First wing chun class of 2019. Back with a bang training basics and knocking the rust off. Cold evening, so well done to everyone who turned up.
Bong Sao, pak sao and wu Sao are absolutely fundamental to being able to use wing chun (more to come on each of them in future posts) and everyone who trained tonight improved visibly from the start of the class. Great start to the new year and hopefully a sign of things to come.
Self defence courses do not work – period!
I often see adverts for self defence and women’s self defence courses and it makes me cringe every time. If you want to learn a bunch of party tricks to show off to your friends at parties then self defence courses are the way to go. If however you want to learn to defend your self in self defence situations the only way to do it is to train repetitively over a prolonged period of time. Constant repetition over time creates muscle memory and reflex actions. During stressful situations like real life self defence anything that isn’t an automatic reaction goes out of the window. Wing Chun kung fu is effective not because the techniques are superior to other martial arts techniques but because of its simplicity and the way in which it is trained. Training a small number of techniques repetitively and practicing drills designed to produce automatic reactions means that Wing Chun is available to the practitioner when it’s needed in real self defence situations. It’s not much good for showing off to friends at parties though…………