Caught Up!

[Sirus]

After studying KF for about 8 years and reading and talking with people from many different arts. One thing seems to rise up all the time. Rapped up in all the techniques! If you notice some of the best WC fighters never got caught up in (Well my bong sao should be exactly here or my tan sao needs to be exactly here) because in a fight there is no time to exactuate the location of the hands they need to react to you opponents pressure. If he or she throws a punch and the pressure justifies a bonng sao and it works then it was the perfect bong sao. Getting to envolved in all the technical aspects of WC at the early stages has a tendancy to develop a person who is always thinking about the move rather than letting the body deform or flow with the event! The fine tuning can happen progressivly. When a cabinet maker starts a piece he does not blaze the excess in one shot to reveal the finish surface the same with your WC. Learn how to use it and make it work for you, you dont work for it! That is why so many NHB and MMA fighters fair so well that is because they train to react not to think over every move (Lets try not to complicate WC it is simple in form lets keep it that way!

Thats my thoughts!

[YongChun]

I think Wing Chun is simple. You can learn the first form pretty quickly say in a few hours. That teaches you all the basic angles. Then the mechanics of chi sau can also be learned in a few hours so that you know how to change and how the various structures deal with force. After that it's just refinement.

Without some proper correction at the start, you can spend years (even 20 years) doing something wrong. The repair later won't be easy.

With regard to the carpenter, he also starts of by making things square and door molding is cut at exactly 45 degrees for it to work. Once the angle in carpentry are wrong then you can never fix it properly. The finishing in carpentry is the same as the refinement that occurs in Wing Chun when you learn to adapt your art to the thousands of kinds of opponents that there are.

At the same time your basic idea is OK that you can teach the main ideas first and slowly over time your depth of thought increases. Wong Shun Leung said that the Little Idea Form is something like a child's level of thinking about the Wing Chun subject. With time the same form is transformed because of application and much thought to an adult's level of thinking about Wing Chun.

If you give a beginner too much detail at the start, then they will give up in frustration and won't think the art is practical. However if you don't give the proper foundation then the art also will not be practical in the end. So it's always a balance of giving enough of the proper detail but not too much depending on the student's aptitude and hard work.

Ray

[sihing]

I agree with Ray, Wing Chun is simple in application, actually IMO it is overkill for the average confrontation on the street. But this does not mean it is easy or not complicated to learn. The movements are not natural, at least not for most...and one has to be very precise when teaching it and learning it. My motto is "in practice have perfect movement" (especially when working solo), so that when in actual application it will be as close to what it is needed for. The idea in a fight is to not have perfect WC movement, but to get out of the situation unharmed and safe. Hopefully through the tools/skills taught to by training in WC (delivery system), you will have "absorbed" enough in your system to allow effective and efficient enough movements to get out safely.

James