Today I invented a new exercise for my Wing Chun training. Your left hand presses down on your partner’s right hand, and both hands are just above waist height. As your hand is on top, you want to release your partner’s hand to hit him in the face (as lightly as you like). He/she has to block the strike, probably with a tan sau of the same hand.

I often find myself in the situation where my left hand is on top of my partner’s right hand like this. It just stays there, not pressing down but resisting any pressure that my partner exerts upwards. From there I can usually leave the hand quickly and reach the face before my partner has time to react.

Because this happens so often, I thought we could make an exercise out of it today during some lunchtime chi sau practice.

It’s not just a speed test. Because the “under hand” has to be aware of when the top hand leaves, it’s a good sensitivity exercise. And because minimal Wing Chun skill is required, you can practise with people who don’t do martial arts. You don’t have to go mad with the striking hand. If you can lightly tap your partner’s face, causing no harm, then equally you should be able to land a punch.

When I had the under hand, I was able to get the tan sau up to block, but I wanted to turn as well. There just wasn’t enough time to turn as well. I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility to be able to tan sau and turn to block the strike, but I’ll need much more practice on this.

My line manager at work is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, so I’ll ask him later if he thinks he’s got quick reactions. That should get a good response. Hold on, he’s just come back from a meeting now.

How do you practise Wing Chun with a partner who doesn’t do WIng Chun? And by partner, here I mean my girlfriend. Well, there are simple techniques that are easy for the non-practitioner to pick up. One little routines I’ve practised in the past with Sue is this:

• We stand facing each other in the classic stance where our extended wu saus are touching via the outside of our wrists
• I pak sau her arm out of the way and punch her lights out. Well, I try…
• She pak saus my punch
• Rinse and repeat

Things like pak saus are very easy for people to pick up, whether or not they’ve done martial arts before.

Another exercise we’ve done is as follows:

• We both start in the kwan sau position, our tan saus touching
• I lap sau Sue’s tan sau and thrust my tan sau to Sue’s face
• She has to meet that with her own tan sau or I smudge her make up
• I lap sau her tan sau and we start over again

This is very much a speed exercise which is bad for me because Sue has demonic speed. I can’t understand it, she doesn’t practise this stuff yet I think she’s faster than me!

Here’s one that doesn’t involve any Wing Chun prowess:

• You are blindfolded but your partner is not.
• The ‘seeing’ person gently holds the blindfolded person’s elbow (either one) and starts leading the other person around the room.
• The blindfolded one has to follow the leader. They really have to ‘listen’ to the leader and offer no resistance whatsoever, so that when the leader pushes, they go with it immediately. At no point must the leader use force to push you where they want you to go, and the follower must have no inertia.
• The leader should vary the direction, speed, height etc.
• Oh, and leader? Don’t run your partner into the wall. The argument you had yesterday? That’s all in the past, so be nice.

The above exercises were all stolen from class, but the following one I made up. Its purpose is to increase your sensitivity and reactions.

• Stand face to face hands down by your sides
• Wing Chun person stretch your arm forward to meet the other’s arm which is now also stretching forward. Both arms are still down, but meeting in the middle
• Give the non Wing Chun person the advantage by allowing their hand to be on the inside
• They must try and slap your face with the inside hand, and your outside hand must pak sau it away
• Go as fast as you like!

For the last two weeks or so, sifu has been up to something and I didn’r know what it was until the last class. In the last few classes he got us all to pair up and chi sau and watched us. Then he would stop us, tell us that we couldn’t move our feet and asked us to start chi sauing again.

Very difficult. No place to run or hide. Yet at that point, he didn’t tell us what it was all about. I think he was hoping that we would figure it out for ourselves. At the last class he told us explicitly what we should be doing.

Turning! Turn to the left, turn to the right. It’s a good way of deflecting your opponents energy and something I rarely do. The kind of turning I’m talking about is that repeated numerous times in Chum Kiu (think about the transitions into the first bong saus). Turning and footwork (ok, maybe they both fall into the realm of footwork) need work. This was a really good exercise and I hope we practise it to death.

At the moment, I feel that my WIng Chun is still very 2 dimensional. I’ll face my partner straight on and we’ll exchange. I do actually move around a little, but I still pretty much face my partner. I hardly every turn.

What’s So Good About Turning?

Turning is useful for several reasons. When you turn, your head for example is no longer in the same place. Meaning, if somebody was aiming a punch at your head, they’ve missed. Also, turning can deflect your opponent’s energy. In turning, one of your shoulders moves nearer your partner effectively bringing your target closer to you.

I know that when you turn, the centre line moves too, but I’m not sure about the precise impact. I’ll need to ponder on that one and maybe ask sifu.

At the end of the class, as we were leaving, sifu said emphasized the importance of turning in Wing Chun by saying that it changes everything.

Recently I realised the importance of keeping my shoulders stationary as I move between the different Wing Chun hands and decided that this was something I was going to practice. But man, this is difficult.

I devised an exercise: I would simply move between bong sau and wu sau and back again, turning to the left for the bong sau and then turning back to the front for the wu sau again. Repeat over and over, monitoring the shoulders and making sure they don’t move. I’ve got to say, it’s boring. Surprisingly, when I slow the movements right down to tell better whether I am moving them, this makes my shoulders ache. The boredom isn’t the only problem though. I’m finding it hard to know whether I am moving my shoulders by feel. For this reason it feels like a wasted exercise, just because I can’t determine whether or not I’m doing it right. What I need is a mirror that I can face while I do it.

So this is the plan: save this practice for times when I can stand in the mirror and watch what my shoulders do. I’ve got some turning routines that I do involving doing those bar arm turns at the start of chum kiu, turning whilst changing bong saus and turning whilst changing tan saus etc. I’ll do those exercises but this time I’ll focus on what my shoulders are doing and try to keep them still. I might have to slow the movement right down to stop the movement.

I’ve just had a mind blowing class. Not mind blowing because some complicated technique was revealed, but quite the opposite. This was something very basic, something very simple to understand but very difficult to do. As with every basic principle, its mastery is crucial if you want to progress to a higher level. So what is this crucial principle? Not moving your shoulders when you bong sau, tan sau, wu sau etc.

The teacher today (not sifu) noticed that we were all distorting our positions and tensing our shoulders when we chi saued, so he stopped us and got us to follow him. We stood in basic stance, right hand in a wu sau and proceeded to move into a bong sau > tan sau, back to wu sau. Every one of us moved our shoulders, some more than others and some even stretched their shoulders forward. Bad, bad bad! The shoulders must remain immobile and relaxed whilst moving into those different hands.

Why Keep Your Shoulders Still?

If you move your shoulders when moving between the different hands, the following can happen:

• the shoulders become tense making it very easy to lap sau your bong sau
• you commit yourself to a certain position instead of remaining neutral and relaxed
• if your shoulders are misshapen and tense it makes the transition into the next position slower
• you are not as balanced as you could be
• your opponent can feel what your intention is

Sifu is a perfect example of this principle. He moves seamlessly from whatever hand to whatever hand keeping shoulders relaxed and immobile, yet his gung lik is very strong. He’s also very quick.

Exercises To Develop Relaxed Shoulders

Understanding what we need to do, and the reasons why are all very well, but how can you just do it? Well, you can’t. You have to practise. I asked whether the best approach to take was to deliberately practise hand movements whilst minimising shoulder movements or to just practise our usual routines whilst placing special attention on correcting the shoulders shoulders. The teacher let us in on his little practise sessions for this:

• adopt the basic stance with one hand in wu sau
• turn to the left and bong sau
• turn to the front and wu sau again
• repeat this many, many, many, many times, bringing awareness to how much your shoulders are moving. Try and minimise this movement
• when you’ve worn out your bong sau replace it with other hands like gang sau and tan sau
• when you’ve worn those out, try mixing up random sequences, both to the right and the left

The devil really is in the details. The above may sound a little tedious and boring, but you have to ask yourself how good do you want to get? And how much do you want that? If you want to progress as far as you can, these tedious little exercises must be performed, and these trivial little problems must be ironed out.

The problem with deconstructing the very fundamentals of your skill when you chi sau is that you will get hit. It’s like going back to the beginning and learning everything again, but with a special eye on the finer details now. And we should get hit, because our technique is not as good as it could be. The teacher today had a perspective on this that I liked. He said that we should be brutally honest with ourselves and with our partners. If they don’t take advantage of our bad technique and hit us then they are lying to us and cheating us. And if we don’t notice and try to correct our technique, then we are lying and cheating ourselves. As is so often forgotten, the class is not about winning, it’s about studying. And it’s not personal. I agree with hime wholeheartedly.

I’m trying to improve the strength and flexibility in my legs. I go to the gym every lunch time and Monday, Wednesday and Friday I do cardio exercises (the stair machine at the moment) followed by leg stretches. I spend 15 minutes on the cardio and then around 10 minutes on the stretching. It’s nothing intense, in fact it’s quite a tame routine.

Leg Exercise Torture

A few times at my Wing Chun class the teacher has made us do a gruelling leg work out. This isn’t sifu, this is some other senior who has some kind of compulsive disorder regarding leg torture! He administers the pain in the following ways:

• Gets us to do siu lim tau on one leg. So you stand on one leg with the other raised with thigh parallel to ground while tan/fook sau goes out and then swap legs when you change to jum sau/wu sau. Nasty.
• Stand on one leg with the other raised so that thigh is parallel to floor. Rotate the foot clockwise and then anticlockwise for an eternity. Then rotate the shin in the same fashion for another eternity. Then stretch the whole leg out so that it’s straight. This lasts a bit longer, like an aeon actually.
• A vicious one this: face a pillar and raise your knee until thigh horizontal again or even pointing up a bit and lower leg just pointing down. Extend your leg so that the heel touches the pillar (foot is maybe 45 degrees to the vertical). This is the painful bit. Keep the leg in that position but relax the foot so that the heel moves away from the pillar and then hit the pillar again with the heel. The ball/arch of the foot maintains contact while the heel hits the pillar repeatedly. All this with the leg raised quite high (for me anyway).

He’s fair about it though as he leads the exercise and sets a fine example as he is so supple.

My New Lege Exrecise Routine

These exercises really hurt. But… they hurt because I don’t do any exercise at home or in the gym. So I’ve decided to rectify this by stepping up (ok – by starting) some strength/flexibility training for my legs. It’s laughable at the moment: I stretch as usual (see above) but then I balance on one leg whilst holding out my other leg for a count of 10. The goal is to hold the leg stretched out horizontally but all I can manage at the moment is some patheic angle to the ground!

Jet Lis’s Intensive Workout

Now, this is an inspirational bit of footage. Look at Jet Li around the 10 second mark. That’s the kind of strength and control I want.

There’s a subtle distinction between using force and… using force. Up to this point I’d been under the impression (ok, it was my mistaken belief) that you shouldn’t use force/strength under any circumstances – unless you were finishing off you’re opponent. I realised at a class today that it’s not quite as simple as that. And yet it’s not much more complicated either.

If I’m face to face with someone and I try to push them out of the way, this is bad. I’m using strength to overcome them. But if they are walking backwards already and I simply add my weight to their movement by guiding them backwards a little faster, this is good. Similarly if someone charges towards me and I charge towards them, that’s two equal and opposite forces meeting in the middle – bad. Bang bang. If someone charges towards me and I slip sideways and then my deft push adds to their momentum to send them on their way – in the same direction – good.

So using strength isn’t always bad. We did a couple of drills today that really made the penny drop for me. They both started with me pushing my bong sau against my partners fook sau. The bong sau actually changed to a lan wan sau (bar arm thing!) to do this and the action was merely to get a response from my partner – that response being his resistance. When he met my pushing bong sau with his own unconscious resistance, I could use his energy by rolling my bong sau on the inside into a tan sau. But because he was pushing back against me, I could actually help his arm go in that same direction with my tan sau, so the tan sau pushes his arm in the direction it’s already going. This is the use of force that isn’t bad. His fook sau is already going in that direction because he’s resisting my bong sau, so it’s ok for me to help it along with my tan sau.

Does that sound complicated? It’s not at all, but of course trying to string a coherent sentence together that describes the movements is tricky. I really need to video these things to illustrate. But saying that… it’s actually quite useful for me to articulate what we did, and write it down, because it aids my memory. Maybe I could do both

The next drill used the same setup. The old “bong sau pushing forwards against his fook sau to provoke the resistance that we can harness” trick. Sneaky like a ninja. This time, when I felt his resistance I had to lap sau it out of the way with my other hand, trapping his tan sau in the process. My lap sau is almost coming back towards me and I have to move to my left to get the angle (assuming my right arm is the bong sau). After the lap sau comes the punch of course, but the important bit is creating the space in which to punch.

These drills really illustrate the subtlety of wing chun. Redirecting energy, you have to love it. The pushing bong sau doesn’t have to be that strong, and people invariably resist it without even knowing they are. This resistance is most accommodating of them, because without it the technique won’t work.

Recently I was messing with my girlfriend (who doesn’t do any martial arts) and we were facing each other, long wu saus touching at the wrists, I would pak sau and punch blah de blah. Well after a few goes, when our wu saus met, I could really feel her pushing against me. Of course she didn’t know she was pushing until I quickly moved my hand away and her hand flew to the side because I was no longer resisting it! I’m always being told to stop pushing, and I know I’m much better than I used to be.

I wonder how much of your partner’s energy you just don’t notice. Energy that you could use to your advantage but is just going to waste. I know for a fact that I’m not yet tuned in sensitively enough. But then, who is?

On a side note, if you want to see numerous examples of how not to use strength, search youtube for chi sau competition. Some of that stuff is not that far removed from wrestling! It ain’t pretty.

When I chi sau it’s like my feet are rooted to the floor. Even when my partner attacks I might move backwards but rarely do I deviate from that straight line between us. We face each other and trade blows! Duh. I know that I should create angles, move to the side when it makes sense to etc but at the moment you can have handwork or footwork but not both.

When it was drawn to my attention by one of the seniors that we should use our footwork more, my steps became exaggerated as though I was overcompensating. And because I was concentrating on my footwork and not my hands, I got slapped. Obviously the ideal is for the whole body to move as one; hands, feet and posture working together but before that becomes natural in chi sau, I need to practise this on my own.
I’ve been trying to think of exercises/routines I can do. So far I’ve come up with:

• forget the hands and just move backwards, forwards and sideways randomly whilst maintaing correct posture, stance and hands up in wu sau
• pick a focal point and move around that as though it were an opponent. This is much trickier. At work there is a pillar that I use for this before my colleagues arrive. I move forwards and do a kwan sau. Move sideways and go into a bong sau and then just mix it up randomly. There are pause between movements while I think of what to do next and the movements are very much broken down into discrete actions, but that’s only until I become more familiar with the exercise and it becomes fluid. Wing Chun shadow boxing!