Wing Chun, Reality and Street Violence – Part 4

Full-contact training to absorb impact. Does it suck sometimes? Yep but do you know what sucks a lot more? The reality of being unprepared to deal with sudden and violent force.

The last of Sgt Rory Miller’s 4 Basic Truths of Violent Assault as laid out in his book Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence, which should be on the nightstand of any martial artist who actually wants to be able to use their art in real life, states that attacks happen with MORE POWER than most people realize. 

This ties hand in hand with #3-the sudden nature of an attack.  If you are a predator, are you going to dilly-dally or are you going to hit them hard, fast and powerfully? If I were some shitbag mugger rapist I’m going with Option B.

For those who train in a martial art and especially for us Wing Chun folks who seek to understand and apply our system for real-world encounters, we have no choice but to approach our training from this point of view.  We need to bank on being sucker-punched, ambushed, grabbed, blitzed or any other way you want to put it.

We need to be able to – through our training – react to such force with greater and more efficient force, purposefully directed at our attacker’s weakest spots to be unabashedly exploited and unmercifully targeted.  Our skills must therefore become second-nature.  Proper training for us needs to address this sudden wave of power and force, both in being on the receiving end of an attack and dishing out twice as much force and bad intentions back to whoever is trying to remove you from your loved ones.  We train Wing Chun for one reason: to win a fight and survive the street.

A situation like this NEEDS not only matched but greater intensity than that of your attacker-you don’t have the luxury of lolly-gagging or dicking around at this point; you need to make him regret choosing YOU.

A Simple Way to Minimize the Gap in Intensity

Proper Wing Chun training MUST address this, as without training for a sudden burst of power the techniques or skills sets one spends so much time practicing mean nothing.  All that concerns us is simple, effective and practical self defense by way of direct and efficient techniques and a butcher mentality.

Try this little test as a benchmark of where your skills are: have a friend attack you at a leisurely pace and notice how well you can pull off moves…then have them attack you FULL FORCE, and you will see just how big a gap exists between what you can do in training and what you can pull off in reality.  Now that you know where you are, you know where you need to be.  We will cover how to get there but start with your own imagination and inject realism into each motion you do.

Do yourself a favor: train you mind as you would your body by feeding it the right raw material to work with.  This is what separates the warriors from the wannabes.

Train Smart, Stay Safe

Sifu Bobby