the subject of WC versus grappling... while some WC principles can be applied on the ground, if you are going to fight a grappler or compete in MMA you need to learn some separate form of groundfighting. For street defence, i dont think it is necessary if you are a WC person to combine with another art, unless you feel like it!
if i may be so bold i would like to repost some points i made a while ago about wing chun. its quite long but bear with me!
One of the main principles or ideas behind wing chun is that of relaxation. We simply don?t punch and kick like boxers or muay thai or karateka. We try to relax each and every muscle in our body in order to achieve maximum power. Why? I hear you cry. Right now you have an image in your head of a huge-shouldered boxer absolutely demolishing a heavy-bag, and a skinny hunched over kung fu guy hitting a pad like he was pickin? daisies, and here?s me telling you that the second guy is hitting harder. Well, he ain?t. In a few years time though, number one will be getting old and tired, maintaining training is going to be harder and harder, and number two will be relaxing more, learning not to rely on his muscles, and he will be getting more and more powerful. Now, why bother relaxing at all? It?s a valid question. No doubt hurling all your strength into a person or training bag is going to hurt them. A lot. But what if I told you you could get the same power by just relaxing and focusing? And the better you relaxed, the more powerful you would be? Have you ever stubbed your toe or walked straight into anything by accident? Notice just how hard you actually wham yourself? That?s because you are relaxed. Ever tried to lift up your friend who has passed out on the couch? Doesn?t he way about 17 tonnes more than usual? That?s because his whole body is relaxed. Now, through training and focus, you can achieve that kind of relaxation in your body and link it up together, then throw that at your opponent. Very powerful. That?s how relaxation helps you to generate more power. It can also help you to absorb things into your structure. By that, I don?t mean absorbing punches with your face. I mean that you can intercept things coming towards you, and by relaxing, they won?t affect you. For example, someone throws a hooking punch. Intercepting this punch with a relaxed but stable structure will cause the person throwing the punch to bounce off. Its hard to explain in words and much easier to demonstrate. A relaxed structure can maintain its shape and movement even under intense pressure (with a lot of training). Once you become very relaxed, people cannot affect your balance. Any force that they apply to you will be reflected straight back into them. This translates well into punching, kicking and moving, as each of your movements will have behind them this relaxed structure, and acceleration will give you power.
By relaxed, I don?t mean weak or sloppy. I mean not tensed up, not pushing, not locking joints in place. A Wing chun person will achieve power by accelerating their body into you, simply using the arms as a delivery mechanism. Not much force is generated in the arm itself, rather it is the centre of the body shifting towards you. This leads to a very focused and stable kind of force which is hard to defend against.
The nature of force is that it needs a hard surface to react against, in order for it to be felt. We have force in our hands, but we do not feel it constantly? only when we push against a wall, or grasp something in our hands, then do we feel a force acting on us and only then does it affect us. If we punch somebody, we feel the force in our hand as it makes contact. If we are tense, then the force has something to react to, and if the force we are feeling is greater than the force we are applying, then we will in fact receive more force as a reaction than our opponent. If we punch someone big, or as a better example, a wall bag (which is rooted firmly to the wall, which is rooted firmly in the ground), then if we are tense, we will bounce off. So, relaxed muscles and correct alignment means that the force that we feel/receive as we punch/touch something, travels into our hand, down our arm, spine, legs, then into the ground, where we feel our feet pushing harder on the ground. This is what we are aiming for. However if we have for example a tense forearm, the reactant force from the punch/ push will react against the hard muscle there, and we will feel it, and be rocked backwards. If we have tense shoulders, the force will travel there and react with the shoulder, pushing it backwards. If we are relaxed everywhere except our thighs, the force will react with the hard muscles in our thighs and we will stagger backwards. The point is, we should have no unnecessary tense muscles in our body, so that the resultant force from our strike travels around our body and finds no hard surfaces/objects to react against, except the floor through contact with our feet. This has the effect of making us heavier, adding more power to our strikes. In fact a surprising result of this, at the higher levels in practitioners such as Chu Shong Tin, is that as soon as contact is made, the opponent becomes lighter and the exponent becomes heavier. The opponent finds the more force he applies, the lighter and weaker he becomes, and the heavier and stronger the exponent becomes. The harder you try, the easier it becomes for Chu Shong Tin to defend himself against you. Another factor leading on from this is that it requires less and less force to overcome the opponent of unbalance them, as they become lighter and you become heavier, so only small movements and easy strikes can seriously affect the opponent.
I must stress that these things are mostly relevant when fighting somebody bigger than you, because if you are significantly bigger or stronger than your opponent it will be fairly easy for you and you wont need to concentrate so much on these things.
Another important thing in wing chun, and one of the things that makes it effective, is that of structure. There are a few basic checks of structure, such as maintaining open angles in your arms and legs and having a straight back, but they are much more detailed than that. The best angle in your arm is the position where it can absorb the most force comfortably, and the biceps and the triceps are both equally as relaxed. It?s a very strong structure and forms most of the shapes a wing chun person will attack you with. The arm should remain relaxed into the shoulder joint, where it can be supported by your body structure, rather than coming up or out of the joint, whereupon you need to engage unnecessary muscles just to keep it working. Relax it back into the shoulder and it is free to rotate and absorb force. Next is the spine, which needs to be reasonably straight or at least aligned. That way, pressure coming into your arms at the point of contact can travel down your relaxed arms and joints, into your spine, down the spine, into the legs and into the floor, where it will effectively make you heavier as it pushes you down into the floor. (This greatly increases the force you can throw around.) The hips need to be aligned with the knees, but not locked in place, and the toes point in to the point where you would punch. The whole stance is designed as a tool to absorb force, deliver force and focus force to one point. Any body who dismisses the stance as seen in the Siu Nim Tao form in favour for a side on stance in fighting is doing themselves a great injustice.
Once you have structure and alignment and relaxation, next comes focus. This is what some schools call forward force, I prefer to call it focus or intention. Without pushing, all of our structure is focused to one point on our opponent and we rotate or move around any obstacle until we feel we can crash through. OF course if we are very good and have good basics we can crash through at almost any time. Think of someone trying to get through a locked door? if they are leaning on it or pushing it with all their might, should someone suddenly open the door they will fall flat on their face. That?s what we don?t want and that?s why we don?t push. Rather, we focus at a target and should the opening present itself, or we decide that we can break through without breaking our structure, we shift into it.
Focus also serves to infuse the spirit into the body, or make the movements less reliant on muscle and more reliant on the mind. Eventually your mind will be present in your whole body, doing the correct movements automatically and instantly.  |