Wing Chun form training: Why is it relevant today?
By: Moses Flores
In a world of technology and fast paced productivity, you would think that martial arts would also keep up with the times and find short cuts and “secrets” to become a better martial artist. When we want food it can be simply a matter of taking a short drive down the street to any fast food restaurant or as simply as pressing a few buttons in the comfort of our own home. Gone are the days of “hunting and gathering” where a meal might take hours to find, more time to prepare and even less time to eat. Many people expect the same results from their martial arts and self-defense training.
For the most part, traditional martial arts seem to be fading away and yielding ground to the ever growing Mixed Martial Arts industry. MMA fighting sells because it is highly entertaining and boasts that is does away with the “inessentials” such a forms and useless drills for fighting. Form training often gets jettisoned very quickly because it is dismissed as useless. For some this proves to be true. For instance, years ago I read an article in a martial arts magazine that revealed how many traditional styles with traditional forms end up sparring and fighting looking like kickboxing. That is to say, while they train their traditional forms, the forms are not connected to how they actually will engage in self-defense situation. In such cases, yes, forms are useless. The Chinese, however, intended to say and teach something about real fighting through the forms.
For the Wing Chun practitioner form training is, without a doubt, necessary I believe. I would argue, contrary to some who would rid Wing Chun of forms, that without the forms passing on knowledge to the next generation becomes quite difficult. I would further argue that grasping the concepts and identifying weak points in ones training becomes rather difficult as well. Indeed, I would argue that when you leave the forms out of your Wing Chun training you are no longer training Wing Chun. Call it something else, “Wing Chun concepts” if you will, “formless Wing Chun” whatever you want, but don’t call it Wing Chun in any historical sense of the art.
I would like to share five reasons why I believe forms training is beneficial for today and why you should trains your forms often. As someone who has trained the forms quite often and encourages it, these reasons are based from my own observations as well as insight from my Sifu, Matt Johnson.
1.) Forms familiarize you and teach you about basic mechanics and movements of Wing Chun.
One of the most basic questions in all fighting is a most important question in Wing Chun that gets answered in form training: How do I throw a punch? It’s a simple question yet, its answer can take you into a profound depths about the correct mechanics of a punch and reveal why Wing Chun practitioners punch the way they do and why it is more effective that most other martial arts punches. Many people who start Wing Chun training usually bring in some prior knowledge about fighting and they even think that they know how to throw a punch. I myself have had students that start their training thinking they already know a thing or two about Wing Chun because they have studied other martial arts styles or simply have some experience in fighting already or because they have seen Ip Man!. The first offensive movement in all three empty hand forms is the punch. It’s not a unique looking punch, but the way Wing Chun uses it does make it unique.
My point in this is that it is through the forms that the practitioner learns to move in a “Wing Chun way”. It is through the forms training that one can train all the basic techniques, ideas and energies so that when they need to be applied against an opponent, one has already gained some sense of proficiency in the mechanics and energies needed. It is through the forms and the familiarity of the movements and transitions from one movement to another, from learning how to control your energy in and through them, that fluidity is achieved. With fluidity come speed and power. In kung fu, it is not uncommon to hear of energy being compared to water running through a hose. If there is a kink in the hose someplace, the “energy” stops flowing. Your body is conduit for “chi” or your “ging”. If your body moves with kinks in it you will never be able to maximize your own power because your own body is working against you. But if you can maximize the flow and transitions of your body movements, you will allow the energy of your defenses and strikes to move correctly, more fluidly which yields greater speed and power in your techniques. This is achieved through correct mechanics learned in the forms.
2.) To understand correct energy
Energy, sometimes called “chi” in martial arts is a difficult concept to grasp. Much mystery and confusion lies behind it especially when it is talked about in such a mystified fashion that it leads one to believe that it cannot be defined. But this is hardly the case at all. Simply stated, energy is your muscular tension. Two important energies that need to be understood in your own body, before they are understood in someone elses, are seung lik and faat lik which are relaxed energy and explosive energy respectively.
In performing the many forms of Wing Chun, the proper use of energy is necessary in order to develop true and useful power for application as well as another key to speed. Without speed and power, your kung fu will not be very useful in a real self-defense situation. So how do the forms help us do that? To begin with, energy is first developed and built in the first portion of one’s Siu Lim Tao training. Here the movements are rather tense and slow using “dynamic tension” in order to build up strength for energy. But as the form progresses, the energy should become less obvious and used only at the last moment. This helps the practitioner to understand conservation and efficiency of energy. Different forms begin to teach you more about energy. The empty hand forms teach you how to place energy in various parts of your body, the wooden dummy teaches you how to deliver energy into a body and the weapons begin to teach you how to get energy through your body up to 9 feet away from you!
My Sifu, Matt Johnson, has shared some of his Sifu’s, Ip Ching, wisdom that can be almost insulting to the experienced Wing Chun practitioner. When asked how can I get better at my use of energy in Chi Sau, the suprising answer from Ip Ching was “do more Chi Sau and more siu lim tao!” It’s sounds so basic, but the wisdom of Ip Ching is to recognize that it is through the forms training, especially the form that has the most to teach about energy, that energy is understood and grasped so that it can be applied correctly in Chi Sau and in fighting ultimately.
3.) To build the Kung Fu into your body
One of the traditional rules of the Moh Duk left behind by Great Grandmaster Ip Man was stated this way: “Train diligently and make it a habit – maintain your skill.” One translation of this puts it this way, “work hard and keep practicing; never let the skill leave your body.” How much you train is something that good Sifu can notice very quickly. A good Sifu knows who spends their time training and how spends their time doing other things. Grandmaster Ip Ching puts it this way, “Practice is the great lie detector…when it is time for action, the time for practice has already passed.”
The fact is that your body does not naturally respond with refined motor movements right away. Rather, it responds with large gross motor movements and the skill of kung fu is to combine these with refined motor skills. This is not easily done for it involves a complete reprogramming of the way your body will naturally respond and move. The forms are what allow you to move freely and unrestricted in order to understand the correct positions and energies of each form and to build them into your body. This is done through repetition. This is the hard work of “kung fu”. There is no other way, and if there is any “secret” to kung fu its found in repetition. Sifu Matt Johnson compares the skills that come through the forms to a knife and the practice time to the sharpening of that blade. Training the forms correctly, consistently and mindfully is how you sharpen your skill that can then be applied to chi sau and fighting.
The forms also, on another level, represent the wellspring of resources that you have to draw from. If the forms are not part of your natural responses that you react with, then the kung fu will be near useless when you have to apply it against an opponent. The less you are aware of your own resources, the less you will have to draw from. I often tell my own students that they should seek to “move like the forms” teach them to do as they apply their techniques in their training. That is, they should be able to recognize the pieces of the forms as they train chi sau and as they train self-defense situations. Also, the consistent practice of the forms leads to less “recall” time in your mind which wastes precious time in fighting. The less you have to think about what to respond with and how to do it means quicker responses on your part. If you still have to think about how to do a pak sau while a punch is coming at you, chances are you are going to get hit because all your effort was spent thinking about what to respond with rather than just reacting with something that is already a part of you and how you move.
4.) Solo practice
Of all the reasons this one is probably the most obvious, yet again the most neglected. Unless you have a live in training partner, the fact is that you cannot do partner drills like chi sau or sparring 24/7. The flaw of some martial arts that do not have forms is that they have no way of training any skills or concepts without a partner. Form training allows you to be able to train anywhere with very little space and very little equipment depending on what form you are working.
Obviously the empty hand forms do not require anything at all but space and a clear mind. The advantage of this is that training can go with you virtually anywhere. In a way, there is no excuse for not being able to train. This only means that there is no reason why your own training cannot excel while you are away from your school.
To be quite honest, form training is often the most neglected aspect of training because all the “cool looking things” appear to be in chi sau for the Wing Chun practitioner. It is not uncommon for new students to look at people doing chi sau and say, “when do I get to do that?” The proper response should be “when you learn to do it in the form, then you learn to do it to someone else,” and this makes reasonable sense. Even teachers in a classroom teach the basic skill before they demonstrate how to apply the same skill to other situations. That is, you have to learn how to do something before you can actually do it. Form training is a something that you do for yourself and alone. It’s like your “homework” or “enrichment work” that you can do in order to gain mastery over yourself which leads to my final point.
5.) To know yourself
I have sometimes received those excited students who are so eager to learn Wing Chun that they sometimes believe that they can perform the forms adequately simply because they know the order of the movements. But the skill of Wing Chun is found in more than just knowing the order of the forms. And beyond knowing it is actually doing it. Of course, I indulge these students and I ask to see their Siu Lim Tao first and always, and then progress up to other forms should they be at higher levels to see if they can not only recall information but that their body can actually do the movements. Why do I say this? Because some people do not know themselves enough to know that they are performing movements incorrectly. In their own minds, they think they are moving correctly but their mind is not lined up with what their body is actually doing. In a way, they do not know their own body yet. They do not know themselves.
As a good Sifu will show you, the movements in the forms must be precise in position, angle and energy. Beginning students, especially entry level martial artist, usually do not have this kind of control over their own body. Hence, when they do movements, they are still often very large, or they use too much energy and they do not even realize it. It is through the forms training that you begin to know a lot about yourself. In many ways, you begin to know what you can do, you begin to realize that you can’t do what you thought you could do, and realize that you need to train more in order to move correctly. I find this aspect of training personally so important because it involves learning how to unify the mind and the body to move as one.
You see, if you only think you can do a movement in your mind but your body says otherwise, you are deceiving yourself about your own abilities. The obvious point here is that if you can’t do it in the form, you probably can’t do it in Chi Sau. If you can’t do it in Chi Sau, there is no way you can pull it off in a real self-defense situation. When mind and body are unified so that the body can do what the mind tells it, then you have true knowledge of your own capabilities and this can lead to true confidence that comes through your training to know that it is useful in real fighting. Do not be deceived. Know thyself!
In conclusion, the forms are not simply “shadow” boxing, especially the Wing Chun forms since the order of the movements does not necessarily reveal a logical connection from one movement to the next. Rather, the forms are simplified to their concepts and mechanics. They are part and parcel of one’s Wing Chun training. Let’s take Siu Lim Tao as an example.
Siu Lim Tao is Wing Chun’s simplest expression of all its core concepts and ideas, hence, it is a foundation form. Learning Siu Lim Tao correctly from a qualified Sifu and training it reveals the basic mechanics and energies of all the different movements that Wing Chun uses in its system. I have often told my own students that all the other forms are simply “developed” or “expanded” concepts that are all contained in the “Little Idea Form”. Understood this way, there are no concepts or ideas that are in the higher level forms that are not already in Siu Lim Tao either explicitly or implicitly. But how does one come to see and understand this? It is through the forms and become familiar with them to the point of recognizing the techniques. This familiarity only comes through constant and consistent training so that movements become a part of you and are easily recalled and performed with minimal effort both physically and mentally.
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