Editorial

Do the movements we use for fighting come from the forms?

In outer *ing *un people make it easy for themselves and resort to what appears likely: the forms and the movements they contain.

If one breaks down the entire movement sequence of a form into smaller and smaller units, this dissection process exposes individual movements which are then practiced separately and without reference to any contact, which turns them into “techniques”.

The result is a store of solutions (“techniques”) with which one hopes to resolve a suddenly occurring attack situation.
To put it more forcefully, we might say that one prepares a certain number of standard answers and drills them in, in the naive expectation that when attacking, the opponent will helpfully pose a question to which one has assiduously practiced the answer.

And to compound this misconception, most martial arts only take into consideration their own (distinctive) attacks, with which no thug in the street will attack us because he is unfamiliar with them.

Or they focus their training on attacking techniques that might have been used by the local martial arts styles in their own specific region of Asia a few hundred years ago, but are not usual in the west.
Yes even if the drilled-in answers actually did have something to do with currently common attacks, this would not help us much either.
It is not only movement researchers who know that in reality, there can never be two identical movements. (Not even the same attacker is able to reproduce his attack exactly). This means that even if the assailant attacks us with the technique for which we have prepared ourselves in class, his “movement question” will not fit our “movement answer”.
There can be hardly any teacher to whom this has not happened: we have just made a picture-book defence to a student's attack, and proudly want to show this “movement answer” to our expectant class. However, the demonstration goes wrong because our “opponent” is unable to attack twice in this same way.
That is why I already abandoned this teaching approach decades ago.

Every living movement is unique!

Answers learned by rote not only fail for this reason, however, but because we are unable to retrieve answers stored in memory quickly enough. Usually they occur to us at home afterwards, when everything is already over.
Men are familiar with this from flirting. Learning clever chat-up lines by heart at home to impress the ladies does not work. You find yourself sitting there like an ungainly fool, contributing nothing to the conversation but merely waiting for a suitable moment when you can squeeze in your clever line at all costs.
Wit and harmonious small-talk are a quite different thing.
When it comes to “fighting” communication, this is where weight-training come to the fore: using brute force, it is sometimes possible to make a technique (ready-made answer) that does not fit “fit”.

Quite clearly this is more of a brawl than a matter of effortlessness, lightness and elegance. There is no need to practice a martial art to achieve this.
It is a widespread misapprehension that we learn the forms and their movements so as to apply them in a fight. 

It is clear, for example, that the 1st form does not have a collection of techniques against the standard attacks that we might nowadays expect on the street. This movement form is at the start of a beginner's training, so that he “empties his cup” and starts from the very beginning if he has previously practiced another style.

Contrary to the thinking in outer *ing *un, the purpose of the SNT is not to teach him movements he should use for fighting by applying them.

According to Chan (Zen)-Buddhist thinking, the purpose of the SiuNimTau – and especially its key section, the slowly executed 3rd set – is to teach him how he can learn WT.

The aim here is to use self-observation which is initially outer (visual) and then inner (observing the “muscular sense”) to understand and differentiate his own movements, so as to be able to project himself into the movements of the teacher demonstrating. But this is another matter.

For now let's be mindful that it is not about learning the ideal movements in the forms to use them for fighting.

Let’s remember the adage that my SiFu taught me: “The expert does not apply the techniques, but rather the principles.”

And isn't experts what we all want to become?

Best wishes
Your SiFu/SiGung
Keith R. Kernspecht

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PS: What movements do we actually use for fighting in WT?
This is revealed in the “Coursebook – Inner WingTsun” on pages 27 to 28 (ring-bound edition), and on pages 52 to 54 of the luxury edition “Vademecum”.