Time For School
Which Form is best?
I’ve just had a wonderful play through Siu Lim Tau and thoroughly enjoyed being in the moment with it, and as soon as it ended I was reminded of something Master Ip Chun had said many times over the years.
It’s a nice idea to think of your Siu Lim Tau as primary school, to think of your Chum Kiu as secondary school and to think of your Wooden Dummy Form (Muk Yan Jong Fat) as university, and if this was actually the case:
Question:
“Which form should we say is the most important?”
Now straight away people will tend to think of the 1st form, ‘As everything is in the Siu Lim Tau‘, if you know where to find it that is, as I mentioned in a very recent blog, ‘How many moves are in Wing Chun?’ 9th May 2020 (See the link at the bottom of the page should you wish to watch that video blog).
Now in many ways this may be true as we learn so much at primary school and it sets us up for life, although if you only went primary school you may not get a top job if all you can do is to recite your alphabet and make paintings with a potato!
University then?
But how would you even get in if you never learned to read and write?
The answer is simply:
“Whichever form you are training at that time”
So whatever you are doing, focus on what you are doing!
Do not look to the future, or what the next guy is doing, because these kinds of distractions will mean you never get there anyway.
So often people want to move on too soon.
We train the 1st form, while looking at the 2nd form, thinking how cool it looks to be doing those turns, whereas I am just stuck in this one stance.
Then when we do get onto the 2nd form, we think how cool the dummy looks, to be doing all those moves and making all that noise.
When you are ready, it will still be there for you.
Every thing is there for a reason.
I have just been chatting with a student on our forum regarding the punches and how many we should do (or not do) and how fast a blast of 50 chain punches should be?
Well the answer to that is to fire them out as fast as possible and as relaxed as possible,
DO NOT try to apply power in chain punches.
If you do 50 punches in 5 seconds then this works out at 10 punches per second. GREAT!
But that does not mean that we should expect to hit someone 10 times per second in a fight.
We train 10 per second so we can throw 1 in one tenth of a second, and THIS is what we train single punches for.
The third element of our punching training is on the wall bag, not just for conditioning but to also teach us to know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop will allow for maximum impact.
If you hit a wall bag and push through, the wall will not move, you will, so in hitting the bag, switching the power off immediately after contact AND stopping where you are, will generate the best punch possible regarding the use of energy as opposed to a glorified, fast push.
So whatever you are doing:
Do it right,
Do not rush,
Stay in the moment,
That way everything will come to you.
Thank you