What is the Purpose of practicing forms?
How do the forms help us or make us better at doing wing chun, self defence and fighting?
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What is the Purpose of practicing forms?
How do the forms help us or make us better at doing wing chun, self defence and fighting?
Forms are designed for teaching and learing only. Forms are not designed for training. 2 men drills are designed for training, and solo drills are designed for enhancement.
They're used for a few things:
- Developing strength and stability to properly apply the concepts learned
- Points of reference for self-teaching and teaching others, or brushing up. Sometimes we can lose certain things when we take breaks from training, our forms help us gain them back.
- An exhibition of your understanding of the concepts within the system, as well as a personal expression ala shadowboxing.
Each form contains individual techniques we need to practice and ingrain in our muscle memory. the form is merely a way of putting them together as a sequence in which to contain the essential techniques for the particular prinicipal and concept the form teaches. Remember its not the form that is vital to learn but the individual techniques.
Forms are holding all the basic fundamentals of Wing Chun. They're a platform to build upon and for me they serve as the best refinement and maintenance tool.
As I see it today, the forms have become the basis of our curriculum but many fail to see the fact that they are only very basic images on an 'idea' that needs to be worked on and progressed through other training methods.
Self defense and fighting training methods are a separate entity which should support the knowledge and skillsets gained through the forms.
Ultimately, forms are just a small part of the whole but without them we wouldn't be Wing Chun practitioners.
Yes. They offer a sansau curriculum.
If you're a student who likes to pick up every technique out there then this approach is good, but without a core understanding of Wing Chun or another Martial Art for that matter all the sansau in the world is a waste of time imho.
Okay, maybe I should have said they 'originate' from sansau. The 'point' methods (yau dim?) are, from what I understand, Leurng Jans retirement teachings which means to me that he reduced his curriculum to exclude the forms. Maybe highlighting the 'key points' with shortened sets. But I too am no authority on such things, so let's hope Robert or T can shed more light on the subject.
FME The sup yee san sik is not regarded as a 'form' either, just a collection of sets that is different from one practitioner to the next.
Do you think that Leurng Jan didn't know SLT, CK or BJ?
Its possible that WCK was originally taught by the san sik method. After all, rather than being a fight with an imaginary opponent, our forms are a series of descreet units of motion....like san sik that have been strung together. So it may be that Leung Jan was simply going back to an older method of teaching the WCK curriculum when he retired to Ku Lo village.