WT - The Workout

Well I had the wonderful opportunity to run last Monday's class. I had the green light from my Si-Fu weeks prior so we were able to give ample heads up to the students. There were two themes for the night:

Part 1: Physical Conditioning and the "Revelation" of Strength

Part 2: The Magnetic Zone and Introduction of the "Uncooperative Partner"

Part 1 introduces the concepts of physical fitness into the WT curriculum. Standard warm up exercises included stretching, pushups (standard and explosive), situps and core training, and cardiovascular (jumping jacks, burpees, squats). In conventional martial arts, much emphasis is placed on physical conditioniong (anywhere between 30-60 minutes in a 1.5-2hr class session). In our school, however, the entire 3 hours is devoted to the Wing Tsun/Self-defense aspect. Physical conditioning is expected to be trained outside of class, if desired.

We then went onto various pad hitting. I wanted the students to hit the pads hard while maintaining the best form possible and minimizing risk of injury. Here, my point was simply to expose them to the automatic use of strength when hitting through a target. It exposes how tense one can get, how the stance goes away, how it becomes sloppy, how the fist slips off the target, how the body may bounce back, etc. Pad hitting (much like the wooden dummy) becomes the teacher and exposes areas for improvement.

Part 2 reviewed the concept of the "magnetic zone". This concept defines when the WT fighter must close the gap, getting to his opponents as quickly, as safely and as offensively as possible. As always, I encourage multiple partner switching as the magnetic zone would differ for each partner.

We then introduced the concept of the un-cooperative partner. In conventional martial arts and in wing chun, the partner is fairly cooperative. Even when the attacker throws a hard or fast attack, there's a mutual allowance for the partner to "do his drill". Considering that for 99% of us, being thrown a completely resisting opponent is a bit much of a jump in difficulty, why not bridge this gap a little bit?

We broke it down and let the partner resist in certain ways to see how the WT fighter would react. For example, when the partner covered up, would the WT fighter keep punching the arms or look for other targets? would he freeze as well and not know what to do? Would he break distance or would he close distance? etc.

Overall it was a good night. Flew by like that.

Until then.