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Reach is important I don't know about wing chun, but in boxing, arm length (reach) is considered a significant advantage independent of other factors. It's important enough to report the "wingspan" of each fighter before a fight, as part of comparing other physical attributes like height and weight. Generally speaking, many physical attributes are ...

Warm up with slow, high-precision, well-known moves You should warm up thoroughly, ending with light, smooth, slow movements that you've already mastered. From Tom Kurz' article, A Well-Run Workout: The Warm-Up: Warm-up regulates emotional states because the flow of impulses from working muscles (respective motor and sensory nerve centers, actually) ...

Excellent Question, @Jeroen. I have had the same problem for a long time. I am not a Wing Chun practitioner, but this has haunted me all my life throughout my Martial Arts study on all stand-up Martial Arts styles, but specially Aikido and BJJ. The interesting thing is that it was via Aikido and BJJ (and by that I mean, non-striking Martial Art) that I found ...

We utilise a drill where the kick is broken down into four stages. The stages are: Raise the knee (keeping the leg bent) Thrust the kick out, and hold it for a couple of seconds Return the kick to the position attained at the end of step #1 Place the foot back on the floor, so you are back in your stance (place the foot, don't just drop it) This is ...

Practice when you are exhausted. When you are just too tiered to have tension, you will have none. After a while, your body will remember how to do it without tension -- since that is how you trained it. Note that this will not help you learn the movement and might be in fact counter productive to learning. However, once you know the move, it might be a ...

I've been practising both Wong Shun Leung and Mai Gei Wong Wing Chun, and I had the same problems as you in the beginning. In both of these styles, early training was focused on getting the bare basics right. For example, we'd do a drill where we'd apply pressure to our partner's technique (say wu sau for example), just to train being relaxed in that ...

Shaolin (Chi Sim) Weng Chun (which is not the same style as Wing Chun) also has chi sao, although it's a bit more like Tai chi's pushing hands. Chi Sim Weng Chun has chi sao sets (looping through several certain moves following each other) as well as 'free' or open chi sao. It's a practice with semi-relaxed arms 'twirling' around each other where you try, ...

Tension in traditional arts is present and in modern systems as well the cause is common in some aspects but different in others. The nature of human is that if you are subjected to stress, adrenaline, unknown, you will tense up. This is a survival mechanism. Frankly the survival mechanism that animals use now is "freezing" in hopes that the predator will ...

Chi sao can be considered a drill for developing sensitivity to positioning and vulnerabilities within a quasi-sparring context. Under that definition, I would add: Wrestling's head position drills and handfighting, as well as judo's gripfighting all have a similar goal to chi sao (finding a dominant position so that one can attack freely) and emphasize ...