Oct 7 and 8th 2000


Chin Jong is the 4th motion done in the 2nd section of Siu Lim Tau.  It is the side shoulder strike.  This video that I did with Sifu Fong shows a great exercise to developed this technique.  Normally if someone pulls your arm, you can go through progressions of different blocks, depending on the force.  For example, if he lop sau’d and punch, I could start off with bong sau, then wu sau, and finally chin jong.  It would all depend on the amount of force he put in to pull my arm.  Also in this exercise notice we used lan sau to neutralize the shoulder strike coming in.

A question was asked regarding how to deal with a nonstandard hook.  In this video Sifu shows different ways to deal with it and that mirroring the individual allows you to neutralize the momentum of his force.   Once again, notice the two different versions that Sifu uses depending on the force of the opponent.   In the video  a slight turn dealt with a wu sau and chop and then he incorporates the principle turn motion in Chum Kiu to deal with a wider hook punch.  Now had it been a standard boxing hook punch and you caught the timing correctly, a simple centerline punch would suffice.

This video demonstrates what’s wrong with about 99% of the Wing Chun punches that are thrown today, and that is the popping of the elbow.  It is the most important thing to learn the Wing Chun punch correctly otherwise you’ll be damaging your elbow.   Correct motion has a stretching motion, or sometimes described as the same motion if you were going to saw something, using  the elbow to lead the motion.  Unfortunately, beginners and many Wing Chun individuals interrupt it for some reason or another as a hammer motion, and continue to pop their elbow when they practice this.   Before learning from Sifu Fong, this is how I was taught as well.

There are a total of 16 footwork in Wing Chun.  And, once you know your footwork, one of the developments is freestyle.  The main thing to remember is that all the footwork that you learn is simply a way for you to move your center in any direction.  So basically, that rooted structure of your YGKYM, should also be mobile but yet extremely stable.  Some of the important rules to remember when doing footwork, is move maintain a 50/50 weight distribution and don’t lean forward or backward.  Every time you take a step, you should feel like you can move at any direction equally.

If you watch regular fighting, you’ll notice that there is no natural flow in how most people attack.  In other words there’s allot of stop and start, and that usually happens because the fighter is investing to much into an attack.  If there is flow however, when attempted the fighter has no killing power.  However, in Wing Chun, each move should be concentrated on having killing power as well as natural flow.  And, you develop that in Wing Chun, with the proper release of each motion.  Here in the video, Sifu decided to show off a bit of the flow and the power that can be done naturally when done correctly.

In school I refer to this as the tug of war.  However your developing quite a bit of different skills when doing this.  Improper practice of this will have the other person leaning back and trying to cheat the technique.  But, if done correctly, not only do you work on the stance, but you have to learn how to separate the arm structure from the body structure, but at the same time, still utilize the structure of the stance.   This was taken in 2000, and eight years later, I still can’t beat my Sifu in this battle of structures.