not practised with before! Club members from all over the country were present, so there were a lot to choose from. Any spare moment I got, I asked someone to chi sau, and mostly with chi sau strangers. It's much better to touch new hands than familiar hands when you get the chance. Of course I got beaten up by everyone I chi saued with! Interestingly, though, I found myself learning while chi sauing. After getting slapped a couple of times whilst using 'wrong hands' I had to adapt on the fly to avoid getting more slaps.

Wing Chun Instructors' Course Learnings

It would be quicker for me to say that I need to work on everything! But here is a breakdown of the detail that I need to brush up on:

• Siu lim tau. It's 'basic' I know, but there is so much detail in it that it blows my mind, like precisely what are the important points when performing a jam sau. You can do it, but can you define it?
• Tsum kiu. I didn't expect it to be perfect as it was only a short while ago that I started learning it. Good job, because it wasn't perfect.
• Theory. By theory I mean things like lineage etc.

My experience here highlights the importance of going to class regularly so that technique can be corrected. Though necessary, it's not enough to only practise for countless hours on your own. You need to regularly attend class so that any problems are identified and any mistakes you make are corrected. You might think you are doing everything right, but you need an objective opinion, or as objective as you are going to get, from your sifu to verify that that's the case.

So that's 3 classes a week for me forever then!

Chi Sau With Seniors

On a lighter note, the chi sau with the seniors was excellent. I practised with one guy who was built like the proverbial but whose footwork was excellent. He moved really well. He was pretty strong with his strikes too, but had quite light hands. It turned out that he was a sifu himself and had had his own class for around 4 years. Knowing that, I wasn't too disappointed in my (relatively) crappy performance.

Warrior number 2 had a very slight build and looked like he was only 20! But wow, he was all over me, dishing out 3 or 4 strikes whenever there was an opening. Excellent technique. He had very soft hands and proceeded to take me apart at his leisure.

Executioner number 3 was quite tall, same as me and was built well, but again he had very soft hands that applied no pressure when we rolled. Like the others, his footwork was so much better than mine that he was able to attack me from all sides while I clumsily turned to fend him off.

The footwork and softness of hands of those seniors was admirable. It's good to meet up and roll with