Friday, September 28, 2007

Who Do You Believe?

Look at these three pictures. They are from a known Wing Chun book that has positive reviews, (Alan Gibson Simple Thinking Intelligent Fighters); and a JKD book that has positive reviews, (Teri Tom The Straight Lead). I know this post is not about the Wooden dummy but I wanted to make the point.


Here the Wing Chun stance takes forward pressure.


















Now look at this picture from Tom - same stance - similar test - different result ! The JKD stance is solid but the Wing Chun stance buckles under a palm. Mmmmmm.













This is Ted Wong here, too, involved. He was Bruce Lee's training partner. And he appears in Randy Williams' Wing Chun training videos so he no stranger to these issues.




So what's going on ? What sense are we to make of all this ?



The point is how when you crosscheck your information in martial art research you sometimes get 2 different answers. I have seen this Wing Chun stance pressed forward so I know it can withstand some pressure. Alan Orr - a MMA inclined Wing Chun player - has this useful drill that is worth checking out below. I adapted it from his www page just to examine a point :

http://www.alanorr.com/htdocs/articles/wcpowerarticle.html






I may invite all 3 authors - Gibson, Tom / Wong and Orr - to reply to what they see here and explain what the issues are involved here.

It would be interesting to get feedback from each of these experts: to explain how the same forces applied to the same structures yield different results ! What is it I am missing here ?

PS. ON reflection this should be telling us to pressure test the knowledge we are given and double-check it. Take nothing on trust alone. If the Wing Chun stance takes time to perfect and eek out its nuances then I can imagine the JKD comparison being 'accepted' by the student as 'true'. I am not in a position to judge properly what is 'true' here. I may have missed a point. But I suspect this example isn't isolated in martial art literature. (It isn't isolated in chess literature. You get the same positions on the board sometimes evaluated differently - it drives you nuts if you 'need' your answers given to you).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the best way to defend a kick is to move around and response. I know guys with more than 100kgs with so much kick power that trying any counter-energy activity could be very painfull to the defender.
There's lot of martial-arts around like aikido that prupose a counter-energy task, but against brutal power got no results. There's a very dificult method of Kung-Fu that may sustain the impact, but all the body structure completely different than the referred. There's also vietvodao: for me the more consistent approach to kick-counter-defense, with its unusual hand-forms along with strutural kung-fu. Although they work, only a few guys in Europe can manage it entirely.

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