Wing Chun Blog 5 - Head Instructor — Myriad Misadventures

More wing chun classes means more baby steps building on stuff we’ve been working on since I started. I usually feel I’m okay at JKD so when we jump from one thing to another either in one class or between classes I don’t usually mind. I figure I’m competent enough at what we’re doing (hahaha ya right) that I’ll be okay. But I’m much less competent at wing chun so although on the surface repeatedly doing the same thing seems kind of tedious it’s probably the only reason I’m slowly getting (a little) better.

In this class spent some time practicing the rotation we’ve been working on for a while. I’m turning on my toes now which definitely seems to solve some of my earlier problems relating to my stance getting too wide.

Although I’ve started to get the feet sorted out I’m still struggling a bit with my head. For some reason I have a tendency to move my head with my body so I’m looking off to the side. That is wrong. The rotation is supposed to be part of a defense to an attack from the front so I need to make sure I’m still looking forward when I turn, even though my body is no longer forward. Sometimes I catch it and sometimes someone tells me I’m doing it but once I realize I’m doing it I can usually fix it.

From there we kept building and moved into a partner drill. One person attacked and the other person needed to do the rotation from before with a tan da. After we did that a bit we added a pak da to trap and attack again. I found it much easier to keep my head forward when doing a partner drill because there’s actually somebody to look at.

The last bit we added was sort of half hook and half sweep. You were close to the other person after the pak da so you hooked their foot with yours and moved back, unbalancing them and letting you attack. It was a great combination since, except for the shuffle back hook/sweep thing, it was all moves we’d done and practiced before, just put together in a new way. It’s LEGOs. They’re giving us the pieces first, then showing us different ways to build things with those pieces.

In the next class I finally met the head instructor. I think he teaches out of Guangzhou, so I hadn’t met him before, but something like once a month he teaches in Shenzhen. I liked him as an instructor. He was a nice guy, seemed knowledgable, and spoke English so he could explain some things that I had been struggling with. But the class was packed. And overall it was sort of a mixed bag.

On the one hand since he could explain things to me in English it was more likely that I wouldn’t understand what specifically I was doing wrong if something got corrected. But on the other hand the head instructor taught a lot like Da Shixiong (Dai Sihing in Cantonese I think, or in this case eldest kung fu brother). Since they’re more senior they sort of move rapid fire through a lot of stuff so that everyone in class can get something. In Da Shixiong’s classes that often leaves me struggling a bit as I try to keep up and that was the case here as well. I do like seeing all the cool stuff I’ll be able to do eventually but I do wish there was maybe a little less of it so maybe I could remember a little.

Most of the stuff I can’t remember because there was just too much but the little I could recall starts in the video at around 5:45 if you want to see me struggling to try to remember what we did and how to do it.

The classes seem to boil down to two kinds. Monday’s classes are much slower and we spend a lot of time on whatever our curriculum stuff in, and Friday’s class is a little more scattershot, with us doing a lot more stuff to try to get everyone a little bit of more advanced stuff that we don’t get on the other days of the week. I prefer Monday.

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