WSL Knives video

[lawrenceofidaho]

I hope you will enjoy this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB79TzHZKT0

Regardless of how "authentic" that form may be, could anyone actually improve their fighting skills in any way whatsoever by practicing like that?

[YongChun]

Regardless of how "authentic" that form may be, could anyone actually improve their fighting skills in any way whatsoever by practicing like that?

After I learned some Escrima stick and knife fighting from various people (Remy Presas, Bobby Taboada, Dom Lopez etc.) and looked at all the tapes I could get my hands on of famous Filipino masters doing their stuff then I thought there was definitely something wrong with the Wing Chun Bat Jam Do training that people do.

So at least I would say that anything commercially available for Wing Chun knife techniques doesn't do the job. Perhaps in the past, people were able to use it.

I think doing the form slowly is step one. Then there is drilling that with a partner in various ways. Some ways include knife against knife, knife against sword and knife against spear and pole.

Then get some protection on your hands and head and spar with these things at random. The spear against the knife is a great match. Knife against knife is very fast, maybe a little messy and both sides usually get cut.

I think these days there is more interest in mixed martial arts skills so the weapons are going by the wayside in favor of grappling skills. The weapons can occupy all of your training time if you want to be good. But because of the gun, why bother or else you will look like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arc who was swing his sword around.

Some clubs do the weapons as a bit of a muscle workout. But probably a good weight training program is better.

Robert Chu told me a long time ago that Hawkins Cheung is pretty good with the knives. So maybe there are a few people around who can do it. If Wong Shun Leung was able to beat a fencer with the knives then maybe he wasn't too bad.
With a different fencer maybe he would have had different results.

Back in the 80's we used to fight Escrima stick vs Wing Chun Butterfly knife. I got whacked real good in the head causing blood to drip down my face from a padded Escrima stick wielded by one of Ancion Bacon's students or grand students. My footwork wasn't fast enough. But another guy in the club who was also a fencing teacher matched the Escrima stick pretty good using the Bat Jam Do and fencing footwork skills. The two killed each other off simultaneously. They went full speed at each other.

For the art of it all I think knife against spear is great practice. It's the classical battle of long against short. There may be some transfer of skills from this into the hand against kicking realm of fighting.

Yesterday I just watched the fighting sequence at the end of the movie Rob Roy MacGregor, it was very well done and more realistic looking than most choreographies. Of course I don't know what realistic looking means since I have never watched any real duels. Probably it is more realistic than all the Alexander FuSheng movies but then I did see some impressive Hung style from a traveling Hung style family back in the early 70's. The guys name was Frank Lam but I've not seen any mention of him on the net.

I think the Bat Jam Do form doesn't matter. It's how you train the stuff. This goes for the empty hand stuff as well. The forms I saw has mostly the most basic methods of cutting and poking which are a subset of Southern knife usage anyway (in my opinion).

We used to train the Wing Chun knife against the wooden Japanese Boken (sword). I thought I was OK until I tried against someone who actually knew how to use the Japanese sword. That was a great eye opener getting cut everywhere. Training against people who know what they are doing is always a great experience which is totally different from training with people who pretend to know what they are doing. E.g. training against your classmates kicks vs training against a real 7th degree TaeoKwondo guy, or wrestling against club members vs wrestling against a club that only does this. Of course this is all obvious.

Ray

[lawrenceofidaho]

Ray,

I have seen how you move with the knives in application, and IMO, it is good & realistic technique.

To say that you've been bested & bled, -by a skilled martial artist who specializes in weapons, is no cause for embarassment.

-L

[lawrenceofidaho]

Yesterday I just watched the fighting sequence at the end of the movie Rob Roy MacGregor, it was very well done and more realistic looking than most choreographies.

Tim Roth's sword work was amazing in that film.

He obviously trained very hard for those scenes.......

[CFT]

Ray, nice to see you posting again. Always a nice read. Would like to hear more stories about your club's training with 6.5 point spear, and any real exchanges with other practitioners.

I've only just started to learn my club's basic knife form so I've not even played with drills, let alone real application.

[YongChun]

Hi Chee,

The 6 1/2 point spear. Well here is something about that.

I learned this in 1982 from Dr. G.K. Khoe who is a student of Wang Kiu in Holland. Wang Kiu is in his 80's I think and still is teaching a little.

We first learned a 6 1/2 point spear form which consisted of 26 or 27 movements. Our knife form had 82 movements and the magic total of the two is about 108 movements. I don't know if this is by design or accident nor do I know if this was Wang Kiu's design or came from Yip Man? Anyway those are just academic questions for which there are no answers but I used to be interested in that. Wang Kiu didn't give any answers to these kinds of questions.

After we learned the spear , we did a two people exercise equivalent to single sticking hands with the spear. Two people face each other, one starts with a poke the other defends with the Tan etc. and a few movements later we repeat the whole thing again. This exercise has the basic Tan, Bong, Fook, Gan for defense and the Bill/Biu/Poke high and low for attack. After that we did one , two, three step kind of sparring drills with the spear or pole. E.g. one guy pokes to one of the four quadrants and your partner deflects with something and counterattacks. This could go on for a few movements.

After that we put some protection on the end of the spear and did random frees style sparring. We found it might be a good idea to have lead hand protection because in fast exchanges the lead hand tends to get whacked making for some sore fingers. We were told that the spear just makes one sound. So there is one engagement and after that someone gets hit. There was not the multiple clashing sounds like in the movies where it takes ten hits to take someone out.

One of the female students who did this sort of thing went to Japan in the 1980's and joined an all female Naginata club. A Naginata is a long pole with a narrow blade on the end of it. She sparred a bit with the blackbelts at that club and found her Wing Chun spear techniques could match their techniques very well.

Later I wondered why we used a spear instead of a long pole like everyone else does in the Wing Chun world. Well I didn't get an answer to that. I was told that the spear was more practical for fighting. I do think the long pole has many advantages from the point of view of physical development like muscle training. Also it is the traditional Wing Chun weapon. The long pole seems to have some roots from the Red boat people. So now I like to use both the spear and the long pole.

I learned Hung style before and feel that the Wing Chun spear technique I learned is a small subset of the Southern spear techniques. The subset applies to fighting a single skilled opponent as opposed to fighting multiple opponents which require a lot more techniques esepecially of the circular kind. When we fought against some people using the double ended pole then we found the single end one had the advantage because it was longer so as long as your facing and center pointing was good, you could keep them at bay.

We use the long pole to also help to develop punching power. You grab the pole at the thick end with two hands close together and then snap the pole down and up (try with and without the snap) and then repeat this as many time as you can. We hade some female students and also some male students who couldn't even do one because they didn't have the wrist strength to hold the pole parallel to the floor. One lady after a few weeks managed a single one. Then a week or two later did about 10 and two or three months later did 60 of those. She was a small 5' 2" high school student.

One year Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting visited here. At that time one of the members by the name of Yvette Wong had a long debate with Wong Shun Leung about the pole vs the spear. She argued that she could maneuver the spear faster and hence it was the superior weapon (for her). He argued that since the pole was heavier, he could easily deflect the spear out of the way and win that way. What we found good was that he didn't mind these kind of debates at all. Other teachers we came across tended to get angry if we asked questions or tried to debate about some point. We also debated about the position of his Wu sau in the Lap sau and punch technique. At a seminar we asked him about defending against the hooking punch. So he picked the largest guy and asked him to throw a hook. He either wasn't ready or was surprised by the guys power because the hook rocked him a bit. So he asked the guy to do it again and this time his defense was very solid. He used the inside Bill sau because it was a wide hook.

Although I learned a lot more movements with the spear and pole from Hung style, I find that I can use what I learned in Wing Chun better but I like the Hung style forms better (for looks and exercise).

Training the knife against spear is a pretty good exercise in order to understand the good points and bad points of each weapon. For us we had to figure out a lot by trial and error because there aren't too many stick and butterfly masters around our part of the world.

My hung style teacher said that one of his masters specialize in the spear and Butterfly knife. That's all he did. One year when he was working up North (Northern Canada) a large group of young people were smashing the town store windows and ste various stores on fire. So this master came out with a bamboo pole and of those people, he put 16 into the hospital with none seriously hurt. He was credited with saving the town. He eventually died at age 94.

I spoke with Kenneth Chung about weapons once. He said weapons forms are not a big deal because they are a dime a dozen in China. There are hundreds of Wu Shu styles and they all have their weapons forms and training procedures. So Ken tended to used the weapons as just a way to enhance his empty hand skills. He said these days there is no practical use for the weapons. He said if you have a club that doesn't mean I need to fight you also with a club. I can fight with a one level up weapon which os what the police do. Once policeman told me that if you fight with your fist then he can use a club. If you fight with a club, then he can use a gun. If you fight with a gun then he can bring in a whole army of police to take you out. So that's the one level up approach.

Ray

[CFT]

Super write up Ray. It deserves a thread of its own. We get a decent amount of material written about the knives, and how it relates to Filipino systems because people have a lot of exposure to that. I find that there is very little written about pole training, benefits, real encounters, etc.

Your pole power development exercises sound similar to ours. Here is what we do, hope it comes across clearly:

Take up the basic YJKYM stance. Pole is in line with the centreline, place tip of pole on ground and grasp the thick end of the pole with right hand, place left hand in front of right, then move right in front of left. So basically holding the pole away from you, tip down, right hand in front of left with a bit of the thick end sticking out.

Next raise the tip of the pole up until about chest/throat height, locking your arms out in front of you. So if you look side on: your shoulders down to your hands, hands up to tip of the pole forms a "V" shape.

Now the hard bit, keeping your elbows down, raise your hands up so that the tip stays roughly stationary and the pole horizontal. Your hands will have to twist around the pole to allow this action. Do this bit quick so you can return to the "hands down" position.

Repeat as many times as you can. You can also work the "other side of the body" by having the left hand in front of the right.

When I first started I could do 2, then after about a week 5. After 2 weeks I could do 10. I'm up to 15-18 now. You can try it with a 6ft pole to begin with to get used to the action, or even a broom (brush end is the tip).