There is an undefined number
of Wing Chun styles today, some very similar to each other some quite
different. With great variety of styles comes even greater variety of forms and
ways they are executed. Most of these styles sprang out from Yip Man’s school
and continue to dividing in even greater number of new styles, it is an active
process that speeding up over time. Other lineages have much less followers but
the process of dividing and founding new styles is pretty much the same.
There is nothing wrong in
founding new styles, in fact that is a natural process of evolution of martial
arts, if style does not constantly change and adapt to outside challenges
whether those challenges are social, political, cultural or purely martial it
is doomed to disappear. Changes also happen without any intention of the
practitioner, every generation is different than the previous one, their world
view and way of life is different and those things influence their
understanding of the art they are practicing.
Changes are necessary, on
the other hand those changes must be done carefully and knowledgably or they
will have completely negative effect on the art and the practitioner himself.
So let’s discuss about changes that happened to the art and how they influenced
it.
Despite all the myths
surrounding Wing Chun ancestor and style’s founders for the last 150 years Wing
Chun people did not fight, at least not on regular basis. While there is so
much talking about death matches, “secret underground fights” and similar
things, there is no evidence for these stories what so ever. We can see that in
the way of Wing Chun is taught, especially in the past. Old teachers did not
include any kind of sparring in their systems of teaching, they would teach something
called “techniques” – a prearranged set of movements that suppose to be a
defense from some kind of attack, usually too complicated and unrealistic to be
effective in real altercation but visually attractive. The style became overly
complicated in technical and theoretical sense because people replace real
experience with imagination. There is
also a predominant believe that Chi Sao is good replacement for sparring and
combat experience. Recently, Qigong was incorporated in many Wing Chun styles,
many people proclaim their styles “internal” mixing traditional Chinese
medicine theories, Taoism and sometimes Buddhism in their teachings. On top of
all many teachers will cover their own misunderstanding and lack of knowledge
with more complicated theories. More than often incapable teachers hide their
shortcomings with “tradition”, and hide behind lineage and their teacher’s
names. All these things influence
technical foundation of the art. People started to develop their skills in a
direction which is not only far from realistic martial usage but they are
executing even the most basic movements wrong.
With great diversity of the
styles came great diversity of forms and movements execution. Interesting thing
is, every style has pretty “deep” explanation why the movements are executed in
some particular way, what is “correct” and what is wrong.
While differences in
executing basic techniques( movements, hand positions) are positive thing and
give people different and wider perspective how movements can used and it is
certainly bad thing to dismiss something as wrong just because it is different
practitioner should be very careful in what he is practicing.
Wing Chun as a style is
based and follows or at it least it should follow certain principles of
biomechanical efficiency. This biomechanical efficiency has different names
although the most commonly used term on the west is “body structure”, some
things can differ from style to style but all should fall in specific frame of
general rules how properly someone should use his body. These rules are not
random, they are result of specific conditions of the time and place where the
art was created and they give best possible outcome regarding energy and power
efficiency whether we are talking about dealing with incoming force or
executing the attack, stability and mobility. There is more than one way to
correctly execute certain movement. Movement will be correct as long as basic
structure of the body and movement its self follows correct skeletal alignment
and proper sequence of muscle contractions. Body structure in general and every
single movement can be tested. Wrong body structure and wrongly executed
movements will simply collapse under pressure while correct cannot be interrupted
under same pressure. If there is no
concept of body structure in some style, that style cannot be considered Wing
Chun, also if there is a concept of body structure and it is practiced in forms
but not utilized in drills and chi sao and not tested, that style is incomplete
and lastly if all those concepts are not taught to be used in sparring and real
fight that style is not complete because there is a big difference in just
testing a structure of the movement and doing it correctly in a drill or chi
sao but something completely different doing all that under pressure of real
combat. Practitioner should be aware of all the facts regarding his chosen
style and consider the best course of his further development and training.