Nino bernardo

The fine art of intelligent laziness

By Nino Bernardo

Sometimes people scratch their heads when I describe wing chun as “the fine art of laziness,” particularly when they have seen sweat pouring off my students at a class or seminar. Let me use this column to explain what I mean, first of all by defining the word lazy, then with a few stories and tangents.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines lazy as an adjective meaning “1 unwilling to work or use energy. 2 showing or characterized by a lack of effort or care.” The part of this definition that we are interested in now is the first section. My point becomes clearer if we adapt it to “unwilling to use excessive energy.”

I remember that I once gave a seminar in Kentucky on “the art of laziness.” One girl put her hand up and said: “We don´t need you to teach us about laziness, we´re experts already!” Of course, everyone laughed.

My answer that day was that if you hate doing the washing up, sometimes it´s easier just to do a little bit every day. If you just leave it, it eventually builds up into a huge pile and it becomes a massive job to get rid of it all. The longer you leave it, the more energy it takes to get rid of it. In other words, if you´re going to be lazy, you´ve got to be smart about it. Laziness combined with stupidity is a fatal combination.

Successful people often do exactly what is needed and nothing more. They don´t waste energy by doing what is unnecessary. In the words of our adapted definition, they are “unwilling to use excessive energy.” This is what I call being lazy and intelligent and is the kind of mentality we need to strive for in martial arts. We need to do just enough for a technique to work, but not so much that we get too tired to continue training.

As an example of what I mean, when we are practicing any technique, we should try and cut out all unnecessary activity. This could include bobbing up and down in our stance, shuffling our feet, twisting our shoulders, biting our lips, nodding our heads and so on.

Another way of appreciating what I call the art of laziness would be to speak to the school teachers of Ronaldinho, David Beckham and other star footballers. Ask them if they were good students. Of course, most of their teachers would say that they were very lazy and always had a ball at their feet.

In other words, these rich, successful footballers were perceived as lazy (unwilling to work or use energy; characterized by a lack of effort or care) when they were young. At the same time, though, they were developing amazing ball skills through a huge amount of daily practice, which nobody, least of all themselves, thought of as hard work.

When these footballers were young, they no doubt used to just kick a ball around for the pleasure of it, without any fear of failure and without having any ulterior motive. In the words of the dictionary, their years of practice before being discovered would have been “characterized by a lack of care.” .

If training is fun and literally carefree, you don´t think of it as being work or a chore and you just keep doing it. In fact, you can´t get enough of it. Your boss or your parents or your lover might think you´re being lazy for going to the kwoon, rather than doing something else, but are you really?

A couple of old sayings will hopefully help me explain my point from a different angle. There´s a story about a student who asked his teacher to explain the secret of happiness. The teacher, an old man, thought for a while and said: “Two words. Correct decisions.”

The student pondered this for a while, then asked how we should make correct decisions. The teacher said: “One word. Experience.” Again the student thought about it. He asked how we should get experience. “Two words. Wrong decisions.”

Another variation on this is a saying which is popular with comedians. “Don´t worry if you die on stage, you keep dying all the way to the top.” Musicians also say that there are no wrong notes in music

To bring all my points together for a moment, I believe that we shouldn´t be afraid of making mistakes when we train. At the same time, the atmosphere at the kwoon should be carefree, playful and enjoyable. Having said that, we should try to cut out all superfluous movement, whatever technique we are playing with, in order to avoid wasting excessive energy. And that is what I mean when I describe wing chun as the fine art of intelligent laziness.

Nino Bernardo will be available to discuss these ideas in further depth at his Spring seminar in London.