Day One of Project San Shou

In my humble opinion Wing Chun is a very special martial art that focuses on fighting for a self defence context. Being tired of the criticism levelled against the style of fighting that I hold true to my heart, I started an experiment to prove that the skills of Wing Chun can be transferred to any other environment of fighting.

Of course, we’ve had to make adaptations to our training and approach to fighting, but to fight in the ring you have to utilise universal fighting methods. Effectively, I’ve taken ordinary Wing Chun students and instructed them in a range of skills that require timing, distance judgement and true fighting spirit. Over a period of time they’ve learnt to kick, punch and wrestle like any other fighter, but with one difference they’ve kept the concepts of Wing Chun in the forefront of their minds.

The concept of this experiment is simple: all martial arts must have a common variable to function effectively. If we train and prepare these variables, then any Martial Art is comparable to each other.

I hope over the period of time that you’ll find this Blog informative enough to follow our progression to the final destination. We’ll share our highs and lows, good techniques, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and more importantly our eventual success in competition format.

You’ll follow the progress of Student A in his own words, and I will drop in from time to time to share my experiences on coaching Wing Chun fighters for a whole new world of combat.

So here goes the journey of a Wing Chun Fighter…

http://www.londonwingchun.co.uk./sanshou.html

Thursday, 3 September 2009

Wow!! This week's San Shou Kickboxing was intense...


Wow!! This week's San Shou Kickboxing was intense, I'll try to be brief on each subject to fit it all into a couple of hundred words, so here goes.


Sifu has definitely upped the pace in preparation for the tournament and taught us some nifty moves in this San Shou class.


We enhanced on a couple of throws, these are both effective from the clinch. The hip throw is a good move (I went into detail a couple of weeks ago) but if you can't get the hips right in there it can be done over a straight leg. The other throw again involves coming to the side of your opponent with one arm around his back, (obviously under the arm) the other monitoring his free arm, You then step in front and hook his/her leg with your leg and raise it p in the air.

When we were practising this a few weeks ago we weren't completing the throw just finding the right body mechanics and I found myself off balanced (probably more so in fact than I felt I was inflicting on my opponent) I queried Sifu Mark about this and he explained that with a slight bounce around when in this position exposes your opponents other leg for the take down.

It all made sense then, I felt like I'd only read half the book and just been told the surprise

ending.

One thing I enjoy about Sifu Mark's style of fighting is there is always another move ready if things don't quite go to plan and it all flows together like it was meant to be.

Its real as well because things rarely go to plan when two experienced fighters face off so I would like as many options as possible in my arsenal.

Sifu Mark then demonstrated one of the coolest moves I've seen for a long while, it doesn't sound like much but the options off of it are plenty.

Basically its a very quick switch of he legs (think of the Muhammed Ali shuffle) but then stepping forward with it and into an offensive, this can be a punch, kick, or take down .
The coolest of all has to be the superman punch, its basically a punch timed with the above footwork, (yes of course I'm gonna be practising it!).

It also helped me with the sanshou close quarter kick which involves finding the right angle and bending the leg so the whole length if the shin makes contact with the abdomen. Another thing which helped with this kick was when Sifu Mark explained the similarity of this to when throwing a hook as far as thrusting the hips are concerned.

From this seemingly irrelevant step there is a nice take down which puts you in a position to dip down slightly to the side of the fighter grabbing or hitting the leg with one hand and basically clotheslining him/her in the neck with the other arm. Hitting these two points simultaneously gives you a pretty good chance of flattening your opponent.

We ended with light kickboxing sparring with high kicks , I got some nice ones off, it felt good , everyone is raring to go.


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1 comment:

Redbridge foodie said...

Great Blog
It is good to see someone writing and talking about their day to day experience. And with such a large community of Chinese martial arts practitioners in London, this kind of Blog is a welcome addition
http://www.cityultima.com/London/Chinese_Martial_Arts

11 March 2010 at 02:33

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