Wing Chun basics, right and wrong

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.