Read Time: 20 mins 21 secs

Part 1: Why relaxation and correct structural position is critical in Wing Chun

The key to finding relaxation is structure and the key to finding structure is relaxation.  This conflict seems logically impossible to break out of, yet it is the very thing that the Wing Chun students must achieve in order to develop the correct posture which, in turn, is critical to being able to correctly perform Wing Chun’s various techniques. Anyone who has studied Wing Chun knows that relaxation and maintaining the correct postural structure are key to properly being able to deliver the power and speed that Wing Chun can offer.  The Wing Chun student also knows that achieving relaxation and correct postural structure is easier said than done – something requiring a long time of focused effort to achieve.

There are many articles about the importance of relaxing and also of maintaining correct structure, but very few link the two together in the necessary way; bringing the two together to explain how to bridge this seemingly incommensurable divide between structure and relaxation.   This is why many students end up alternating between an endless cycle of trying to relax with their structure collapsing and introducing tension to try and add structure back in – finding themselves either collapsing under an attack or trying to resist it with force and being easily knocked out of their stance (uprooted).

I started writing what I thought we be a fairly quick piece to add to the website to begin to address this subject of relaxation and the importance of gravity a couple of months back and quickly realised, as I got to 20, 30, 40 pages that this was a subject that demanded a fuller explanation – and what was originally intended as a short article was quickly turning into a book.   The approach I have decided to take is to split this book into the key chapters that had emerged.   In this article, the focus is on introducing the importance of the relationship between relaxation and structure, with the essential role that using the force of gravity within the body has.

So, back to the initial dilemma we outlined – for those students who are struggling with this very stage in your development you no doubt recognise this is an incredibly frustrating and confusing stage – one that often ends with many students leaving Wing Chun altogether.  For those advanced students who have made it through this challenge, you will never forget the challenge that this stage brought.  The Wing Chun practitioner who has managed to make their way through this challenge on their path comes to understand that relaxation, structure and correct postural alignment are all tied together – a bit like Yin / Yang – it is not an either / or thing, instead it is an essential unison of both.   This article aims to go some way into showing how relaxation and structure are essentially linked and how using gravity to allow the limbs to ‘fall’ into the correct position is key to this.

In the course of series of articles, we will explore the following areas:

1. Why relaxation and correct structural position is critical in Wing Chun
2. Understanding correct Wing Chun posture
3. The challenge of relaxing
4. Sinking and Springing – the concept of rooting and explosive power
5. Guide to relaxing and the use of gravity

The focus of this article is why relaxation and correct structural position is critical in Wing Chun.  We will first explore why is it so important in Wing Chun to grasp these concepts early on and to continue to develop these throughout your training.  This includes the potentially de-railing frustrations and challenges that this brings to your training   In the following article we will then look in more detail at what correct postural structure should like in Wing Chun.  After all, without properly understanding what you should be doing the student has no way of changing their postural habits to the correct ones.  In the third article we will explore why relaxing, which sounds such an easy thing to do, proves so difficult to pretty much every Wing Chun student.  The fourth article will explore the key concepts of ‘rootedness’ and ‘forwarding’ – the sinking and springing effect that correct relaxed structural posture achieves.  Finally, the final article will provide some exercises and insights into how to achieve the relaxed, structure posture using gravity to minimise muscle effort.

Why relaxation and correct structural position is key in Wing Chun?

Structure as the foundation

Kenneth Chung is an outspoken exponent of the supreme importance of building the correct foundation:

“You can spend a lifetime practicing Wing Chun, but if you don’t have the basics, you will come to regret it. You can be in the style for 40 years, but without the basics, you are nothing.”

In Cantonese there is the saying “doa lo yut cheung hung” which means that you are empty, (i.e. lacking substance) when you get old because you were empty from the beginning.

For Chung, the foundation must be strong and correct. The foundation is everything in Wing Chun – and for the foundation to be correct it requires the student to have relaxed structure.  Obviously there is a way to break out of this cyclical dilemma and we will begin to examine how this is typically achieved.

As previously mentioned the challenge here, and one that is so often overlooked or not specifically made clear, is that in order for the body to get into the correct position the student must remove all tension.  Not only this, they must actively undo unnecessary muscle use to allow the body to use different muscles.  If there is tension of the muscles then the arms are not in the correct position – for example, if there is an imbalance in the correct position of the elbow this either pokes out away from the body (which results in the hand collapsing back to the body when under pressure from the opponent) or is draw into the body (which results in the elbow collapsing into the body under pressure) – even the slightest deviation from the correct path means the ‘power line’ which is the correct alignment of the arm (imagine a string connecting the wrist, elbow and should in a straight line) means that the body is forced to use different muscles to stabilise the arm as incoming force is ‘leaked’ out of the alignment position.

This is why most Wing Chun Schools in the Western approach spend a great deal of time in the very outset of the training (up to 80%) on developing the fundamental positions.  The basic Wing Chun horse stance (Yee Gee Kim Yung Ma) is of paramount importance along with the correct use of the limbs – which is why this is so intensively trained within the first hand-form, Sil Lim Tao.  In Western teaching there is the assumption that the starting point is that the correct positions must be understood by the developing student – much in the same way that one learns the positions of a dance move.  Here the arms and legs are ‘placed’ in position and are held using incorrect muscles – often resulting in a lot of achy shoulders from incorrectly holding the weight of the arms in the shoulders, having a focus on driving from the hands.  This is considered necessary at the very outset – taking the approach of building up the structural position and then refining this bit-by-bit thereafter.

Now, I have no first-hand experience of traditional Eastern teaching methods but I have been told from many that students of the Grandmaster’s in Foshan were required to be able to do each component of the forms correctly before they were allowed to move on.  This approach differs dramatically from the Western position described above – this approach is instead analogous to a sculptor who starts with nothing and slowly adds material to build up piece by piece the final structure.  The Western approach is more analogous to whittling – where a wood-worker starts with a crude block of wood and slowly refines the required shape from this by chipping away bit by bit.   Both models have their advantages and disadvantages.  The Eastern approach was renowned for being frustratingly slow to progress through the early stages.  The Western approach, on the other hand, allows students to very quickly get through the Sil Lim Tao form but left unchecked this is dangerous.  The danger is, as is often the case, that the student feels that they have completed this form and are hungry to proceed to the next.  However, without then going back through the form to properly apply the relaxed structure the student is ‘empty’ as Chung describes; they have no concept of how to correctly relax and use gravity – instead every action is muscular and the structure that they have created is not fit for purpose.

It is important to note here that, although Wing Chun is often said not to proceed in a linear fashion (i.e. you progress across many different areas rather than achieving one thing and move on to the next like stepping stones), what is true is that you will hit many training walls and not be able to progress to deeper levels of understanding and therefore higher levels of skill and training without this foundation being in place.   Without a doubt one of the most difficult walls to break through is this structure versus relaxation challenge.  The critical thing for the Wing Chun student and the Instructor is to recognise that the student must face this challenge before they can move on.   This is because it is so fundamental to all the later training and development in Wing Chun.  Unfortunately, students often bypass this challenge for various reasons, but always at a price.

As an example, I have trained with many supposed Black Sash students from different schools and lineages who have been allowed to progress through Sil Lim Tao, Chum Kui, Biu Jee and the Weapons form who have fast hands and know the techniques but who cannot defend their core correctly using correct structure and are quickly defeated.  They are shocked and say ‘but I am a black sash’ – why did you beat me so easily.  Of these individuals some have embraced this new insight and gone back to the very beginning to improve their basic foundation structure (and thereby becoming much better practitioners) and those who simply cannot bridge the training gap of being at the top of the pile then seemingly having to go back to the very beginning.  Those who do persist are disappointed with their teachers and feel that they have to go right back to the start.  I reassure them that the learning they have made is not wasted – instead deeper learning will refine this – a bit lit a spring-board where there is an initial downward force but then considerable upwards spring which can be likened to the student taking one step backwards but 50 steps forward.

Many other students I have known over and above these who have pushed to move on to the next form without grasping the basic and then hit a wall – their training stalls and they are unable to progress.  At this point they must either accept they must learn the basics or, as unfortunately often happens, they become demoralised and end up quitting their Wing Chun training.  There is no way around this – the Wing Chun student must break through this wall.  The only way to get through this wall is to allow the body and limbs to (1) to be held in the correct position using the correct muscles and (2) to allow the limbs to transition between the ‘fixed’ positions (hand positions).   Understanding the role of gravity within the structural integrity of the Wing Chun stance and movement is key to this.

The importance of the place of gravity in the foundation of structure in Sil Lim Tao is often completely overlooked by many developing students and their instructors where they have a focus on finding a sequence of individual correct arm limb positions and not flowing between positions.   By this I mean the developing student seeks to get the perfect chamber position with the arms and hands ‘placed’ at a physical point in space.  They then move from this fixed position to another fixed position, for example Taan Sau.  The student then stops and analyses the physical distance the body has from the elbow, the height of the arm relative to the centreline and so on.  In doing so, the student has invariably overlooked the importance of correctly moving between these two positions with the correct structure and relaxation.    I often remark that the vocabulary of Wing Chun does not help this – there are terms which describe the individual positions but no common terms which explain how to ‘flow’ properly using the physiology of the body between these positions.  I have found using physiological terms such as Supination, Pronation, Radial deviation, Flexion very beneficial in this regard – allowing students to begin to understand the physical processes involved in moving between fixed positions.

As mentioned, this is acceptable for the very early student (in the Western approach) who simply has to learn the most basic positions of the limbs prior to then seeking to understand this deeper level of understanding of flowing through each position.  The danger for the students proper foundational learning is where this level is considered sufficient and the student then moves on to the next stage or form merely to once again learn on this basic ‘placement’ level.  Where limbs are placed, as in the earlier example we mentioned of the Taan Sau, it is easy to spot because the elbow is in a high position and the weight of the arm is hanging off the shoulder (the Deltoid muscles) meaning that the arm is working alone with no structural integrity feeding back down into the body.  Indeed, this is quickly shown by any incoming force into the Taan Sau as it will travel down the length of the arm and into the shoulder toppling the student backwards.

The key to developing correct Wing Chun structure and relaxation is to first recognise that correct positioning and relaxation between techniques is achieved somewhat like making bridges between stepping stones – whereby each step must be correctly connected to the next before you can properly make it to the next one.  If you have not got correctly into position with your Taan Sau it is almost impossible to then correctly transition into Bong Sau.   If you are holding you Taan Sau from the shoulder then then only way to move into the Bong Sau is to flip the arm out sideways (a physical placement of the limb) instead of correctly forwarding and rotating into the final position (flowing through the technique and around an opponent’s structure).  In this way, students must be exceptionally controlled in ensuring each technique can be achieved before moving on.

The important point to take from this is that you cannot simply ‘relax’ into a static position – instead, you must be able to get into the correct structural position using relaxation through a dynamic flow into the final position.  This concept is confusing for the beginning student, but it is a critical one to master, and will be explored and explained in greater detail in the later sections.

Structure and relaxation as the source of power

The second key reason why relaxation and correct structural position is key to Wing Chun is because without it you have no real power and can end up damaging yourself.   There is another Cantonese saying which is also useful to remember at this stage: ‘Ging Chong Gwut Gun Faat, Lik Chong Gerk Jang Sheng’ which translates as ‘Power comes from bones and tendons, strength originates from the heels’.   What you often see in beginning Wing Chun students is a locking out of arm joints where the arm is extended incorrectly at the elbow and the shoulder.  This is because the developing student is still very much using muscle force – attempting to use strength to ‘push’ an attack into an opponent or ‘push’ away in defence.  This gives a very limited source of power and, more importantly, causes long term damage to both the elbow and the shoulder rotor-cuff.  The correct way to deliver the punch is using the whole body structure.  In doing so the correct postural alignment allows the body to deliver tremendous power whilst also allowing the body to absorb pressure and redirect pressure, without effort, into the ground.  Larger students with more muscle are often prone to relinquish the seemingly early advantage that they have over their smaller training partners – however, this is only to their later detriment which blocks their advancement.

The bottom line is, that until you have properly developed the foundation of your structure your limbs are not in the correct position to allow the right application of muscles, tendons and ligaments to provide the forwarding motion required.   Where you have not got the correct foundation then different muscle-groups are used which inevitable causes fatigue and lacks the power that Wing Chun brings to the table to allow you to defeat a stronger opponent.  Indeed, where the developing student is still using muscle force alone then the outcome of the fight will be based purely on strength alone.

This transition marks another very difficult transition for the developing student and again one that seems to trap them in a circular argument – namely, you must let go of muscle power to develop effective power, yet when letting go of muscle power the Wing Chun attacks seem weak.   This is a key stage where the ‘normal’ use of the body has to be stripped back to reveal a different way of using the physiology of the body.  Some students are simply not capable of making this leap of faith – both in the significant amount of training required to ingrain the technique and, importantly, when having to trust this when faced with a combat situation.

It is often said that Wing Chun punches are like little slaps by those who train with students who have relinquished muscular power but who have not yet learnt to develop full-body power.  The key thing here for the developing student is to recognise that power comes with speed and speed only comes with relaxation.   An example would be hitting someone with a stick – holding the stick in your arm and bringing this swinging down onto them with power would be damaging.  However, if you try and use a very big stick to hit a castle’s gates then they will not break.  The solution that was found hundreds of years ago was to use the stick like a battering ram.  Here the weight of the batting ram combining with the momentum of the swing combined with the running forwards of the apparatus driven by the attackers combined into a focused strike that generated a vast increase in impact power.  This is what the Wing Chun practitioner seeks to achieve using the entirety of their body working as a whole unit.  When you feel a correct Wing Chun punch delivered with force it does not feel like a little slap – in fact, it does feel like you have been hit with a battering ram.

Unfortunately, the beginning student is not able to call upon the whole body structure from the outset – this is something that will take time to develop.  As such, they again must be very disciplined and patient in accepting that relaxation and structure will lead to power in time.  To this end drills, bag work and sparring should be adjusted accordingly to develop the correct application in the arms which can then be properly connected with the rest of the bodily structure.  Here the student can feel the power where an instructor throws a relaxed ‘heavy’ punch into a bag using structure through the elbow connected into the ground but they are not able to emulate this themselves.  Instead they seek to apply power in the only way they know – by throwing a very tense, muscular punch.   Using examples of the weight of the relaxed arm dropped from a high position to strike their outstretched hand compared to a downward strike quickly allows then to grasp the principles at play here – where the resounding impact force into the hand from an arm simply dropping hurts them a great deal more because it is not slowed down by the effect of opposite groups of muscles working against each other.

Importantly, this is an early lesson in the power that gravity brings to the Wing Chun table through relaxation that many students get but then fail to apply to the rest of their Wing Chun.  Often they are able to grasp the swing (the pendulum nature of the battering ram) but this is driving from a tense elbow and an arm that is working alone without the force of the body coming up through the punch.   In this way, Wing Chun requires the developing student to completely turn on its head the ‘natural’ way of delivering a punch or hand technique – rather than being led from the hand it must be generated from the feet through to body finally into the hands at the contact point.  This requires the developing student to fundamentally re-asses, accept and re-programme their bodies into a new way of generating and delivering force.

Structure and relaxation as the source of isolating the limbs to use independently

A final area of the importance of relaxation and correct posture in Wing Chun is in the natural bodily fighting position – something expressed well by Sifu Mark Rasmus:

“Many people ask why Wing Chun spends so many hundreds of hours training from the neutral position. There are many good reasons for this. Firstly, most self-defence situations are not going to happen in a deeper fighting stance, you must be ready in a natural upright position. It is much better to achieve a strong root in an upright stance than in a deep stance. A deeper stance can offer a false root while a shallow stance shows your true connection to the earth so you can`t fool yourself about where your level of development is”.

The first reason is that for the student to be able to apply Wing Chun techniques properly they must be able to use all of their limbs as weapons – rather than just a dominant punching arm as is often the case in untrained fighters.  This is the foundation of the Gate theory – where each limb must be able to defend its corresponding section of the body.  This is easier said than done – and can be understood by trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.  There are cognitive processes going on in the brain that make this a difficult activity for the untrained person.  Adding in both legs into the mix as well adds twice as much difficulty.   Training this ability requires the student moving from cognitive pre-frontal cortex control of a specific limb to having embedded in learning into the motor cortex after hundreds or even thousands of hours of repetition and focused training.

If you ask a junior Wing Chun student to try and apply the Sil Lim Tao techniques they are trying to learn whilst moving around you quickly see it quickly unravels – this is simply because the human brain can only concentrate on so many things at once.  It is for this reason that Dan Chi-Sau (single sticking arm) is trained before Poon-Sau (double sticking arm); it allows the student time to embed the techniques on one side of their body so this is automatic when they begin using two arms.  This issue of concentration remains a challenge for the most advanced student when working on new levels of understanding and technique.  The only difference is the more advanced students have embedded in much more elements of learning that they can delivery automatically.  For the beginning student this frustration can be overwhelming, leaving them with a feeling that they have ‘lost’ everything that have spent ages working through.   Being in the neutral stance allows the Wing Chun practitioner to focus on reprogramming the way their brains manipulate their limbs into the correct positions necessary for the techniques.  In this way, the student is able to practice positions, test these through drills and basic sparring (attack and defence routines) and refine this – for example, from holding the arms rigid from the shoulder to correctly forwarding.  In doing so, they start to understand the concept of gravity – including the importance of sinking and rooting, absorbing and using the opponents force rather than being toppled over by it.

It could be said from this that relaxation must also occur in the mind, as it must do so in the body.  Here relaxation refers to the mind being ‘comfortable’ with the technique – namely, they have trained it to such an extent in isolation that it has become second nature.  They do not need to think about this anymore.  However, it is importantly to remember that just doing something again and again does not mean you are doing it correctly.   Bruce Lee once said that he fears not the man who knows many techniques which he has practiced only a few times, but instead the opponent who has trained one technique many times.    What must also be added to this is that the training must be correct – you could train an incorrect Bong-sau 10,000 times over 40 years without ever getting it right; you are in fact merely repeating the same mistake and, in doing so, programming the mind and body into this incorrect response which would be called upon in a fight situation and leave the student vulnerable.  Training the mind through repetition of the correct technique is therefore something that is critical in Wing Chun and something we explore in more detail later.

The second reason is that Wing Chun requires us to reprogram not only how the mind works (as seen above) but also the entire physiology of the body.  It is through the mastery of this section that the Wing Chun student starts to ‘feel’ what ‘rooting’ and ‘sinking’ actually involve.   This section moves away from the initial ‘external’ focus of placing the arms in the positions within Sil Lim Tao to focus instead on more ‘internal’ aspects of how to flow between movements and especially how to get into the correct position in the correct way, rather than a limb merely being placed into position.  Here the Wing Chun student begins to take note of the muscles that they are using, where they have tension and begin to try to remove this from their form practice.  Ultimately, in doing so the body is able to seamlessly respond to an attack and deliver an attack as a unified whole, working together.

It is often said that it takes at least six months to undo the learning from ‘hard’ style martial arts.  Actually, the bigger challenge for the new Wing Chun student is stripping out all the poor postural habits that modern western living brings along with the incorrect ‘placement’ of the limbs through the early stages.  This includes weak core structure, poor upper-body posture and a tendency to lead from the hands in fighting.   All these practices must again be stripped away, layer by layer – very much like peeling an onion shale to get down to the white flesh.   Reprogramming how to correctly hold the body is central to dealing with the challenge of finding correct structure and body relaxation.  In the section that follows this we will look in more detail at several key sections of the body which must require different structures and accompanying physiology changes.

The third area that the Wing Chun student must master is the relationship between the mind, body and spirit.  A key part of mastering kung-fu extends above and beyond training the body and the mind as separate elements.  Qi Gong (the use of energy in the body expressed through movement to deliver power) is a key focus of Shaolin Kung-fu along with many other ‘internal’ martial art styles.  Modern Wing Chun teaching often fails to instruct the student in this key area – meaning that their martial art training does not really extend deeper than a self-defence class.   Understanding the importance of the relationship between these three elements is conveyed in the old saying “it is the size of the fight in the dog not the size of the dog in the fight”.   If you do not develop your fighting spirit, you will have skills that mean nothing in a fight situation.   Conversely, you could have a strong fighting spirit, a strong body but without trained techniques your brute force is easily overcome by those who do have these.

Although this topic warrants much more attention to properly understand it, the key element to make clear is the emotional response involved and how this must be controlled by the Wing Chun student.  It is only necessary here to understand that the fighting spirit must be able to express itself through the mind and body which both must be relaxed and structured.   This is not possible until the student has advanced to the point where they have ‘mastered’ Wing Chun principles and techniques rather than being the ‘slave’ to them.  By this, I mean the advanced student is able to fight without having to think about what arm or foot goes where – they have trained in the principles and techniques to be able to simply respond to the attacker using the Wing Chun ‘weapons’ they have built up over time in their arsenal.  A key part of being able to use this is being confident enough that you have the knowledge, experience and trust that these ‘weapons’ actually work.

The advanced Wing Chun student who has mastered relaxation and structure has this knowledge, along with experience and trust in their Wing Chun and the ability to express this in a combat situation.  In fact, the advanced student has become a complete fighter because their automatic trained response is now an expression of the relaxed, structural Wing Chun fighting system.  The advanced student must then only decide whether or not to ‘draw’ their weapons and use them on the attacker.  When that decision is to attack, then it is done so by breaking the opponents structure, capturing the centre-line and to devastating them through unrelenting attacks to their core – this is the spirit of Wing Chun that comes to be embodied and the mind-set of the Wing Chun fighter.

The key element of importance to our discussion of the role and use of gravity in Wing Chun involves being clear of the essential part the mind, body and spirit place together, working in unison, in being able to learn and then powerfully express Wing Chun kung-fu.   In this union Spirit is the intention – which feels like a power that is seeking to explode through a relaxed body and mind that has the correct physiological structure to deliver this into the opponent through the maximum possible force generation through the use of the whole body.  Here the mind, spirit and body unite in using relaxation and structure focused into the core to destroy the opponent.  The role of the mind in this union is a critical one in helping the Wing Chun student transition between the way an untrained person ‘of the street’ applies Wing Chun techniques (jumping around like a Power Ranger doing very tense Karate chops whilst making Bruce Lee noises) and the later total body structure that is fluid, flexible and highly sensitive and responsive.  A big part of this is the mind’s ability to grasp the principles of Wing Chun and, however frustrating at the time, to realise what they are actually doing does not adhere to this principle inasmuch as their techniques are not working because of tension, incorrect focus etc.

An example of such a transition is in the physiological fight or flight response.   This is the automatic response that humans have when faced with a situation of danger, which in this case means being in a combat situation.   For the untrained student who faces a ‘fight’ response this looks like a rush of adrenaline surging through the body, clouding the mind often associated with anger, tension comes into body (clenching of the fists etc) and standing taller to make yourself look bigger or, more often tensing up so much that you are literally ‘frozen’ and left completely open to attack.   Typically, this natural response also involves stepping away from attacks, tensing up limbs, pushing the opponent away and seeking to resist pushes and grabs with force.  All of these things are the complete opposite of what the wing Chun student must do.  Again, it takes a long time to reprogram the ‘natural’ response to the Wing Chun response.   The principles of attacking the attack, stepping in and welcoming an opponent’s force are all completely alien to the new Wing Chun student – it is something that the mind must train itself to accept and the body to be able to achieve.

The difficulty of understanding meaning within Wing Chun terminology

One of the challenges for the Wing Chun student during these phases of development is that there is a very weak understanding of physiology in the modern Western world.   Even though we have developed over the last several hundred years in terms of technology and pharmaceuticals, our knowledge and understanding of how the body works naturally has taken a significant backwards step.  It is reassuring that holistic practices, Chinese medicine and (at least true in older generations) culture still has a strong understanding in this area.  Wing Chun articles will often talk in the following style of language that is difficult for the modern Western student to process.

“The deeper our level of relaxation into the earth is, the better our root.  The stronger the root the better we are able to avoid being disrupted by the opponent and to use their energy and ours to disrupt and attack them.   Our internal energy system/chi body must stretch down and sink deeply into the earth, giving us connection to gravity and the ground. The deeper our level of awareness of the chi within our body and the earth energies in the ground, the faster our growth and development in Internal Wing Chun”.

Concepts such as ‘root’ and ‘forwarding’ are terms that advanced practitioners come to understand over time through years of training, feeling and good instruction.  Concepts such as ‘chi’ and understanding energy channels in the body are intertwined with the cultural and spiritual practices of the East, but have no meaning for the average Westerner.  As such, for the beginning student seeking to master relaxation and structural position these types of article or instruction mean very little.  Unless the instructor has exceptional knowledge in physiology, anatomy, psychology, neurology, Chinese medicine and so on then being able to explain these elements is just not possible.  Here the instructor merely repeats the traditional phrases passed down.   Instead, the new student learns, like a child learning to walk, through trial and error with guidance from the instructor.   In this way, Wing Chun is generally passed down as a feeling from teacher to student.  Relaying this ‘feeling’ requires the Student and Teacher developing their own shared language, expressions and by being able to use language to explain requirements to very specific movements and techniques.

Many other styles of martial arts do have an approach to try and relay this kind of information to their students.  For example, where a given movement may be referred to as ‘Dragon whipping its tail’ which visually conjures up a mental image for the student.  This mental representation captures the type of movement across the whole body and also gives an indication of what the attack is aiming to do in terms of delivering power.   Such terms are not used in Wing Chun teaching in the Western world.  However, it is important to take the benefits that come with this and I have found helping students visualise and label their discoveries in a way that has meaning for them has proven exceptionally beneficial over the years from my experience.

This is why in the very beginning of a new students Wing Chun instruction, three-fourths of the training is spent on developing the fundamental position.  It simply takes a long time for the body and mind to get used to finding position and, importantly, moving correctly between positions.   The basic Wing Chun horse stance is of paramount importance, and will eventually, after many hours, give the feeling of having “suction” against the floor. This “rootedness” is at first mechanical and restrictive but leads through practice to an extreme lightness and spontaneity of movement. The stance moves from being easily toppled to solid and heavy, done with total relaxation, with the muscles instantaneously ready to react. Through many years of training the basic movements are refined down to very small effective movements.  The movements are very confined — the release of energy is shifted away from rigid, exaggerated external training instead to be focused by training every fibre in the muscle to respond in a soft, integrated, yet explosive manner. The force is trained to be released subliminally without conscious thought.  In the epic Warriors Two film relaxed, natural speed and power generation is taught by Leung Jan (Tsan) using a pin prick to shock his student Chan Wah Shun (Hua).   This develops a trained reaction bypasses the overt thought process of the brain, and occurs automatically – meaning that you react automatically in a fight, where there is no time to think about which arm to put where in defence.

Through these many years the Wing Chun student begins to understand some of the wisdom and knowledge (understanding how the body and mind work) that allowed the early founders of Wing Chun to develop it into such a powerful, simple martial art.  It is important to remember, that Wing Chun was often referred to as the “thinking man’s kung-fu” because understanding the ‘internal’ aspects of physiology, anatomy, body-mechanics, psychology and so on required a level of mental ability to understand and then correctly employ.   It is possible to use Wing Chun as an effective fighting style without this, but the depth of mastery here is very slight in comparison.

Helping students master these skills in Wing Chun was something that Leung Jan actively examined – indeed, by breaking the forms down into the segmented three hand-forms that we know today.  There is a good saying that helps to explain this approach to learning: “how do you eat an elephant?” with the answer being “one bite at a time”.   It is not possible to eat such a large creature in one go – the same is true for Wing Chun, which also at heart it is functional and simple to all outward intents, it still requires many years of focused learning to master.   To help the student develop correct posture, it is common to break Wing Chun structure down into several parts which allow the student to train these in isolation, refining these and then putting these pieces back into the bigger structural jigsaw.  This also allows for the Teacher to be able articulate the required movements, positions, use of muscles, positions, placements and so forth that are required in allowing the developing student to begin to ‘feel’ this for themselves.

This is the focus of the next section – how to help the student understand the correct Wing Chun structural posture.

Copyright @ Craig Sands