The more I learn of Alan Orr's stuff the more I like it!!
I've always been a logical, well reasoned, and straight forward guy. In my martial arts training--I've approached things the same way. If I found that something didn't work or was un-realistic, I altered it or simply dropped it altogether and moved on. So having practiced both full contact arts as well as more esoteric ones I think that I can say with proper qualifications that Alan Orr's NHB series is seriously eye opening and thankfully confirming!
Alan just just makes it all make logical sense! It's like watching an epiphany in motion of how to take wing chun from the textbook to the real world; like the missing link in the theory of evolution. The more I watch it the more I realize that what I've been thinking through all these years has been in the right direction--so his videos helped to both confirm my idealogies as well as fill in gaps that I had.
As I alluded to in the first paragraph, I always disliked things that I learned that didn't seem like they'd work in real life--because I knew that it didn't. I would even voice it when I was taught it through questions. But regardless of whether I agreed with the answer, I took the good with the bad in much of what I learned through the years in any martial art. In general, I always preferred simplicity and spontaneity and in WC my step brother taught me that way as well saying things like "don't mess with all that flippy hand stuff--just hit the guy!" Funny thing was that I always thought he did the flippy hand stuff because I could never hit him.
Since he and I lost touch the wing chun that was filling the gaps was...different from what he showed me, and more mainstream with what most YM schools teach (since it was all YM WC). When I started with my continued education, I thought that perhaps my step brother simply didn't know the "real" wing chun and that I was getting a more proper education because the majority of chunners did things in these ways.
But in the past couple years...I realized I was taught simply more realistically in my original learning and the reason why is because my step brother actually got into a lot of fights living in Hawaii and even here in Texas, many of those fights were against more than one person.
I kept training in the status quo though...because I really wanted to finish the wing chun curriculum. All the while this feeling about the lack of realism in WC training got to the point where I just couldn't get it out of my head. I see now that it was my desire to "finish" the system that was inhibiting my natural logic and understanding that what I had to begin with was better than what I was continuing with...until now.
Luckily I've been able to find time with Scott Baker, who has a good bit of real fighting experience and knowledge of the internal side of things. He's refined a lot of my skills with hands on private instruction, and I'm going to be doing a lot more research into the Chu Sao Lei method as well. It's a bit different than my original method...but Scott's method and theirs are similar...yet ironically very different than the mainstream. But both of their teachings are closer to my mentality than anything else out there right now.
I think that Robert's / Alan's method is something that everyone should take an intimate look at with an open mind. Not just watch the MMA fights but really take a deeper look at it. Invest in some of the videos and/or work with them directly if you're lucky enough to do so. All it can do is improve your application and at the very least give you more insight into varying ways to train. Why not?
BTW...this is completely my own thought process with no pitching from anyone else (like Robert or Alan or Terence). Just something I felt strongly about and wanted to share.
