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There is no REAL secrets in Wing Chun, but because the forms are conceptual you have to know how to decipher the information..That's the secret..
Hopefully when you learned how to catch, Randy Johnson wasn't throwing at you. And this isn't Sparta, I hope the taught you to swim in the mellow pool, shallow and smooth. That said, if you're a man, and you want to learn to fight, you shouldn't limit yourself to slow training for very long. If you train hard and fast, you will get better at hard and fast training. If you want to be good and mental focus and imagination power,( I think I can), then slow, deliberate concentration can help. People at the Olympic level of almost anything work on mental strength and mental rehersal. I think it helps me.
Good post. One thing I will add is that, in China at least, meditation in none of the major disciplines is an end to itself, nor are its results. You meditate to quiet the mind, but a quiet mind is not an end to itself, one could just as easily become a quiet monster. Contemplation and meditation are always paired in Chinese disciplines, quiet the mind to observe and understand, observing and understanding, one does less that disturbs the mind. Counting breaths is only to quiet, eventually one is supposed to be quiet enough to contemplate, not count breaths.
I can see going slow for reasons of body mechanics, honing them, but only if one also trains fast, otherwise one might tailor the body mechanics to conditions where the kinetic energy of motion does not play out identically. By also doing it fast, one makes certain not to train unrealistically. Same with training the same things live.
I can see the value of quieting the mind in training in order to observe the results of motion, and then contemplating the motion. In fighting, I can see the value of not letting one's ideas get in the way of seeing the fight that is before one. But in fighting, it's really not the time to count breaths, but counting breaths isn't meditation or contemplation, it's a gateway to meditation, nothing more.
Anyway, good post.
Also, if you throw a ball Yang style taiji slow, you have not thrown a ball, you have dropped it. This is not to argue that there is no value to slow practice, I think there is as long as it is always paired with practice at speed, but the danger of slow practice is that it allows some things to happen that cannot happen at speed, and does not fully allow some things to happen that only happen at speed. It should inform footwork transitions, but some fundamental steps that are necessary in all fighting are almost never used in slow practice for this reason. By slower loading of weightedness from step to step, one necessarily accepts a duration of tension in one leg or the other that, at speed, is simply loading and unloading, not at all a show of stance.
The comparison to throwing does not work, because no one throws a ball taiji slow. Ever. Throwing always involves a compression that comes from progressive building up of force, taiji slow does not. Without that, there is no throwing.
Doing strikes slow is more about linking than about power. Linking is helpful to power, but a practice that teaches linking is not having power, it is the result you are looking for. Practicing linking and practicing actual usage are necessary. One can link very well in form and not be able to apply that against someone who does not link superbly, but can apply. One can learn linking without slow work, one cannot learn application without working at speed. Especially throws, qinnas, strikes, etc.
Only the first section of the sil lim tao is done slowly- not the whole form.
the slowness helps develop awareness and intent in controlling the tan, huen,
fok and bong motions- with minimal local muscle tension- and with awareness of
bone and joint alignments and orientation towards target.
Practice makes the principles of motion second nature so they can be applied
in diverse ways
I can understand this. It is sensible. The fact that other sections are done at speed also gets around the issues I was getting at, namely that speed tends to reveal weaknesses in ability to link by way of failure or balance issues once more substantial energy is added.
To illustrate, one can have a washing machine whose spin cycle seems perfect with smaller loads. Once a full load is added, it can be revealed that you need to fix your washing machine because it is not really balanced. Taking it apart then reveals that they no longer want you to be able to fix the **** thing!
**** planned obsolescence!
Here's a spin you'll all enjoy for developing that internal energy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NpyyWlCUpE