A new, old love has won me back – or vice versa – with all its force. After years of abstinence caused by unthinking frustration about external matters which were not in my power to control, I had withdrawn myself and sought refuge in other fighting arenas. Fortunately, however, WingTsun offers us many areas of activity which are physical, mental and spiritual. Yes, you have guessed it, my old love is nothing else and nothing less than Chi-Sao, the most important yet most misunderstood of all the training methods in WingTsun.

Yesterday I was in Berlin on the invitation of Sifu Vilimek, teaching students ranging from beginners to the 8th student grade for four hours in the morning, then the advanced students up to the 5th Practician programme for another four hours in the afternoon.
I like being in Berlin, firstly because of the city itself and especially because of the excellent WingTsun representatives who live and teach here, and who always inspire and encourage me to give of my best.

But what is my best? What do I possess that I consider valuable, and what can I pass on that might help my students become better themselves?
My experience of course. The practical experience that comes of more than 46 years of self-defence. Even though I may not be able to kick as high as I once could, I believe I now have the clearness of sight to know what is necessary and unnecessary where self-defence is concerned.

I have only ever been really interested in the self-defence aspects of the martial arts. Acrobatics, lots of forms, breaking bricks, elegant demonstrations, kung-fu films and contests have never been my scene. And although I am amazingly changeable in many areas for some people, I doubt whether this attitude of mine is likely to change.

Once I had recognised ritualised combat, the “who-the-hell-are-you-looking-at” situation, to be statistically the greatest danger for men (!), it was clear to me that talking and fighting belong together, and that we are talking about close combat. WingTsun is more suitable than any other method when it comes to fighting at conversational range. Traditional WingTsun maintains a dignified silence and knows nothing about adrenalin, body language, veto time and mirror neurons. But it can claim to be scientific to the extent that an Asian art can be scientific.
So we took WingTsun at its word and helped it to go to university. Grandmaster Leung Ting was the first to teach in a college, and it was my privilege to establish WingTsun as a course of university study. This has advanced the cause of WingTsun, and will advance it even more in the future.

Having discerned that it is wrong and indicates a misapprehension of the wooden dummy form to stand between the opponent’s arms with Man-Sao/Wu-Sao (adding a wide-legged stance as an invitation for a kick to the genitals), I drew my own conclusions and developed the outside positions. Naturally this also meant creating the corresponding Chi-Sao exercises. After all, somebody who has realised something and does not act on his conclusions would be better off remaining ignorant. The fact that one tends to be ”stiff-armed” during the first few seconds of a fight was also incorporated into my training programme. Likewise the fact that a beginner has better chances if he maintains a preventive, forward defence with due regard for legal considerations (see student programmes 1-3 as a result of this conclusion), while the more advanced student has better chances if he responds and is therefore faster than the attacker (see student programme 4 and my book ”The Last shall be First”.

After decades of blindfolded Chi-Sao practice and analysis of the ingenious movements of my teacher Leung Ting, I realised that before receiving information from the tactile sense, there are at least two other early-warning systems which can be developed further, and with whose help I can and sometimes must respond even before physical contact is made if I am to win the encounter.
The fact that traditional WingTsun always restricts itself to tactile impulses, and only allows reactions prompted by visual recognition in the case of curving attacks, has didactic reasons: just as the WT beginner is traditionally made rigid at first, e.g. being told only to move the arms during the SNT form, before he is gradually given more freedom of action which is only limited by the principles when Grandmaster level is achieved, the Chi-Sao beginner limits himself to tactile stimuli and learns not to trust his visual sense, so that he is not susceptible to feints like the followers of other styles.

However, any master who misinterprets this teaching method or interim goal as the final objective deserves just as much condemnation as the one who regards Chi-Sao as an end in itself, rather than as a means of acquiring important self-defence capabilities provided it is practiced correctly.

Being a good fighter does not necessarily give one the critical judgement necessary to understand how one achieved this skill, and how this capability might best be imparted to students within a short time. This particularly applies to WingTsun, where it is one’s own teacher who implants the essential (semi-)reflexes or not. You give the master your body and let him do his stuff. It is a kind of massage, during which the student remains almost passive and is moved around without any involvement by the mind. That is how I learned Chi-Sao. I had no fellow-students, there were no student grades yet, no “WingTsun Kuen Bible”, no posters and no videos. Neither did we have the two-man forms now known as ”Chi-Sao sequences“. All these were results of our success in spreading Yip Man’s martial art to even the smallest village. The goal has long been reached, but in some respects achieving one’s goal is not a blessing.
My first students had far less WingTsun knowledge, but were more formidable fighters than today’s. One of my talented students holding the 2nd TG was able to defeat a Chinese 10th Level Grandmaster of whom even the legendary Bruce Lee was afraid, not to mention the son of the late Great-Grandmaster Yip Man. That is how practical our WingTsun training was at that time. If I remember rightly, almost half a dozen of my students had prepared themselves for this fight and were capable of winning it, and they were not even familiar with the 3rd form!

No, I am not regretful or negative – I say it is good that things turned out as they are now. Amor fati. I am also very optimistic about the future of WingTsun. Developments have enabled our students and instructors to acquire an enormous body of WingTsun knowledge at first hand. Great knowledge can be confusing, however. As Heraclitus once said: ”Learning many things does not teach understanding”. He must have been familiar with WingTsun, for he also coined this famous saying: ”Conflict is the father of all things”. Less is more for practical purposes. What is important, and what is less important? What can you do without in a ritualised combat situation? In other words, what is of no help in perhaps more than 80% of all violent confrontations in which a man belonging to our target group may become involved? What does a woman need to make herself a nightmare for an attacker? And what does a child need?

Let me return to the Berlin seminar, to which I owe the idea for this editorial. I hugely enjoyed doing hours of Chi-Sao with all those present, though with a heavy emphasis on techniques which guarantee victory within seconds in the event of a confrontation on the street.
Mario M. watched me examining candidates from the 1st to 4th TG, and asked me a question which I failed to understand at first: “You do the same with all of us here. Whatever their grade. And we all feel like beginners. What criteria do you actually apply when you are examining? Surely we are all the same for you!“
At first I took the question to be a criticism, then I sensed his frustration and finally realised that Mario wanted to know the standards by which I examine Technicians.
For the first time I found myself obliged to think about this and give a quick answer. As I do not know whether the answer I gave was satisfactory to Mario, here is a more detailed one:

Originally and traditionally, our world association awarded TG grades for knowledge and skills which were acquired in training classes, seminars and tutorials. It was sufficient to demonstrate the necessary skills, show the required preparation time and attend the grading seminar. Traditionally there was no examination as I conduct it, i.e. with a written (theoretical) part and a practical part, which consists of at least 2 but possibly 6 separate parts which are examined at different times.
Technician grades are expected to be familiar with the “techniques“ and be able to perform them well. Nowadays they must acquire very extensive and detailed knowledge, as well as learning numerous solo and partner forms with variations that are hard to remember. In addition they are given a theoretical introduction to the WingTsun principles that will later help them to free themselves from brain-cluttering knowledge as masters and grandmasters, and simply follow the principles.
So far so good. All the above aspects are part of the examination, or are required before a candidate can present himself for examination in the first place.
But all of this does not make a WT fighter who can stand in a relaxed manner in front of an opponent and say: “Attack any way you want if you feel you have to. Do what you want, I’ll certainly cope with it somehow.”
In addition to psychological training, doing this requires a greater and more certain level of skill. It requires the things I mentioned at the beginning. This is where “less is more“ really counts! Where every superfluous technique you know costs you valuable brain processing time! Where every technique you can do on both the left and right might cost you another few bits. What is also needed here is knock-out punching power.
So why do I check out that part of the examination that I consider most important in the same way for everyone? Well, I don’t really examine the same techniques, but people happen to have only two arms and two legs, and there are not actually as many sensible attacks as some would have you believe.
In all the decades and thousands of hours during which I practiced Chi-Sao with my Si-Fu Leung Ting, the world’s most expert WingTsun exponent, he never used any exotic or questionable techniques against me when we were sparring together in Chi-Sao, where each of us was trying to hit the other hard. The only thing that counted in these moments of truth was effectiveness, and this made the self-risk associated with flowery techniques completely out of the question.

During examinations this personal preference for realistic attacks on my part may give the impression that I attack everyone “in the same way, whatever their grade”. In fact this is only the personal impression of the observer, and not my reality.
I actually attack in many different ways “according to the student’s level of skill“, and I adjust my power and speed accordingly. While there are only a few basic types of practical attack, I am able to carry each of them out in a hundred different ways, at different angles, with a broken rhythm and with distractions or feints. Timing presents the greatest difficulty of all. To cope with my attack, the other person would need to change when I change.
So much for the wrong impression that I attack everyone in the same way.

Before I start to philosophise – a privilege of age – let me relieve you of another misconception: WT is not as complicated as it appears to you. It is actually quite simple, and does not require much: in addition to having a good stance, short footwork, a good stance turn and 3 to 6 good attacking techniques, you will cope with any situation if you have mastered Tan, Bong, Jam and Kao-Sao.
Indeed, I already passed on this good news in the mid-80s, in my book “On Single Combat”.

Now let me turn to an almost philosophical problem: what relative levels of skill (not knowledge) exist for me?

Can skill be graduated in this way? Do I carry some form of invisible yardstick around with me?
Or is it merely a matter of “being hit by me“ or “not being hit by me”? If that were the criterion, there would be just a handful of skilled people and a whole army of the unskilled. The fact that those of my students whom I can hit during examinations are themselves routinely able to ”put away” almost anybody who confronts them as members of elite police or military units, bodyguards or doormen shows that there must be something else between the two extremes.

Perhaps the weaponless martial arts are not quite like shooting, where it does not matter whether you miss the target by 1 centimetre or 1 metre – a miss is as good as a mile.

If we took this as an example, we would need to stop training students.
It should never be the aim of a student to get the better of his teacher, but rather to improve himself – at least that is how I have always seen it, and I would never waste a moment’s thought on whether I could beat my much-admired master now that I hold the same grade.

If you will let me paraphrase a letter by Seneca for my own purposes, it reads like this:
“Are there no graduations below this? Is there a yawning chasm immediately beside the skill of a master? I think not, for while somebody who makes progress still belongs to the large number of people who are less skilled than their master, there is still a wide gap between him and them. There are also great differences between those who are making progress.”
But we do not need to cite the Stoics, as the Christians, who learned a great deal from them, also have a comparable ethical view: someone who repents is still a sinner who does not enjoy the full grace of God, however there is a fundamental difference between those who have repented and those who have not.

And if all this is too complicated for you, the message is: training is still well worthwhile, less is more and the good old days are about to return ...

Best wishes from Stralsund

Your Si-Fu/Sigung

P.S. ... but without neglecting our newly gained and valuable mental knowledge. Let’s try to turn this into body knowledge, with the help of suitable teaching methods which I will provide.