Wing Chun Blog 4 - Repetition — Myriad Misadventures

Wing Chun is still doing what I enjoy most, and that is reviewing past material. I guess that’s a little more boring than doing new stuff but by regularly reviewing and building on old material I feel that I get better at it, versus learning a bunch of new stuff regularly and never getting good at anything. Case in point, doing more rotating into blocks, in this case tan da, helped me figure out that the rotation is probably (I haven’t specifically asked so I won’t say for sure) happening on the toes, since rotating not he heels seems to create a stance that’s much too wide. It also helped me clear up how my weight should be distributed after the rotation, which I hadn’t been sure about before. This is the sort of thing that I feel like I wouldn’t get enough of if we were moving between things at a more rapid clip.

I also got to make some Tang Soo Do comparisons. We did a self defense where someone is grabbing your shoulder and you trap their hand and then wrap your arm around their arm. The defenses weren’t exactly the same (the Tang Soo Do one is from the side and the Wing Chun one from the back for example) but I do really like seeing things like that that I can compare. Wing Chun is often different enough that I don’t have much of a base for comparisons.

Another great thing about that shoulder grab defense is that instead of inventing something new it recycles another defense. In a previous class we did a defense against a push that involved a sort of arm bar and we did a very similar arm bar at the end of this defense as well. As I’ve mentioned I really like when stuff gets reused, since I figure I’m more likely to learn, remember, and be able to use something that we use often versus something that has a very specific use for just one case. By making defenses similar across multiple different attacks and scenarios I find them much more learnable.

It’s not always so smooth though of course. We also did a punch defense that started with pak sao. At the end of the defense there was a sort of take down attacking the opponent’s head. We’ve used it as a take down quite often. This lineage of Wing Chun (maybe all of them for all I know) seems to like take downs. Even though we’ve done it often and used it in multiple defense I still haven’t been able to pick it up. I’m not so great at sweeps and throws and take downs and even doing it regularly hasn’t seemed to help me much.

All in all I quite like the direction that class I going in with the regular practice of older things we’ve done and the incorporation of older things into multiple self defenses.

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