When it comes to training, you need to be adaptable. The “perfect” time for training doesn’t always present itself. Look at today: I was supposed to be getting the house to myself for the whole day and I was planning on doing one of my siu lim taus in the morning, and the other one later in the evening. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Relatives turned up in the morning and stayed a few hours. Kids of 4 and 6 years old running round the house and needing constant attention! When they left I completely forgot about siu lim tau and ate a huge meal for a late lunch, meaning that I was too full to do my form when I remembered it.

By 5pm I’d recovered enough from that meal to do a siu lim tau, meaning that it wouldn’t be long before I had to do the second one.

Life’s a bitch.

On the spur of the moment I decided that it would be a good idea to do some stretching. I can get by doing siu lim tau in the tight jeans I was wearing, but stretching is impossible so I had to borrow some of my girlfriend’s jogging bottoms. She’s 5 feet tall, and I’m 6 feet 2 inches so they came to my knees, but I was desperate. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to wear the bra, but you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

All I needed now was more relatives coming round and catching me in my girlfriend’s clothes. Which of course they did do. I didn’t care because I got my stretching in!

As I said before, if you wait for the perfect opportunity to train, you will miss out a great deal of training you could do if you were a little more adaptable. For example, I like to do a few bong saus, kwaan saus, punches and chops while I’m waiting in the bedroom for my girlfriend to get ready for bed. Anyone with a female partner will appreciate what a long training session they can have while waiting for girls to finish in the bathroom! It perturbs the dog a little to see me flailing my arms about, but what the hell – I’m training.

OK, I know this is only the second day of my siu lim tau challenge, but I’m pleased with the way things are going! My siu lim taus take around 15 minutes each and I did two yesterday with 15 minutes of alternating bong saus on top of that. Today I did another two siu lim taus and 10 minutes of leg training while I microwaved a baked potato. The potato wasn’t an integral part of my training, it was just cooking in the background. You could equally boil some vegetables, for a similar effect.

I’m getting a few twinges in my right shoulder, but it’s not got any worse than it was before. I’ve had these twinges for the last year or so, sometimes more painful, sometimes less. Their presence is certainly not conclusive proof that siu lim tau is causing my problems.

I’ve also been pondering the fact that when we chi sau, we have our elbows in as we roll. Holding the elbows in like that over long periods of time will probably have the same effect as the inward pressure we exert as we extend our fuk saus and tan saus in siu lim tau. That’s to be expected as the first section of siu lim tau helps you guard the centre with your fuk sau when you chi sau.

Tomorrow, I’ve got the house to myself, so I should be able to get my two siu lim taus in.

Check out the reason I’m testing my siu lim tau.

My shoulder injury is bugging me because I don’t know what’s causing the pain. Also, I’m doing so little of whatever is causing the pain that it’s restricted to minor niggles here and there when I put my arm in awkward positions. It doesn’t affect everything I do.

My theory is that siu lim tau is causing the pain, specifically the first section where you extend your tan sau and fuk sau whilst forcing your elbow in towards the centre. I’ve been doing siu lim tau infrequently recently – maybe twice a week – so that might be the reason my injury hasn’t got worse. The pain is at such a low level, and it’s only there for such a small duration of time, that I wonder whether it’s “just one of those aches and pains we all get”.

Anyway, to test my theory that siu lim tau is the cause, I’m going to do the form twice a day. Fortunately, I’ve got the next week off work and should be able to fit those in easily. I’ve already done siu lim tau once today and practised alternating my bong saus whilst turning for 15 minutes. That’s a lot of bong saus!

I’m not doing any other exercise that involves my shoulder (like pressups, benchpress etc), and I’m not chi sauing with anyone at the moment, so I can’t think of anything else it could be. It’ll be disappointing, to say the least, if I discover that siu lim tau is damaging my shoulder, but at least I’ll know for sure what the cause is. The thing is, this form is part of the foundations of wing chun. It’ll be a simple adjustment to make, for me to ease off on the inward pressure as I extend my tan sau and fuk sau, just so I can continue doing siu lim tau, but that will have a knock on effect on my chi sau. My elbows won’t be able to come in as far as they used to, leaving me more open along the centre line, and vulnerable to attack. If that’s the case, I’m going to have to tighten up on my footwork and positioning to compensate.

If I establish that siu lim tau hurts my shoulder, then I can resume doing pressups, though, so it’s not all bad.

Unless they both damage my shoulder, and then we may as well slit our own throats!

I’ve just put myself through the hardest siu lim tau I’ve done for a while. I don’t normally do siu lim tau whilst listening to music, but tonight I just felt like it. I know you are supposed to still your mind, reduce your thoughts and relax everything, but the choice was either do siu lim tau to music or don’t do it at all. My theory was that doing it with a “disturbed” mind was better than not doing it at all.

Admittedly, the style of music I was listening to – house – isn’t the kind you normally associate with wing chun, but I like it!

I have a little routine that ensures I do siu lim tau for a long enough period of time: I count 60 whilst extending my tan sau and fuk sau and I count another 60 whilst retracting my wu sau. The music I was listening to had such a strong beat, though, that I couldn’t disregard it and count at my normal tempo, so I decided to count to the beat of the music. Unfortunately for me, the beat turned out to be much slower than my usual tempo.

My legs started trembling by the time I started extending my right tan sau! By the time I had finished my right side in the first section, my legs were shaking like mad. That hurt. But it hurt in a good way.

I remember my sifu saying in the past that you need to face yourself before you can face an enemy. You need to put yourself through pain like this, and keep pushing the limits. If you can’t put up with the pain you feel in your legs for such a relatively short time, how are you going to face a thug who wants to kill you? Who is going to fare better in an “ugly” situation: someone who chickens out at the first sign of pain or someone who continually pushes their barriers?

In addition to the obvious physical pain and discomfort we experience when doing siu lim tau, there is also the emotional distress. I’m not sure emotional distress is the right way to describe it, but if you’ve done siu lim tau for long periods, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It can easily be confused with boredom, but I think it’s something quite different. It takes a disciplined mind to remain still for long periods of time. If you’ve ever meditated seriously, then you’ll be familiar with the yearning to do something – anything – else. To just stop and get some mental relief by doing a different activity. To the untrained, simply standing still (seemingly) for so long is like torture! But pushing through that mental barrier is what we must do. I know when I’m at that mental torture point because I start looking around me. When doing siu lim tau, you should look dead straight ahead, but when I get to that point I start looking down and to the left and right, all over the place, such is the level on mental discomfort. As if looking around is going to curb the pain!

Siu lim tau: such a simple idea, yet so tough an adversary. But it does get easier. It’s just practice.

I suppose that ideally you should be able to do siu lim tau and reduce your thoughts whatever your environment, wherever you are. A bit like meditating. You know you’ve cracked it when you can still your mind in the middles of chaos.

Next stage: siu lim tau in the middle of a dance club!

Eye Opener

Last night’s class was a real eye opener for me. Sifu asked us to start the class by doing siu lim tau, but just as I was preparing to start he told me to correct the others. I was gobsmacked. This was something I had never done before. It’s hard enough getting your own form right, let alone correcting others. Usually the more senior members go around the class correcting students but this time the burden fell on me.

At first I thought I just didn’t know enough to be able to identify where other people were going wrong. And in many ways I don’t. For example, I found it really hard to assess whether my colleagues’ stances were correct. So I left them alone! I saw a few shoulders tensed and sloping, so I adjusted those. Interestingly, mistakes increased as time wore on. More on this later.

Correcting Others Helps Me

I can see that my correcting others is a twofold exercise. They get my input on where they are going wrong and can correct themselves accordingly. But also, it’s an exercise for me. I have to think more about correct structure and form. Seeing the form from this new angle helps. Previously I’d only experienced siu lim tau internally; I had my own personal experience of it. Last night, however,  I was seeing siu lim tau from the outside. The more I think about it, the weirder it seems! But, at the same time, there is unmistakable logic in asking a student to correct others.

An Increased Responsibility

Another consequence of this task was that I felt a responsibility I’d not felt before. I couldn’t just dismiss my task and only pretend to do it. Sifu spots things like that and chastens you for not correcting the student and then corrects the student himself. I had to embrace the task and try to do it well. Last night’s siu lim tau took maybe 10 minutes and the interesting thing was that as time wore on, my friends’ shoulders started becoming more tense and more ‘distorted’. The fuk sau shoulder would either be further forward than the other one, or lower. Of course, this gives me a perspective I didn’t have before. Now I can see a pattern emerging.

As time wears on, your muscles get more tired, and you make more mistakes. But you might also lose track of how the correct structure feels and deviate from it because you’ve been immersed in the form for so long. It’s much easier to sense change than sense something that hasn’t changed. For example if there is light pressure on your skin, after a short while you begin to not notice its presence. As soon as the pressure changes, you become aware of it. Both these factors conspire to distort your structure. Because I’ve seen this pattern externally in others I can now be aware of this pattern in my own siu lim tau.

Sifu Is Cleverer Than He Looks

One things for sure. Being asked to correct other students has made me feel a responsibility to really know my stuff, to become a better practitioner. Sifu knows what he is doing. The invitation to the instructor’s course, the assigning of responsibility to judge others: it all encourages me to do better, to practise more, to read up on things. I’m sure this has the same effect on my peers, too. I now have a responsibility not only to improve my skill, but to be able to help others improve theirs too. Sneaky, very sneaky.

This must be a well trodden path in my club that I just wasn’t aware of in the past. I’m really impressed. What a great way to motivate people to work harder.

At my last class I was waiting around for someone to chi sau with so I thought I’d make constructive use of the time by practicising the siu lim tau form. I wasn’t expecting my sifu to watch and assess but he did anyway. I’m glad he did because he gave me a long list of things I was doing wrong, and what I need to do to correct them. Here’s the list:

Marking The Centre

Very sloppy! I didn’t notice (we never do) but I guess my hands must have been flapping about loosely. Their movement should be well defined and precise like all the other movements in the form.

Wrist Strengthening

The next bit, the punch, after which the hand opens, bends up, rotates round, the fingers curl up one by one into a fist. That bit there, where it’s the wrist snapping up that puts the power into the punch (is it like a one inch punch…?), that bits important. It’s included in the form to strengthen the wrist for just such a purpose: punching.

Wu Sau

In the first part of the form after I’ve extended the tan sau slowly and amd slowly returning my wu sau, I bring it too close to my chest. In fact, it’s nearly touching. A collapsed wu sau like this is neither use nor ornament. It should be maybe 2 fists away from my chest. I’ll see if I can get some diagrams together to illustrate, but you get the idea.

Hoon Sau

In the second section, after the gang sau, low gang sau, the second gang sau (although I believe some variants of the form do a tan sau here) there is the hoon sau. Here I was actually drawing my arm back as I rotated the hoon sau so that my elbow moved closer to my body – wrong! I guess I was doing that to give myself more power in the dai jurn (probably spelt wrong – I need to find the proper spellings for these techniques ), but it’s still wrong. Instead, after the last gang sau the whole arm must remain motionless apart from the hand from the wrist up, which rotates in the hoon sau.

Bong Sau To Tan Sau

I thought I was getting this right, but I obviously need to tighten it up. I certainly think about these points as I’m doing it but it always helps when someone points out that you’re not actually doing what you think you’re doing. The transition from bong sau to tan sau: the wrist must remain stationary, as if it is a pivot for the movement.

Punch The Face

The very last 3 punches I was aiming around chest height but they should have been head height.

You know what, maybe I’ll put together some video footage to illustrate these points. I’ve always shield away from indulging in stuff like this because I ain’t perfect. But what the hell. I’ll look up prices of video cameras. Maybe the fear of showing myself up will force me to practice more!

My understanding of gung lik is that it is a kind of internal strength, and similar to endurance. I think this is one of those terms that defies a clear definition. I know how one can develop gung lik, and that is by doing the first form, siu lim tao, and by doing chi sau. A few times my sifu has ‘pushed’ us. This ‘pushing’ occurs in a chi sau position where we meet and equal the other’s push with our own. It’s a gently increasing pressure that is maintained for what feels like an eternity. It feels like an eternity for me because it makes my shoulders ache so much. Not so for my sifu, obviously, as his gung lik is so much greater than mine.

I asked one of the seniors at the last class if there was any additional exercise I could do to develop my gung lik. He surprised me when he said no. I was imagining an exercise similar to pressips, but instead of the constant up-down movement I would just hold the position, say half way down. When I mentioned this, he said that doing that would simply increase the strength I usually use, and this is something we should be trying to minimise in Wing Chun.

As the ‘pushing’ exercise is only done rarely in class, I’m now wondering if it isn’t so much an exercise to increase gung lik as a measure of it. That is, while my shoulders ache after a push, I know I still have work to do!

One of my friends at class (I hesitate at the use of ‘kung fu brother’, sounds a bit cliched!) , was thinking about doing siu lim tau whilst wearing some wrist weights to get some additional gung lik training. I’m not sure about this now. I think it might somehow distort the development of gung lik. I certainly remember that when I used to do siu lim tau (without weights!) for 40 minutes, my shoulders did ache so I know they were being exercised properly. At the moment I’m doing a 12 minute siu lim tau in the morning, and though my shoulders and arms don’t feel it, my thighs really do.

I’m going to ask my sifu what the nature of the oushing exercise is, and what its purpose is – whether it’s for developing gung lik or just assessing it. Often you get different points of view, depending on who you ask. This doesn’t bother me too much. If I know I need to do a certain thing to improve, it’s not as important to know
why (although it’s desirable).