MightyBands, home gym system

Saturday, October 3, 2009

The Weakest Link

Pretty unrelated to wing chun, I came across this article regarding chin ups. Now the article gets pretty involved, but I think the first part makes some interesting points. In particular...

...that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. From there, it discusses the idea of grip strength and how that will help you better utilize the other muscles to perform more chin ups. The author stresses that grip strength is a weak point for many and it does hinder the ability to use your other muscles.

Same can be said about our wing chun. If your weakest link is your stance or your wedging force, then you can probably forget about all the fancy pak-da, bong-da, combinations. If you can't even step and punch, forget about all those technician chi-sao sections.

It's easy for ourselves, as students, to get caught up in learning the "cool stuff" and there's a lot to gain from that "cool stuff" but if you don't have the boring stuff down, the cool stuff isn't gonna work.

The same philosophy can be applied to conditioning. I've blogged about this before: Don't just train your muscles but also let your wrists, joints, etc. get used to the increased punching power. If you have strong back, chest, shoulders and tricep muscles but weak wrists..guess what? you'll probably throw so much into your punch that risk injuring your wrist.

Until then.

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