IT’S DOWN TO BASICS

Because of the boom in MMA and self defence/self protection classes, more and more people are starting to question the need for drilling basics. By basics I mean going up and down the hall (line work) punching, kicking, combinations etc. You know what I mean, the bit where some students find it boring and others struggle to keep up because they are unfit.   I believe that basics are a must!!!                                                

Given that people presumably make their own way into my class I have never really figured out why they can no longer seem to put one foot in front of the other when they first start. Nevertheless, some line-up work exposes those difficulties immediately and you can work on putting it right. Basics can help develop fluid coordination of movement.

I have found that when you pair people up straight away and try to get them to do a technique, they are far more concerned with, for example, getting someone to the floor than they are with getting the technique right. Now I know that ultimately, that’s what we are all more concerned with but the class is the place to try and get it exactly right so that you have half a chance of doing something half decent outside when the adrenalin kicks in. Make your mistakes in the class, not the street. Basics can help with drilling precision of movement.

A lot of Wing Chun is overly and unnecessarily complex because of instructors adding stuff in to either increase their syllabus, more gradings, or simply because they don’t know the complete system in the first place. However, while there may be a ton of techniques, there are far fewer basic postures, movements and structural positions that make them all work. Basics can help ingrain these simple patterns of movement. Drilling works. It’s why the military do it. Drilling means that once you can no longer rationally think and you lose control of fine motor skills, (adrenalin, fear, exhaustion), your body will do what it has been drilled to do. Drilling basics can help ingrain the basic patterns of combat structure and movement.

From what I have seen, a lot of styles will teach people to punch simply by holding up pads and having people hit them (I know I am generalising here and I do so to make a point). And that approach undoubtedly works. However, Wing Chun takes a different approach. What Wing Chun does (or is supposed to do) is break the punch up into its component phases of trigger, release, impact. Basics are only concerned with the trigger phase of a punch – with the alignment, relaxation, torque etc, needed to fire that shot out like a bullet. You cannot train the release this way as with no target, you need to slow the shot down immediately to avoid injury; and you cannot train the impact phase – that’s what the wallbag, pads and people are for. However, if you fail to put all three elements together, you’re punch will be weak. Basics are meant to be done as well as impact work, not instead of. Used in this way, basics can help develop genuine impact power.

Finally, it is my opinion that you need a degree of intelligence to train in a ‘traditional’ art such as Wing Chun because you need to be able to see the bigger picture. The Wing Chun approach to combat is basically to split it into tiny little pieces and attempt to perfect them all independently. So we have basics, Forms, Form based sparring, free sparring, Dan Chi, Chi Sau etc. all taught (at least initially) almost as separate units so to speak. But if you are to have any chance of using Wing Chun to its potential as the real fighting system, which it undoubtedly is, you need to be able to piece all of these separate elements back together again to make the whole.

You see some people who have just developed on or two of the elements, say sparring, but no Forms/Form based sparring – these people often believe, truly believe, that sparring is the closest Wing Chun element to real fighting. You get other people who do virtually no sparring (often within the same style as the previous lot) and concentrate on Forms and Chi Sau in the firmly held belief, that these elements are the closest Wing Chun elements to real fighting. Further, you get some clubs that have bought into the 90% of fights go to the ground nonsense and place their emphasis there; others believe that no one could get them to the ground in the first place and so ignore it and concentrate wholly on stand-up.

But of course the ‘truth’ lies somewhere in the middle of all these things. For me personally, most of my experience away from the class has come from doorwork, and in that scenario, ‘fighting’ is much more like Form based sparring, than it is sparring. Usually someone squares off, tries one big technique and you are required to deal with it and incapacitate as soon as possible – Form based sparring. But, although rare, I have ended up exchanging blows with people in a free flowing format – like sparring; and, although rare, I have ended up- rolling around on the floor with people ground fighting style.

The fact is that to be a good all-round fighter you need all of it and basics is to my mind one of the component parts of developing a good fighter.  Just don’t fall into the trap of doing basics just to be good at basics.

Train smart, train hard, then test, test, test.

Paul.

 

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