wingchunsucks

[wingchunsucks]

Chi Sao sucks

I remember being at a seminar some years ago and doing chi sao with some guy. I had already become more relaxed about chi sao in terms of not seeing it as a scrap or a competitive tool. This guy was confident and good and I rolled to what I thought was his level. i.e, I wasn’t struggling to hit him as often as I could. I would enjoy the conversation without the need for too many exclamation marks. This meant I was quite happy to let him dominate the flow a little and just respond. Sometimes he’d make good use of the space he created. We’d have a good exchange, I thought. At the end he said “How long have you been doing Wing Chun?’ I think it was around 10 years, so I said so. He started laughing.. literally laughing.. “10 years? I’ve been doing it for 2!” in a way that meant, how come I’ve done so well against you? So that, unfortunately did hit my ego.. because to him I looked like I had taken 10 years to do what he did in 2. I wanted to say “I went easy on you” but man that would sound like sour grapes or something. Instead I let him have that good feeling anyway. What do I care? He was definitely good and deserved the confidence, but I remember that event as being a turning point in how I think about, and observe ego (my own, especially) in chi sao.

Chi sao is fun. Chi sao is kind of the only thing people really want to be doing when they go to Wing Chun. I remember watching people doing chi sao and thinking “Man, I want to do that, not stand here stepping and punching”. So when people start doing chi sao, they sort of feel like they’re actually doing real kung fu for the first time.

What feels great about chi sao is that you’re in a state of flow. You’re not practising the same technique over and over while being corrected, like some kind of task.You are truly in the moment and you can’t think about anything else. You are reacting to the smallest and quickest of movements to avoid being hit, or so you can land something on your training partner.

So, chi sao doesn’t suck? Well... chi sao itself is great, but only if you and your partner are doing it in a way that means it doesn’t suck. Chi sao is nothing like sparring, it’s nowhere near a fight. Chi sao is, when it’s viewed properly, an exercise with a limited scope.

There are things in Wing Chun that are truly brilliant and really speak to how a martial art trains us to be aware of our mind-body connection. ‘Lut sao jic chueng’ for example is a concept that chi sao can develop that is a genuine asset to the art. It roughly translates as ‘hand free, spring forward’. If you have contact with someone and through that contact you can feel that their guard/path to strike is not open, as soon as that path opens up, you strike. This doesn’t mean you’re pushing against someone’s arm and as soon as they drop their arm your potential energy is turned into kinetic energy. Lut sau jic chung is about your brain registering the change/loss of contact, and engaging your body to strike. Chi sao being a dynamic exercise means that you’re training to recognise that stimuli/response again and again. 

Chi sao also trains you to ensure your positions are sound. If your elbow in tan sau is too close to your body, someone can tell you by hitting you. It can teach you distance, timing, and angles like nothing else.

So what is the problem with chi sao? It’s when people muddy the waters and mutate chi sao into something it isn’t. We are all human and I am as guilty of the things I’m about to raise as anyone else. Maybe I’m more guilty of them and that’s how I’m so keenly aware of them. Everyone has an ego. When you become a martial artist, you go through differing processes depending on your chosen style. You might line up in rows with a white belt on while the black belts stand the other side of the room. You might be put in a corner and taught how to stand up properly, while people are doing the fun stuff over in the other corner. When you reach a certain level, either through belt systems or just by seeing the ratio of people senior and junior to you shift in balance, you will likely have experienced some of what I’m going to say.

When you engage in sparring or in something chi sao, you are holding a mirror up to your ability and therefore your ego is pricked.

This is an unhealthy approach in any martial art. The problem when it comes to chi sao is that chi sao isn’t simply about hitting your opponent. If chi sao isn’t full-contact sparring, then there is a limited scope to it. That limited scope clashes with people and their egos and manifests in several ways.

HItbacks

If someone senior to you, let’s say it’s your instructor, hits you, you take it in your stride. He/she is your instructor, you want them to be better than you. Why? Because it gives you a feeling that the power balance / progression exists for a reason. Your ego isn’t damaged at all. When you train with someone quite new and inexperienced, you would assume then that you would be to them as your instructor is to you i.e. again, the ranking and standing in the world of you dojo is written in the cosmos. So what happens when someone you see as inferior to you, hits you? This isn’t meant to be, is it? They must be doing something unfair, or outside of the rules of the art! You try to respond with dominance... I have to show them I’m senior to them and I know more and I’ve trained more.

So when someone gets hit there may be a tendency to do all they can to hit back as soon as possible. Tit for tat.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this. You SHOULD train yourself to retaliate even after being hit. That’s GOOD. Right?

Chi sao is not a fight. Real fights can be messy and scrappy. If you want to fight, put on some gloves and put 2 minutes on the clock and really hit each other. No, seriously, do this! When you’ve calmed down again, do chi sao.

Chi sao isn’t about scoring points or ippons. If someone managed to execute a technique that resulted in you receiving a clean and deliberate hit, just accept it. Actually, no, you can stop what you’re doing and ask them what they did, and you can develop the ideal response and then drill that for a minute. That would serve you both so much better. Giving them a flick with the back of your hand as a call and answer thing is shitty. Long strong arm

Sometimes in chi sao you break out into single arm contact on the outside gate. Like crossed swords. If the shoulders are angled and the contact is closer to the wrist of each person, you’ve essentially changed range. If you have to step to make contact, you’re really in a boxing or long range now. So many people, including sifus I have a great deal of respect for, will step to this range and tense/strengthen their mun sau arm to the point that the other person is unable to do anything without stepping in (it’s a trap).

This is not to say that this is illegitimate in some way, but why are you breaking the range of chi sao? It’s part of a non-verbal body language of domination and torment that someone who feels superior will do. Which brings me onto the next point. Starting and stopping

Chi sao starts with the characteristic rolling of interlocked tan/bong and fook sau. This serves the purpose of creating a dynamic neutral starting point. The movements would disguise any small twitches and flinches (magicians always say that the big movement hides the small one). The double-handed rolling leads to someone creating an opening somehow and then the free-flow of chi sao commences. 

There’s a strange non-verbal agreement as to when to return to rolling after a period of free-flowing interaction. Through subtle body language when there’s a pause in the action, both participants will reset to a neutral state. 

One way in which people can make chi sao an antagonistic experience is by forcing a return to rolling early. Let’s say you’re rolling and your partner initiates an opening. You defend, you capitalise on something in their position and you are looking good to take control of centre and possibly set up a trap, or whatever.. then they step away, drop their hands out and offer them up in the tan/fook position clearly instigating rolling again. Hang on! You were about to do some amazing Wing Chun there! Well they decided they wanted to return to rolling and they’re in charge, ok?

The opposite can happen to. When you clearly reach a kind of stalemate position where you’re kind of both trapped or both your positions are looking less than textbook, you know it makes sense to just go back to a neutral rolling. But when you clearly go to reset, they throw in a punch to your ribs. You want to say “Oi, that’s cheeky” but you realise it looks like you’re a sore loser. You can’t say “I wasn’t expecting that”, because how petty does that look? So then you’re tempted to do a hitback (see above). Sometimes if someone is being domineering in chi sao, they’ll seemingly be the one to decide when to roll and when to have free play. It’s a weird power move. The only way I can think to deal with it, is to ask to slowly repeat what just happened and ask if you can dok sau (slow collaborative chi sao) from that point on. Maybe also saying “I was going to look at how I recover/capitalise on this position we’d got to”

Glancing blows

As chi sao isn’t a fight and nor is it a sport, there’s no real way to evaluate a strike. Common sense would tell you that if you’d trapped both your partner’s hands and could slowly and definitively draw a line to their chin with your fist and forearm aligned, you’d have been able to deliver a proper blow. But what about when you use some lut sao jic chung and your hand moves about an inch limply onto the chest of your partner. Is that a ‘hit’? Is it a ‘win’? Perhaps they’d eat that hit for breakfast and follow it with an elbow strike to your nose?  So a hit in chi sao isn’t necessarily a checkmate. Surely the goal is to land contact on the person’s face/chest/ribs? That’s the ultimate goal of chi sao right? No.

If you fail to strike when there’s a clear opening, then yeah that’s bad and you should feel bad. But hitting at all costs is how chi sao descends into a schoolyard squabble. 

I’ve been here. I’ve felt like the more times I can touch my partner’s torso or face, the more I am winning. But I’ve also felt really annoyed when someone has just gone to hit me, I’ve done a nice gang sao or jum sao and with their hand a few inches off course they’ve just jerked their hand like a dead fish to slap a knuckle or two against me. Even though I know that’s not really worth anything, it still pricks the ego. It pricks the ego partly because you know they feel like they got you, and now you want to hit them back or yell “doesn’t count” or something childish like that.

So what’s the answer?

Ignore it. Really, just ignore it. Let them have it if that’s what they want.

Something I would do is decide that I’m not going to try and hit them. Just defend. They don’t know that’s what I’m doing, but somehow it changes the balance of things. I know that if I start to try and hit back in this situation, it’ll just deteriorate. Both of you will start flailing wildly as it becomes a war of attrition. Perhaps one of you will try to look as though you’re satisfied and then return to rolling like nothing happened.

Grinning and looking away

Ever seen people doing chi sao and one of them grinning inanely? There’s a few things going on, i think. Firstly I think people want to seem relaxed and breezy while they’re engaged in something where their ego might take a knock. Their faces beam with a wide grin as if to say “actually guys, I’m super chill about this, even if I look like I’m fucking tense as fuck”. If you look like you’re concentrating and intense, then when you get hit, or fail to hit, you might look worse for it.

I think it also is a natural response to show lack of aggression, which is probably an evolved social behaviour.

The problem is that it can look condescending. I’m not saying not to smile, be happy when doing chi sao. Smile! Just make sure your chi sao is congruous with your emotions, be lighter, be easier, be less rooted in your ego.

Another thing that happens a lot is people looking away. Are you even paying attention? The weird thing here is that sometimes chi sao is easier when you’re looking away. You are responding to the feeling of contact, rather than what you perceive to be about to happen by looking.

Conclusion

I will say now that I’ve definitely experienced all of these myself. But not only that, I’ve seen very very respected and great sifus do chi sao with each other and this behaviour emerge.

The truth is that we place too much onto chi sao in Wing Chun because there is no sparring that doesn’t involve gloves or doesn’t change into another style. We need to recognise that chi sao is another drill; just a drill with a lot more variables at play. A drill is something where both partners are working to improve each other. Improvement is not seen through the sloppy substandard behaviours I’ve outlined in this post.

We need to develop in Wing Chun a hybridisation between drills and chi sao and a more realistic application of technique that borders on sparring. Chi sao is about close range/double hand contact. Whereas in reality people will stand out of range, will throw longer punches, flail with wider arcs, go to grapple or takedown. Chi sao doesn’t cover any of that so it can’t do the job of replicating the chaos of an actual fight. Learn to train in harmony with your partner and chi sao is great.

[wingchunsucks]

About this blog

To give this blog some context, it’s important that I confess that I’m a lapsed Wing Chun student. I studied it for over a decade before finding myself drawn to trying Krav Maga and then BJJ (and a little bit of Kendo).

I truly love(d) Wing Chun. I would consume as much of the content I would find online as I could. I trained consistently at class, travelled to classes further afield (including Hong Kong), and it was almost as though Wing Chun was a core part of myself.

When I say that Wing Chun sucks, I really mean that a lot of people that do Wing Chun suck. I sucked, still suck. Do I TRULY mean that Wing Chun itself sucks? Allow me to be a bit mystical for a second here... martial arts only come into being through the medium of people. I’ll repeat myself.. people that do martial arts suck. The martial art or self defence class itself, like practically any martial art, is merely a collection of at least some of the following: • A set of cultural or historical interpretations • Ways to cause pain or damage to a human body • A glossary or vocabulary • A sense of discipline or spirit instilled on a group • Named individuals who posses the knowledge that will trickle down via their lineage or at seminars • Grading or belt systems or a syllabus designed to be traversed • Physical training or fitness • Beliefs about how people behave • Beliefs about optimal technique, range, position • Sparring or competitive play All martial arts that don’t employ the use of weaponry (or the open-hand elements of all martial arts) use the varying range of the ability of human bodies to perform. At its core, each martial art is an abstraction of an innate survival function of that human body. The rest of a martial art is ego, sentimentality, self-identity, ideology, cultural ideation, and so on.

When I stopped doing Wing Chun, it was because I felt like the Wing Chun I was doing had blinkered itself to a lot of things that pertain to violence, combat, reality.

I’ve heard Wing Chun sifus say things like “Wing Chun works on the ground” when asked about grappling and being taken to the floor. I’ve also heard “Wing Chun teaches us how to not go to the ground, so we don’t need to learn to grapple”. It was this kind of hubris, for example, that made me try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Wing Chun practitioners also like to state that you don’t need to be big, or strong, or ‘fit’ to do Wing Chun. They say that’s because of things like ‘using your opponent’s force against them’ or ‘it was invented by a nun’. The truth is that any martial art can be practiced by anyone, but unfortunately size, strength, fitness etc are always going to be an advantage. So why does Wing Chun suck and BJJ (for example) not suck? It could be said that BJJ doesn’t really deal with striking, it’s kind of a sport, it relies on ground-fighting. The difference here is that while those things may apply to BJJ, nobody I’ve ever met that does BJJ would deny that. A lot of people mix BJJ with some kind of stand-up martial art and have a fairly comprehensive or holistic approach. You might argue that BJJ is a sport where you aren’t allowed to strike. Some people might say “Oh but if I was in that position, I’d drop an elbow onto them”. Those same people might say that the reason why Wing Chun can’t be a sport is because it relies on devastating strikes. I would turn this around and say that BJJ is able to be full contact and trained at high-intensity with 100% resistance consistently, which is hugely advantageous. A martial art that doesn’t allow practitioners to go full contact without holding back has to rely on some kind of imagined outcomes or cooperative partners to enact how a real altercation would go. Am I saying BJJ is better than Wing Chun? No. I think that in Wing Chun it’s easier to fool yourself, than it is in BJJ.  Boxing offers another good insight. Boxing is full contact striking. Boxing is made relatively safe with the inclusion of gloves. Those gloves reduce sensitivity and protect the hands, allowing practitioners to land hard blows in an antagonistic and competitive environment. In boxing, you can’t grapple, there’d no floorwork. Bare-knuckle boxing used to have a different guard because punches to the head were less common. People would break their hands on people’s skulls. So even boxing has had to curtail itself a little to make it something people can train week-in week-out. So then, what about MMA? MMA is arguably the grand unification of all open-hand martial arts. Muay Thai, boxing, and BJJ show themselves to dominate there and all with good reason. But, we have to concede that MMA itself is a sport. The fighters are athletes. I would argue that a modern martial art doesn’t need to be made for athletes that are looking to compete. A modern martial art just needs to equip its practitioners with practical skills through well-reasoned and safe training, so that they can use their bodies in as effective a way as possible, without self-delusion. I will also concede that a martial art doesn’t need to be purely about reality or combat. It can be a way to engage in another culture, from another time. It can be a way to understand your own body and its movements, with or without someone else being present. It can be a social activity. 

The only thing I think is important here though is that it doesn’t make claims and propagate beliefs that it can’t substantiate. That, reader, is what’s known as religion, or a cult.