I had an interesting exchange with someone recently about how much to train. Interesting not so much because of what he said, but because of my reaction to it. This guys has a few videos of himself demonstrating Wing Chun and although I don’t usually participate in all this ‘social networking’ business, in this instance I thought I’d reach out and connect with this like minded individual.

So I sent him an email via youtube complimenting him on his skill and asked him how much he trains and how he structures his training. I thought I’d offer him my training routine (however small!) first so he wouldn’t feel shy about revealing his training secrets, but he politely avoided the question. What he did say though was this:

• never look at training in terms of time as Wing Chun requires a different kind of attention. The point he was making was that it’s the quality of training that matters, not the duration
• He could practise for 15 minutes focussing on perfecting techniques, somebody else could practise for an hour and the two training sessions wouldn’t be comparable

While I agree that quality beats quantity hands down, why not have both. Obviously, you need to be heading in the right direction for any volume of training to be useful. There is no point in training a technique badly over and over again – and that woul be harmful to your skill. But…. as my sifu always says: “More practice”. How else can you get better? The more you practise – correctly – the better you get. This is how it works in everything.

I’ve just started learning Chum Kiu, and I’m damned if I’m not going to practise what I’ve learnt over and over again until I’m doing it in my sleep. And every class I go to I’m going to check with any senior around that I’m doing it correctly. This is how it works: you get taught in class, then you go away and practise it to perfection. You go back to class, what you’ve been practising gets corrected and when ready you get taught more stuff. But you need to put the hours in.

And it’s not just techniques that get perfected through the hours of training. Where would my gung lik be if I zipped through my siu lim tau in say a couple of minutes? I’ve heard scary stories about how my sigung makes his students take a whole hour over siu lim tau on his residential courses. People shake, people feel dizzy, people vomit – but their gung lik gets stronger. OK I didn’t hear of anyone vomiting, but they did shake and feel dizzy. And their gung lik grows.

More practice!