Bringing it up to speed

[Nyrotic]

With the advent of mixed martial arts and a huge sudden burst of interest into the martial arts, and more specifically, the effectiveness of certain martial arts, it seems the martial art of Wing Chun is repeatedly defeated and even disrespectfully spat upon. Being a strong believer of the effectiveness of Wing Chun (Having used it while sparring with many other styles, ie. bajiquan, my mma friend (Kickboxing and judo), BJJ), I know it can and does work when done properly.

I believe what has made it work for me are several strategies implemented within Wing Chun principles during a fight.

My two best strategies:

1. Maintaining the bridge. When I'm out of someone's range, all I have to worry about are kicks, so I usually stay just out of, or too close to, my opponent's kicking range. So when I'm in I put up a bridge. This can be done simply by throwing a punch at an open area, such as the face or neck. Now either my opponent gets hit, or he blocks, therefore giving me the bridge. And from there I stick to his arms and whenever he attacks I feel it and disperse it quite easily (Considering I have almost no chi sao training since I take private lessons and the other folks who train under the same sifu are a decent drive away). I try to maintain the bridge as often as possible, rarely is my Man Sau/Wu Sau guard idle. And we all know what happens when he tries to pull his arms off my bridge .

2. Keeping it simple. I never worry about what hand to use or what technique to apply (Arguably, there are no real techniques in Wing Chun). I simply hit when I lose the bridge until my opponent puts it up again, step in under his space and drop him. In my mind that is how simple I try to keep it. In doing so, my friends often tell me my attacks are fast and that I can't be hit.

So I ask you my Wing Chun brothers. What sort of things do you do in a fight/sparring that you have felt firsthand make your Wing Chun a real annoying martial art to cross hands with?

With respect
Nyro

 

[KamonGuy2]

To clarify - wing chun does work and works well as a streetfighting art. My Sifu Kevin Chan, who is a black belt in BJJ, proficient boxer and kickboxer is a major advocate of wing chun.

It would be very easy for him to open an MMA school taching BJJ and boxing and making shedloads of money
But he teaches wing chun because he believes in it.
After winning a silver medal in Brazil for BJJ he was talking to me on the phone and said that wing chun was still his best art. Considering how good he is at BJJ, that is quite scary!

He trains cage fighters – UFC and Cage Rage fighters, and knows what works and what doesn’t

At the end of the day most arts such as boxing, karate, BJJ, Judo etc are divided into weight categories. So while most practitioners could still win the fight on the street, they would struggle against bigger guys.

Wing chun is not a sport art. The SENI chi sao competition proved that (type it into youtube). As soon as a competition sets rules, you have to tailormake that art to fit around it. Due to the aggressive ‘street’ nature of wing chun, rules strip away the point of wing chun. It is like trying to reconfigure a gun to fire bullets that will act in a certain way.

I love UFC and mixed martial arts, but those guys merely condition themselves to a professional degree. Most train six months in each art and pick up basic moves

That is why the commentators say ‘…with a background in BJJ/Judo/boxing/Muay Thai’ etc as opposed to ‘…with a black belt in…’

The difference is that those guys are fighting professionally and have set fights that they train for. The average joe does not want to spend five hours in the gym being conditioned and working out. The average joe doesn’t have the ability or the patience for that. Most want to learn something with substance. Wing chun trains you hard, but teaches you basic motions that fall back on common sense. A guy who weighs six stone has a chance of doing some very serious damage to a guy who weighs twenty stone. How many arts can say that?

I train in karate, muay thai, BJJ, escrima, boxing and wing chun. Even though I will get beaten up for saying it, in most of those arts, it is very hard for the smaller guy to do well unless he is up against a person of his size. Wing chun was the first art where I felt under threat from a smaller person

Admittedly, the other arts can occasionally do well against the bigger guy, but if you pitted Lennox Lewis against the flyweight champion (whoever that is), the good money would be on Lewis

Wing chun is an equalizer

 

[mook jong man]

I don't give a stuff what people say about Wing Chun most of them wouldn't know real Wing Chun if it jumped up and bit them on the ****.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence from my instructors that worked in bouncing , security ,police and even normal students that used it when they were attacked on the street.

They all said it worked well , maybe even a little bit too well because they thought they might have killed the attacker. My experience of sparring other arts is that you have to hit them , otherwise they don't acknowledge the strikes because they are so fast they can't even see them .

One time i sparred a Bagua dude and we agreed to pull back the strikes , i moved in straight away with a pak sau and punch that would have spread his nose across his face and he just ignored it and went straight into his whole spinning around routine and told me he would have hit me in the groin 3 times whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that while his back was turned i would of smashed him in the spine and kidneys.

The bottom line is sparring is just a game, these days if i have a desire for contact my friends and i put on the boxing gloves ,head gear and mouthguards etc but we still realise it is a game with limitations.

With the big gloves on you lose the sensitivity built up by chi sau, the head gear stops your peripheral vision so you can't see low kicks, centerline punching becomes cumbersome, and trapping becomes pretty much non existant .

But in the end we accept these limitations because we still get to hit a live target that is moving around , and learn to get in the proper range to deliver a strike and sometimes get struck ourselves and keep going.

 

[KamonGuy2]

Well put Mook. At the end of the day, people are pretty smart about what works and what doesn't. In days of old, schools would be closed of and it would be a sin to cross train
Nowadays you have internet, 20 martial arts schools in each town and access to very very experienced instructors.

Training against various exponents you will have a sense of how good wing chun is and where it works and where it doesn't. All I would say is that wing chun is still a growing art and has a lot of empty areas (groundwork, long range), but to be honest, in a streetfight, people will not spar with you at long range (it has only happened twice to me in a fight and it closed again pretty quickly). As for groundwork, it doesn't take much to be able to recover from the floor. After about five sessions of BJJ I knew simple basics that has helped me greatly in many fights and tournaments

But I have gone to many martial art schools since doing wing chun and it is amazing how limited they are with realistic fighting. Sure they spar. In karate we smack each other incredibly hard sometimes and work on knockdown fighting. But they still do not work on what would happen if a huge guy came and grabbed them or threw a massive punch
Muay Thai divides the fighters into weights so I am often fighting people as heavy as me which won’t help me if someone heavier attacks me in the street.

Wing chun is simple, effective, explosive, friendly and fun. And you learn something with substance and reasons behind why you are doing a certain move (as opposed to just kicking a bag as hard as you can!)

 

[brocklee]

Well put Mook. At the end of the day, people are pretty smart about what works and what doesn't. In days of old, schools would be closed of and it would be a sin to cross train
Nowadays you have internet, 20 martial arts schools in each town and access to very very experienced instructors.

Training against various exponents you will have a sense of how good wing chun is and where it works and where it doesn't. All I would say is that wing chun is still a growing art and has a lot of empty areas (groundwork, long range), but to be honest, in a streetfight, people will not spar with you at long range (it has only happened twice to me in a fight and it closed again pretty quickly). As for groundwork, it doesn't take much to be able to recover from the floor. After about five sessions of BJJ I knew simple basics that has helped me greatly in many fights and tournaments

But I have gone to many martial art schools since doing wing chun and it is amazing how limited they are with realistic fighting. Sure they spar. In karate we smack each other incredibly hard sometimes and work on knockdown fighting. But they still do not work on what would happen if a huge guy came and grabbed them or threw a massive punch
Muay Thai divides the fighters into weights so I am often fighting people as heavy as me which won’t help me if someone heavier attacks me in the street.

Wing chun is simple, effective, explosive, friendly and fun. And you learn something with substance and reasons behind why you are doing a certain move (as opposed to just kicking a bag as hard as you can!)

WC DOES have ground work, it's everything you learned standing up. And as for long range? That's why we bridge right away. Hopefully the opponent is a long range expert and sux with his short game.

My feelings, and some will agree with me, are that adding MMA to your WC removes the simplicity aspect of WC.

 

[KamonGuy2]

WC DOES have ground work, it's everything you learned standing up. And as for long range? That's why we bridge right away. Hopefully the opponent is a long range expert and sux with his short game.

My feelings, and some will agree with me, are that adding MMA to your WC removes the simplicity aspect of WC.

Sometimes, there are no simple techniques to the fight. Using wing chun on the ground - your base has gone, you cannot turn your hips for leverage of a turning punch, your faat saos become difficult as your opponent holds you at range. I have gone with numerous wing chun practitioners on the ground and not one of them could escape or attack using wing chun

For a great example, type royc gracie and kung fu into youtune and you will see what people do

Even Bosteppi has used elements of sambo for his 'anti grappling'

Good martial artists will not let you bridge - try it against a boxer and see what happens...

Certainly most modern wing chun systems have started to understand that there are gaps in wing chun and have learnt to close them

But as I have always said - I am open to contradiction. Just because I haven't seen wing chun work on the ground doesn't mean that there isn't one wing chun school out there that hasn't learnt how to use wing chun on the floor

I would appreciate it greatly if ANYONE could post some vid clips (doesn't have to be your own) of a wing chun guy destroying a BJJ guy or boxer in these kind of conditions. I don't want to hear the usual 'I can't do that becaue my knife hand strike would kill him' arguments. Every other martial art manages to cope...

 

[geezer]

My feelings, and some will agree with me, are that adding MMA to your WC removes the simplicity aspect of WC.

Adding knowledge doesn't mean losing simplicity. I don't know BJJ (yet), but I do know a little ground work and would like to learn more. Many of the really important principles of WC/WT should be compatible with fighting at all ranges, and especially with grappling and ground work. I'm talking about core concepts like simplicity, efficiency, feeling the energy and borrowing the force of an opponent to defeat him.

Many other WC/WT concepts, such as punching in a straightline are really secondary, since they are simply a means to achieve the core idea of efficiency. At the higher levels, you learn how and when to use hooks and uppercuts, since in the right circumstances they may be the most efficient techniques. By extension, it is only logical that you would adapt other approaches to achieve the WC/WT ideal when you go to the ground. I don't see why some of these approaches couldn't be adapted from BJJ. If they fit the core concepts of WC/WT, then they are WC/WT as far as I am concerned.

But then I've always been guilty of being open to heretical ideas.

 

[bully]

I am unsure what version of Wing Chun i was taught in the early 90's by my old Sifu.

We trained 3 times a week (minimum), Monday was basics, formwork, chi sau and more form work.

Wednesday was senior pupils, sparring, floorwork and working on specifics ie takedowns. My sifu trained our local Police and security forces. He showed us restraint techniques, aikido and judo. These formed part of our gradings too as did pressure testing. The floorwork was grappling as i remember with judo groundwork etc. I had previously done Judo for a few years so i recognised some techniques. I enjoyed the floorwork as alot of fights end up that way.

Friday was a 1 hour session of do what you want. You could spar (with senior pupils so you could learn) weapons, i enjoyed wing chun long pole...i was dismal with it mind you. Formwork, chi sau......whatever really. It worked very well as it was fun and different.

He also allowed senior students to run grading "help" classes and weekend classes which helped us newer students at the time.

Once every few months he would run what he called a seminar, usually over 2 days or bring someone over from the UK to teach us something. I spent 2 days learning Bo Bong the praying mantis form from a very talented UK sifu. It was great and alot of fun. Some seminars would consist of lock, holds and takedowns. Practising all weekend was helpful and i have used some of these restraint tech's on freinds when they were drunk and trying to attack me (in fun but people sometimes dont know what they are doing when drunk!!).

All in all i think the guy was ahead of his time, he took criticism as his way of teaching was seen as very agressive. If i was cornered, even now i wouldnt hesitate to use his training and i know it works.

Was he teaching MMA?? yes i suppose he was in his own way. I think he wanted us to be good WC guys and any holes he saw he wanted filled.

He doesnt teach here anymore as he had a business which took up his time. There is only one guy who does a bit and when my back is healed we will be doing one on one.

Its a shame my old Sifu isnt around anymore.

 

[qwksilver61]

Again, average people do not train for a fight,ring rules are different,if you end up on the ground,you were not ferocious enough;knees,elbows,fists and most importantly speed and timing.Try using a heavy bag, speeding up then slowing down, it confuses your enemy,works for me.......the aura works too,appear larger by attitude,fierce,intense.....two cents,WT definitely works....with hard work.........train like you mean it.I wanted to add,no I am not an expert at ground fighting and yes I do believe that any ground fighting tactics are a must.I must admit there are a lot of people,thugs too,that are training at UFC gyms here locally,so that just means the odds of possibly having an encounter with a trained ground fighter just went up.When dealing with ground fighters in the past who were semi skilled,speed and ferocity worked most of the time,however against a seasoned ground fighter the only way to beat him is to join the ranks.....nothing like trying to escape an arm bar.....or being stretched.....oww..

 

[brocklee]

Some good view points in this thread