Originally Posted by
Paddington
Hello Faux Newbie. I've never competed in a competition beyond a couple of katate tournaments in my youth so I find it hard to make a definitive comment in the context of competitive, full contact wing chun fighting. That said, this year I have really focused on short range power generation with respects to my wing chun, so I can perhaps comment on my experiences here.
I will say from the outset that I am sad and embarrassed to report that I recently badly hurt someone when they asked me to demonstrate comparatively short range power generation, despite the large stack of books and pads I used to offer some measure of protection in addition to, I thought at the time, not putting much into the strike.
Anyone that is familiar with 'Newton's cradle' will perhaps appreciate, as I now do, how disingenuous some of the demonstrations of wing chun's penetrative strikes are. The gentleman I hurt ended up with a bruised lung and a suspected fractured rib, so I do caution against demonstrations of that type.
Anyway, I found that once I had practiced just standing still, much like Hendrik describes, so that I could feel gravity and the ground reaction force through my structure, I was then able to move onto the principles from chum kui, albeit with a through founding in what I think is a good elbow position. Where as in slt movement of the elbow is of a primary focus, in chum kui I've found that unifying waist or hip movement with elbow movement, is key to generating a good deal of power. When I did some training with Jim Halliwell his phrasing as 'bouncing off the hip', really helped me to cement it all together.
What is more I kept in mind the idea of the 6 or 7 major joints or bows which enabled me to look at this idea of kinetic linking and refine it in my chum kui practice, a lot more thoroughly. Of course, I am talking about alignment of the joints/bows across all x, y and z spatial planes.
I found one other important aspect of chum kui and also chain punching practice that, in a way, uncloaked a lot of short range power generation for me and is inline with what I have said above about alignment and moving the joints in unison. With regards to chain punching, I found a great deal of improvement by focusing on the hand being withdrawn. Once the elbow of the withdrawing hand comes back towards the hip/waist, that kinetic energy springs back into the arm moving outwards to strike. You can see the use of the withdrawing arm/hand in chum kui as operating in a similar fashion, much like as Moy Yat describes. You don't have to use the lead hand to withdraw whilst punching with the back hand to generate a lot of power, particularly if you are good at fa jing to the extent that the guard hand can be still be withdrawn back sharply, over a small distance to kick off the kinetic chain.
Of course, turning punches from a squared position benefit very well from keeping the above in mind and one other point I have found useful to generating short range power is knowing how to relax and remaining relaxed, particularly after striking the opponent.
It was through using all of the above that resulted in my injuring someone at a very short range even when I did not put much into the strike. In hindsight, in all of the incidents where I have unintentionally knocked my training partner out with one strike during my more exuberant chi sau sessions over the years, it has been through using the body movements and principles such as I describe above even though back then, I didn't know that that was how I was generating such short range knock out power. Back then it was not something that I could consciously do.
Needless to say, I see one of the biggest strengths of wing chun in terms of power generation as being comparatively short range power generation as I describe above.