Official First __ing __un (WT/VT/WC/TWC/JKD even)

MMA and Martial Arts
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Wing Chun is still rife with well intentioned failures and multiple spelling and various ways to do it. “But that is not Wing Chun…” is no longer as common today, in part because of Bullshido. Most people know rather quickly about the three different ways the major families do it or they find out fast on the internet. There has been a movie hit series and Wooden Dummies are selling fast. They look great in any living room. More recognizable today than an Ashida Kim Tale Tudo Black Belt certification framed on the wall.

But can they fight? That still seems to be a question? Bruce Lee did it, so people will be inventing their own WC for a very long time.

It is…so lets make sure it is great. If you do not think __ing __un et al. has any great leaders or teachers, then we must still treat Wing Chun as a lost orphan. It is …and it is not going to ever go away.

I used to go to Throwdowns and represent Wing Tsun from Leung Ting and my Si-fu Emin Boztepe.
I present for us my first TD event with a Karate Brown Belt. I tried to only use a front kick and chain punches as an experiment here. I present it as a benchmark for “adequate” Chunner free sparring. It is not full contact and it is limited to beginner techniques from WT so I would rank it a 3 out of 10 possible as a good video of the Chun in a sport environment. (If we rank it that way, +1 for another two levels of contact might have made it a4 or 5 the way I am thinking)
It is what we train. Other people also look and act this way when they do it(or do they?) It does have a throw counter and some side control on the ground I think, but not much. Nothing exciting, just adequate. I was a “Black Belt” level in WT whatever that is, Tech 1. (I compare it to a BJJ blue belt, but at Blue for a decade). It is not a great performance, but it is better than the other guy. I went to several of these so we have footage of progress too…
I have my standards. I will critique. I will celebrate. You will too. We will build something great.
I have seen several other WT vs MMA videos over the decade and they all look about like this. Sloppy Chain punching chasing the other guy around, sloppy escapes or nots… So it seems to be a standard kinda thing. We can rank other Chunners compared to this.

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I mean, if WC is just Chinesium for MMA, then OK. But the trappy slappy straight line shit is still bullshit.

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Wing Chun is a Southern form that mostly borrows snake and crane techniques (and some dragon) from the much larger Five Family Styles, which contains hundreds of years of boxing and wrestling technique.

Wing Chun is extremely narrowed down and is a lot like Xing Yi in that it just focuses on direct boxing attacks, without a lot of the harder stancework required for grappling etc.

This is why the hallmark of any “Kung fu vs. MMA” video typically relies on poorly prepared Wing Chun stylists to make its point. Anywhere you see other Kung Fu styles, Five Animals, Hung Kuen, Northern Shaolin, you see heavy representation in MMA competitions, because those same schools also tend to compete at the local/state/international level anyway.

I remember you, DTT.

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I tried WC for a couple of months, maybe a year, back in 2010. Yeah, that’s the same kind of stuff they trained regurlarly back then. The people who train wc AND Sanda do a lot more stuff, obviously, and often do it better than their chun-only friends.

However, Sanda is kinda it’s own thing now. Back when I started training CMA, my teachers and friends used to tell me Sanda/Sanshou/Guoshu was just some kind of framework for sparring and competition between any kungfu styles. That can be the case, but you can’t deny the influences of other martial arts (boxing, TKD, wrestling - both chinese and olympic - and Muay Thai) and MMA had on Sanda since its creation as a combat sport. There’s no better way to describe it than “Chinese kickboxing”. Sure, you can find TMA stuff inside the curriculum, but who cares…

After the establishment of Sanda, many kungfu schools refer to it as the main event or format for free sparring and competition. My experience with traditional kungfu schools is this: we do forms and study traditional combat techniques, even trying to apply that in resistance sparring. But, overall, Sanda is the go-to if you want to get better at fighting. Hell, even our people who do Tai Chi and become interested in combat go train Sanda.

This is starting to get long, so I’ll finish saying that WC kinda sucks, but it’s ok [ahem], as long as chunners realize that, don’t get butthurt over us making fun of them, and go complement their set of skills cross-training with boxing and BJJ or whatever.

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It isn’t widely practiced but within the CMA world Shuai jiao (摔跤 or 摔角) would be the natural foundational art to have in place before seriously taking on other arts, in the way Judo is (or should be) for Japanese arts. But good luck finding a legit place to learn it.

As far as Sanda goes this is a great discussion about it, and about how little an actual impact it has in China.

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Antonio Graceffo discussing his experiences with Shuai jiao.

Someone get this guy an autofocus…

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It depends on where you live, I guess. It’s kinda already worked out here in Brazil. There’s people here teaching both Baoding Kuai Jiao and Beijing style Shuai Jiao, legitimate lineages – I know a lot of the teachers personally. It’s one of the smallest CMA communities here, but it keeps growing each year.

About Ramsey’s video, he said there’s only 10,000 people training Sanda in China, but I couldn’t find those numbers anywhere. Maybe that info’s not available in English. At least not readily available. Am I forgeting how to google?

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I love this guy, but he points about that Jean Claud Van Damme popularized Muay Thai??? And not ninjutsu???

That’s true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_vaSsF9hx0

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You should sleep more.

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What do you know about biphasic sleep?

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Yawn. Not much.

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I tried WT with Javier Gutierrez and did my 1st Student Level with his brother Victor Gutiérrez, in Rayo Vallecano’s Boxing Gym.

By that time the two of them, Leung Ting students like Boztepe, where developing the Re Evolution system, and a subsequent lineage war, with some sort of inverted triangle guard, as opposed to the pyramidal one. I understood that it was because of the combination of training in Latosa Escrima that EWTO, did in those days.

A close friend of mine continued to train under that lineage, mixing their new stuff with lots of “MMA” (In fact my “inherited” first and best mma gloves still have an inverted triangle sign). He had lots of fun especially with the sticks. Always happy to train until fucked his shoulder up.

I can remember the chainpunching and front kick stomp. There where good people around them. Hard training and sparring above my level.

My only personal critic is that it was expensive as fuck. You drill until you pay for the exam, and then you drill more.

But I have heard other stories, of high ranked technicall degrees, that were not fun to imagine.

*edit. I did not train at Rayo Vallecano, just did my exam there, and maybe a course.

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I trained in WT from around 95 to around 2000. Like all forms of the Chung it relies on not being pressure tested against other styles and it created a cult-like structure around Kernspect, it’s boss, which I didn’t like.

Also like other forms of Chun it was pretty terrible and folded up quickly against combats sports. As soon as I realised this I left and never looked back.

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The harder something is to do, the fewer quality examples we will see of it. There is also an inverse rule here because at a certain point something is so hard there are not even enough teachers for it! So we start to see people that do but can’t teach, or many that tried and failed but are still willing to try. In Martial Arts practice we often have this method in layers, with only a few true Champions that “remain in their MA style” for open fighting.

Sport fight Systems like Judo or Boxing create a perception bias on this question as the MA is made for a limited sport test already. Wing Chun is made for a different test. If you take Boxing and a BJJ together people consider them useful, not worthless on the street. But apparently WC doesn’t even get considered as useful drills to some people?

More on modern Wing Chun today. It seems most of us Chunners are fine now calling it Wing Chun, and then if a student shows up we can explain the spelling issue. I think today the majority of us do not give shit about Hong Kong and Uncle Ip, except that he is a legendary historic figure. Many of us now enjoy the various differences in application the training mechanics produce. Leung Ting did it one ay, KK took that and did something, then they added Latosa Concepts and the revolts started happening…

YaBut1973: That is not exactly the way so and so taught!
Us: But he said it is only a formula for inventing what is needed?
YaBut1973: He meant needed in a fight!
Us: True, it works that way, but it also has a self correcting feature for creating new chi sau sections.
YaBu1973: Those are not traditional…ya but…

I promote the belief that in Hong Kong Ip Man was forced to teach to make money so he used an older and more mainland version at first, and then he saved the secrets for only his best students. This is my first premise.

Second, I began teaching WT in 1996 in a friends backyard. I can tell you it is very hard to learn, to teach, to then do what you learned, to survive the human social politics of it when we each hear Si-Fu same something differently.

Have you ever taught anything? If so you are awesome. Has another awesome teacher ever come in and tried to help the lesson? Was it helpful? yes or no…and why. This can help with my second premise. It is very hard to teach a system that can be done in multiple ways to a group. We each hear it and do it with a bias. The single expert tries to meet each of us in Wing Chun with what we each need, but then it is a different lesson compared to the guy next to you.

What I have experienced over and over and over is the human Ego’s arguing about who is the “correct” version. Any WT move can become at least two others, so there is always 2 correct answers based on pressure. Si-Fu leaves and we train together and the ego’s must argue about some detail. You find out fast that many people do not want to hear the exact same words from you, it can only come from the “si-fu” and this is due to the ego validation these people demand.

Everyone has this problem, it is so bad an entire political party just became a single party rule dictatorship because they just couldn’t admit Trump lied to them about his taxes. The party for a Republic of States just became a fascist dictatorship while they complained about Red Communist Party China. The irony right? This is just human nature run wild in a free market that allows lies.(I can defend Trumps BS even, using a fringe angle of Libertarian theory, but not the illegal and immoral way the GOP did it. Illegal and immoral is the issue in both situations)

Adding to my first premise then, if Ip Man had to deal with people like I have had to do, he taught some the best he could and others he mislead into dead ends because he did not or even worse, he recognized a monster bully. I have never mislead anyone, I just send them away. But I do teach a watered down version with holes my Chum Kiu student will destroy. You have to stay loyal and with Justice and Honor before I take a student higher. Then, I know every si-fu I have trained under created new and beautiful chi sau drills. The Sections we use have changed several times since 1994. I have watched others forget things! Myself included. So I KNOW it changed after 1958 when one kid left for Australia. I know after Elder Si-Fu Moy Yat left with the entire known system there were changes.
All of these ego arguments over 60 years have been because at least 3 official ways were taught as VT, then Leung Ting invented his version of WT from tea talks and tape recordings of the man’s voice. Plus the Death Touch angle we used to believe in…we should have worked together all this time. I hope it isn’t too late.

So my Second Premise relates to that human struggle in TEACHING martial Arts in general, and how the harder it is to teach, the less like we will get it right is a free society. Americans are free thinkers so they argue and question everything (but themselves) and they then “try it their way” too. This then means a MA will have to PROVE it works to close that mouth. That then selects for teachers that bully instead of produce. Wing Chun has a myth that a woman invented it and a little girl learned it for this reason. So MEN wise up and SHUT UP and do what the teacher says. Nuns do not bully little girls when they teach them kung fun and little girls do not ask disruptive questions.

Premise 1) Ip Man taught 3 versions in Hong Kong, all good to beat the 1960’s threats BEGINNERS faced. I consider those Mainland, Police Club, and Ving Tsun. It is all VT, but WC has some sub-categories. Then We have WT. We are fine being considered completely wrong by the WC crowd. So what? High School math looks funny to 3rd grades too…but we admit we are making stuff up, like they do in aerospace and mechanics…make up new awesome stuff. Boztepe gets credit for the first big EWTO shake up, due to his fame. But I believe several others had left the marketing politics before him. As mentioned above, Dai Si-Fu taught has freedom to invented and engineer new stuff using Wing Tsun. But that would be only when Wing Tsun ran out of new material! HA! Are you so good to invent something yet?..So many of his followers left to make new versions. It is the tradition to improve the way we TEACH martial arts. It changes the art over time. It should be a sign of success.

But it is mostly only the beginner and intermediate stuff. We judge WC hard in truth because it is incomplete for a reason. But they were given the clues to escape this trap and ignored them…

Premise 2) The harder a martial art is to teach, the less likely it will grow large. In order to overcome that the art must suffer change or the society must learn to become educators, or it must just stay a few dozen people on Earth at any given time. This fact remains true even as the art or label grows into the millions of people claiming they do it. Half the planet has done Yoga I bet, at least once. But the Monks in Tibet are still unique. What they do is hard to maintain as a GROUP.

Wing Chun et al has been VERY HARD to maintain as a tribe…

Since society is not making large cooperative working groups, no matter how big the population gets, the struggle of small group teaching dynamics and marketing politics remain. It might even get harder to sell complex truths to the people as the number of stupid ones increase. They won’t even wear masks, ya feeling me? Just like in the public schools I teach in, kids now just want the test. If they fail they want to retake it until they pass. This is a common attitude now. In MA they say, “lets just figure it out with sparring.” Advertising and philosophy are targeting that attitude now or they will not make $.

So for Wing Chun, we must remember Karate and Judo were the rare Asian mystery when Bruce Lee died. We must remember Bruce Lee’s Wing Cheung was the first spelling. Wing Chun was one of the first to be so famous and so has suffered the Bullshido of greedy markets the longest. MMA is getting there now too and if BJJ didn’t have a safe sport I think Judo would have reabsorbed it. Karate though now has a showcase champion fighter in the UFC. Silva is a WC guy. The list is growing. Wing Chun is real, just still elusive like a black jaguar…

I will pursue these two themes 1)Wing Chun is a formula that produced 3 +1 unique styles from 1973 Hong Kong. These categories I will use to place any WC style regardless of time period or place, so I can compare them all. These are reference points to define and separate the styles. 2) The Chun is wrongly overburdened with proofs other MA are never asked to prove at such a high threshold due to inherent intellectual bias. In order to educate us to a resolution I am working on a Wing Tsun Sport. I will collect more WT fights and Pro Fighters for video evidence. I will challenge the shitty chun to rise up to the high ground or get off the road because they are slowing us down. I hope with a sport venue, even if only at a Throwdown level of participation would be a good start.

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Any fraud in any style can avoid pressure testing. The difficulty for a Chunner above and beyond the normal MA is the difficulty of showing how it works even if you are lucky enough to have something that does. BJJ can tap you out. A Chunner must show you the training produces boxers but without boxing. In older MA culture we just tried it because of the “deadly” we didn’t ask questions. But Chi Sau is so complicated it might not work anyway! So the Chun has long had the ability for salesmen to hide behind that too. “It is complicated, we just need to work harder.”
This is the same fraud a bully uses though. A brawn bully can fight already. But can he teach? Often no, so they can hide behind “it is hard so work on it” too. It is an excuse for not teaching. But he can win fights so the art must be good? Nope, it is the fighter only, he can sell any MA he can imitate. We want to see if a Big Brawny Si-Fu, like Emin Boztepe, can teach little girls to fight like him too. That is the Nun and the little Girl myth again. “So what if your teacher can fight…” He might have even started on the wrong path himself, a brawler before the Wing Tsun. But teaching it forced him into a choice, as it does for every MA instructor. Are we really going to figure out how to teach this or just keep fighting everything and hope they can copy us themselves?

So I agree, we need to find a way to expose this in a whole generation of video learned chi sau masters we are about to see selling the “authentic” stuff.

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Chi Sau/Lap Sau kinda reminds me of Taijiquan’s Tuishou and Karate’s Tuite. For me it would make sense if, through Chi Sau, Wing Chun had evolved into a grappling school – I believe the intention behind training Chi Sau is similar to that of judoka who are training to figure out kuzushi and kumikata. However, from what I’ve seen, while not discarding absolutely all grappling, most chunners are obsessed with punching the center line.

Again, I’m not saying chunners discard all grappling and joint control, but it doesn’t seem to be a priority – and it would make a world of difference if it was.

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I believe in Judo, and the idea that we must find only the moves we can practice safely. Striking the throat and knee to the pelvis, elbows etc… present the ultimate challenge in this regard.

One of the Bullshido Throwdown organizers in my time was a WT school partner in Concord. Not from the Boztepe family, but the IWTA Leung Ting people who then went on their own too. He wanted to spar with Lat Sau and build a sport but couldn’t find the way alone. We had a Throwdown there even. Funny that the WT chunners lead the Throwdown cause after the Berkely CA event.
He was not satisficed, I think more by the lack of opportunity to face sport contests world wide then any lack in WT. So he continued with BJJ. He runs and owns a huge BJJ school now. He switched exactly like you correctly identified and I supported him in that. I even showed up at the grand opening of his facility (Facebook was good this way) rolled with some Gi’s, and made sure he remembered to take a group photo of the massive crowd for his promotion (and made sure there were no bags or soda cans in the photo!). This is family.
One of my students became a Fencing Instructor when I moved away. WT should make a person able to do any martial art I think.

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I’ve knocked out so many fools on the street using my seu nim tao and wusau from wing chun it’s not even funny.

And my chain fist techniques

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Please tell me you have video to post.

Otherwise this isn’t going to go the way you think.

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He’s probably got one less than your one video.

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