Wing Chun Blog 7 - Graduation
In this class we continued with the theme from the last class, which was test prep. That last class wasn’t great. We reviewed all the material together as a class but since I’m new I hadn’t seen most of it. None of it really seemed super difficult, at least in theory, but since I hadn’t seen it before I kind of needed some time to digest it, which I didn’t get.
Luckily in this class I didn’t spend as much time seeing the other stuff. We didn’t practice together as much in the previous class so I was mostly working on my stuff, which was mostly the three basic blocks with the step that I’ve been working on for a while now.
The biggest takeaway from this class was actually completely unrelated to wing chun and instead all about how being an adult kind of sucks. I started going to class during the summer when I had no work and didn’t think about what I would do when work starts. This was the first class after work actually started and I realized that it was going to be difficult to get to class after work. There’s not a ton of time between the end of the work day and the beginning of class and they aren’t close. Thankfully Renyi (the school) is starting classes at a new location much closer to where I work so it shouldn’t be a problem for long.
After that I took a week off and it was time for the first class at the new location. See what I meant? Not a problem for long. Of course it was a weird class though. We had spent a couple of classes preparing for graduation and this class, the first in the new Futian location, was the graduation, so it wasn’t really a normal class. A lot of instructors were there, including the head instructor, and everyone did their graduation. I was too new so no graduation for me which meant a lot of sitting around. It was interesting to watch how the process played out though and see what I have to look forward to when it’s eventually my turn. Then after all the grading was done we had some class.
One of the most interesting things that we did was a pak da defense. From your normal stance you step in and use the back hand to pak sao, trapping their hands, and punch with your front hand. We had done the exact same defense in JKD class. Only difference I guess was the stance. It was cool to see that parallel, since Bruce Lee studied some wing chun before creating JKD. In JKD class we continued the self defense though. We added an extra bit in case the person who had their hand trapped managed to block the punch. It consisted of sliding the pak sao hand under and then punching again. Like a lot of wing chun hand stuff it was pretty smooth.
We also did tan da in response to a hook punch. Tan sao to block the hook punch while attacking with the other hand, then the punching hand did a tan sao to block another hook punch coming from the other side while again throwing an attack at the same time. It was the first time I’d seen it and I was struggling with distancing a little, as I often do. It didn’t seem too tough though so I think I should be able to pick it up with a little bit more practice.
The instructor also talked about being relaxed until we made contact with the block and punch, and doing them together. I’m not very good at relaxing and trying to focus on relaxing, and doing the block and punch at the same time, and getting the timing and distance right probably contributed to struggling with the technique a little. I definitely need to practice relaxing as I start the technique more but I think I’m going to pick something I’m a little better at the practice it with.
And that was class. There wasn’t as much time as normal because a lot of class was taken up by the graduation. The location was much better though and I’m looking forward to the first normal class there.
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