Happy new year everyone! My apologies as it
has been TOO long since I’ve last posted.
The second half of 2013 has kept me away from my blogging adventures but
I’m back and boy do I have a post for you today..
Well, many of you may know this guy, Victor
Gutierrez of the WT lineage (now no longer with the EWTO). I always liked his stuff and here’s a cool
youtube clip that I particularly enjoyed showing off to people who aren’t
familiar with WT.
You can see he’s quite aggressive, yet his
attacks flow well.
But then I saw this clip of him now.
Without any additional context to this
video, I have to say I’m absolutely disheartened by what I saw. RUBBISH I tell you.
It’s really a shame.
And if a guy of his WT caliber produces
crap like that..what’s to say for the rest of us normal folk?
I don’t know if he’s intentionally trying
to wrestle or if this is what his WT looks like a free sparring environment.
The guy is also clearly tapped after as
well.
But let’s assume worst case scenario and
that he was trying to use WT but fell into a wrestling mode. You can quickly
see how fast your energy dissipates during a free sparring situation (not even
a real fight!) and you can see how easily the ‘strength reflex’ kicks in.
I think both of these factors are
absolutely normal and also why I feel there’s a lot of value in sparring.
I don’t think our class does enough of this
and yes, while there are great arguments against sparring, I do think that as a
conditioning exercise or drill, it has incredible value.
If for some reason, we can preach a form
that utilizes a pigeon toed stance as something that builds wing chun structure
or we can justify all the merits of doing tan sao at such and such an angle and
holding it there for a certain period of time, yada yada yada – why is it we’re
so quick to ignore the merits of free sparring?
Like with any drill, sparring has its
weaknesses, builds bad habits, etc but at the same time, it also brings about
many other benefits (adrenaline, uncooperative partner, reveals how fast the WT
skills fade, etc).
I’m curious to know your thoughts in the
comment section.
Until then.
1 comment:
Hmm, what can one say? Maybe it was supposed to be an easy session to convince the practitioner of another style. The pace quickly changed and further action was abandoned with a high-five.
On the other side, I personally think that even, yes even martial artists are human! :-) We can have a bad day. Go to a meetup after having received bad, depressing news. Not feeling well, yet trying to make it to a session.
Who knows, it is useless to guess the real reason behind the less than stellar performance.
But don't forget; Athletes train years towards their participation in the Olympic Games, start and completely mess up. It happens.
The leader of an organization might have to be a bit more careful about how they appear in social media. You can't prevent everything, but you must work on controlling your image.
If you add the human component, if you take away mysticism, if you admit that you can be beaten, people won't judge a bad performance as harsh.
Maybe an extreme example, famous heavyweight champions had horrible fights, got knocked out. But due to the allover performance in their career, they are still for all time heavyweight champions.
Make sure you know who you are, a teacher or a fighter. Win fights or create progress in your field of expertise, the how-to of teaching.
Don't try to be everything!
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