Nino bernardo

Sensitivity and attention to detail in wing chun

By Nino Bernardo

It´s very difficult to study the whole system of wing chun all the way through because there´s a thing called life that keeps getting in the way. My sifu, Wong Shun Leung, used to say that it would take at least one lifetime of full-time study to really get to grips with wing chun and maybe more.

However, if you stick with wing chun through thick or thin, you will find some of the best parts of the system come once you´ve reached a certain level of maturity. In this month´s column, I´m going to talk about two of the rewards that come to those who enjoy training enough to get to a fairly good level.

One of the rewards is increased sensitivity. Of course, sensitivity is something natural and we all have it. Wing chun builds on that. The kind of sensitivity we develop is that of an expert at chess or poker, who can start to read the character of an opponent through the way they are playing.

If you have spent a lot of time in a wing chun kwoon, you slowly learn to blend in. You develop your own vocabulary of techniques and your own criteria for thinking about chi sao. This means that you should be able to pick up many important aspects of the character of your training partners within the first 30 seconds of chi sao. I believe that chi sao heightens our natural awareness because it is based on touching another human being, something which is often thought of as uncomfortable.

Of course, it´s also worth bearing in mind that another skilled practitioner will be reading your own personality through their sense of touch in the first 30 seconds of chi sao. After 30 seconds have elapsed, this ability seems to fade and you get locked into the game. As I´ve mentioned before, one of the tactics at the higher levels is to feed false information to your training partner once the game gets underway.

Another reward for spending a lot of time in a wing chun kwoon comes from the attention to detail we develop. For example, a lot of what I call spastic spasms can be brought to the surface through training. These include telegraphing moves, twitching, flinching and strange facial expressions such as biting your lip or blinking just before executing a technique.

As I´ve mentioned before, there´s no room for what is commonly called “niceness” in a kwoon. We must be honest with ourselves and our training partners. It is only through brutal honesty that we are able to eliminate all these spasms, which we are rarely aware of in everyday life.

Of course, there´s always a risk that a beginner will walk into a kwoon and think that the instructor and the senior students were born with their sensitivity and their attention to detail. It´s up to the experienced practitioners to explain to the beginners that they were only able to reach this level by making a lot of mistakes and taking a lot of wrong decisions.