GENERAL WING CHUN QUESTIONS
At face value Wing Chun is a complete Kung Fu system designed for smaller opponents to defend themselves through better movement, positioning, and technique.
At its heart, Wing Chun is the world’s most effective strategy for developing strength, compassion, confidence, intelligence, and total self improvement.
The system is a collection of 6 forms that each have their own principles & techniques to teach the student, and each builds on the previous one(s).
There are a variety of practice drills & games that help the practitioner apply and understand what the forms teach them.
Short time to learn, long time to master. The complete system can be learned in about 9 months of concentrated practice. Everyone’s progress is different.
Yes, two of the six forms are weapon forms.
The first is the butterfly knives and the second is the long pole.
- Siu Nim Tau (The little idea)
- Chum Kiu (Seeking bridges)
- Biu Jee (Pointing fingers)
- Mook Jong (Wooden dummy)
- Bart Jam Dao (Butterfly swords)
- Luk Dim Boon Kwan (6.5 point pole)
When you’re in a fight, the first split second of contact means the difference between life and death. Chi Sau (often translated as “sticky hands”) is a training exercise that teaches the Wing Chun practitioner how to use that split second of contact with the opponent to “listen” to their movements and use that knowledge to stay one step ahead.
Like Tai Chi, Wing Chun is considered an “internal” art, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Wing Chun focuses on momentum, positioning, body alignment, and a focused mind more than feeling energy.
There have been two camps in the martial arts world for the longest time: internal vs external.
Internal is focused on the right way of being, feeling changes in a dynamic situation, and focusing on maintaining proper transitions & flow.
External is more about striking, strong body, impact conditioning, and other “hard” methods.
CLUB QUESTIONS
No, and this is one of our proudest points.
We don’t believe in training that damages you. We want to show you what to do, how to do it, and stay safe while doing it. A martial art that does more damage to the practitioner than the opponent isn’t all that great in our book.
Yes and no.
The Wing Chun principles taught standing up are also the principles you want to respect when you’re doing ground work. We focus more on standing, staying standing, and preventing takedowns in the first place. We do teach the right and wrong ways to recover from the ground.
Coming up on 2 years. We started as Chicago’s number one Meetup group, and have proudly made the leap to a full-on club.
By mastering the basics: Memorize the form, test, and advance.
First, you learn the Siu Nim Tau form. Once you can go through the whole form without skipping any postures, and doing them in the right order, you’re ready for level one testing.
We will arrange a time to evaluate your form, and if you pass, you gain access to the second form, Chum Kiu.
This process repeats through the whole system until you can do all six forms in one go without missing anything.
Then you start over at the beginning to refine your understanding.
Short answer: Chris Chan.
Long answer: Your opponent doesn’t care about lineage. Physics doesn’t care about lineage. You shouldn’t care about lineage. What you should care about, above all else, is how well your training prepares you to manage difficult situations.
To that end, our students are the best proof our system works.
No. What we do have are evaluations of knowledge & skill that are pass/fail.
When you succeed you will progress to the next level of training, but what we aren’t going to give you is a trinket just because you’ve been a member for 6 months.
Each achievement is earned completely on your own effort & skill.