Wing Chun - Pros and Cons

[pvwingchun]

This is not meant to be an aggressive "burn" post, saying that Wing Chun is useless or anything like that.

This usually means it is.

This thread, however, is about the pros and cons of Wing Chun, and I noticed a lack of cons (and all styles have cons...).

You offered no pros only cons.

All of this is an account of a particular high-contact match I had against a very good Wing Chun practioner whom I respect very much.

Your opinion of good Wing Chun is probably very different than mine.

The last important factor in the fight was that, though muscular, young, and in good shape, he just wasn't used to fighting for as long as boxers are. By the end of the fight he was exhausted while my boxing conditioning had me still a fresh fighter.

Being young, muscular and in good shape does not make a good Wing Chun man. We train our students to end the fight in 10 seconds or less to go any longer on the street is not a good idea. The ring is not the street and the Wing Chun people I know while in good shape would be exhausted after a minute or so, we would never allow a fight to last that long, if we could help it. Training for the ring is totally different.

Recently I sparred with a man in excellent physical shape with over 8 years of Wing Chun experience (and you could tell, watching him warm up. His techniques were very crisp).

Once 8 years means nothing, I know people who have been in Wing Chun a long time and couldn't make it work if their life depended on it they are there for different reasons. Being crisp means nothing either.

Since Wing Chun is not a long range striking style like boxing can be, but more of a medium/close range style, it was surprisingly easy to keep out of his range while continually hitting him with good boxing punches.

A good Wing Chun man would never allow you into this range where you are effective. He would either stay out of your range or get inside and take that away also. Wing Chun needs a bridge to fight and without that bridge there is no fight. A good Wing Chun man would simply have stepped out of your range instead of standing and trading punches with a boxer.

When I opted to go in close now and then, we did end up both trading blows and he managed to get a number of shots in (for obvious reasons).

We don't train to trade blows we train to end the confrontation. The game you are talking about is totally different than what the Wing Chun I train is used for, many of my techniques simply could not be used in the ring. I know it is cliche but they are simply to dangerous and are not intended for the ring.

One thing that became prominant in the fight was that he had not experienced the feigns and deceptive techniques that boxing entails.

You fake it creates an opening and expends energy which a good Wing Chun man takes advantage of. Everything thrown at us is considered a strike and therefore countered as such. Therefore we don't sit back and wait, we attack on any movement stepping in and breaking your structure which it is obvious your opponent did not do or you would be writing an entirely different post.

Again, this is not a burn post about how bad Wing Chun is and how greate boxing is, so please don't go nuts with counters to everything I have said here.

I realize this wasn't intended to be a burn post but you offered up some very weak examples of Wing Chun and its uses. Besides it sounded like a "burn" post right from the start.

[Drunken Monkey]

c'mon, be fair.

 

all he did was recount an experience he had.

 

i have to say my first time with a boxer was probably worse than that...

 

even now, i have a severe range problem

 

but i guess that's cos i'm only little.

[pvwingchun]

I was being fair. One experience does not represent all of Wing Chun which was how he portrayed it. I could have been a lot harder but I wasn't, I was very fair. I could have turned what he said around put in a few different words and put any art in there instead of Wing Chun. I just get really tired of hearing the same stuff about Wing Chun when somebody has one or two experiences.

[Guy_Who_Fights]

*sigh*

 

pvwingchun, your's is exactly the kind of post I was hoping to avoid. Allow me to address your points one at a time.

 

1. It was not a burn post. I kept mentioning that because it is only text, not me speaking. Therefore it is very easy to misread a post and see it as an immature attack (a criticism that we all, as martial artists, have encountered at one time or another in real life).

 

2. I did not offer only cons, I did obviously (at least I thought it was obvious) give my opponent credit for certain things such as his skill when we were at close range. However I did focus mainly on the cons because everyone else seemed to be focusing on the many pros. I am aware of the pros in Wing Chun, but felt that the thread needed to be balanced out a little. I kept mentioning that it was not a burn post in hopes that it would be understood that balance was the reason for mentioning cons.

 

3. Why would you insult an opponent you have never seen? Indirectly this comment on my opponent not being any good is an attack on my personal skill. Since mine and my opponent's skill are nothing I can prove here, I don't particularly mind the attack and shrug it off. However, please try not to insult people here in the future, this is a friendly forum.

 

4. I pointed out that he was muscular, young, and in good shape to wipe away any possible assumptions that this man was A) a teenager or younger, or B) a father who only participates in classes when he has time apart from work and his family. I was trying to get the point across that he trains for strong strikes and trains daily in his techniques - not once or twice per week with no weight training. Also, being able to end a fight in 10 seconds is great, but I tried to very clearly point out that, having a personal style of fighting that gave his Wing Chun strategies and principles some adversity, he was unable to end the fight so quickly. Since I was able to dictate how long the fight lasted, I was able to let the fight last until he became tired and I thus gained a good advantage. Even Bruce Lee wrote extensively about the unrealistic ideas inherent in the martial art community about how short a fight is. His crippling back injury came during one of his intensive workout routines to improve his strength and endurance. He developed these new routines after his legendary fight to earn himself the right to teach whites and blacks - he found himself exhausted after a fight that lasted 2-5 minutes (this is the range of the different accounts of how long the fight lasted).

 

5. Some people can't make it work, but then some people can. So why again accuse someone you don't know of being a poor fighter? I was merely trying to illustrate the amount of time and effort he had put into Wing Chun, as well as his skill. This was all to eliminate any assumptions that this was someone who had only been training for a few months.

 

6. He was obviously more than willing to let me into his most effective range, but I stayed out of that range. And that was a big problem for him. That was the point I was making. If my effective range is greater than his, and he stays out of my range, how on Earth is he going to hit me? (let alone defeat me within 10 seconds) I mentioned that he continually tried to get in close - to his most effective range - but it was very easy to keep him at bay with the lengthy boxing jab. He obviously didn't just stand there for 9 minutes while we pumbled each other, we all know this is not what a fight between two skilled fighters is like. We stayed out of one another's range until he decided to attack me or I decided to attack him. The point was I was able to attack him while staying out or almost entirely out of his most effective range, and when he attacked me I was able to easily keep him out of his most effective range.

 

7. When I said we 'traded blows' I meant that I was able to hit him while in close, but he was also able to hit me. He indeed tried manipulations and such while I was in close, and did not simply let his hands fly while taking an equal amount of punches squarely on the jaw. I was giving him and his style credit, illustrating that my boxing did not have the advantage inside that it did at long range. Also, the only techniques we ruled out were eye gouges. He had gloves that did not hinder his techniques the way boxing gloves would have done to him. We were fighting at high-contact, so any techniques that would hurt on the streets hurt when he landed them. In fact I took a good punch to the throat during a mid-range exchange with him.

 

8.

Everything thrown at us is considered a strike and therefore countered as such.

This is exactly the way someone throwing a feign hopes their opponent will react. When he tried to deal with the false attack as though it were real, I changed the attack into another that exploited the opening created by his attempted defense. A jab lasts only a fraction of a second, and a feigned jab lasts for only half of that time because only half of the technique is thrown. A feigned low jab followed by a real high jab keeps the centre-line occupied, not giving him a chance to move in and break my structure. It is a very fast combination and stops an opponent in their tracks (or else snaps their head back) if they try to rush in in an attempt to deal with the low jab as a real attack. Further discussion on how dealing with a feign as a real attack is the very essence of a feign's goal , as well as all of the possible effective feigning combinations would take up an entire book, so we'll leave it at that. (and again with the personal attack on my opponent's skill as well as my own indirectly...just don't do this so much to others on this forum, please.)

 

9. Stating that it is not a burn post makes it sound like a burn post? If I introduce my self to someone by saying, "my name is Bob," does that make it automatically seem like my name isn't Bob? I have no reason to lie here. Plus, keep in mind that this thread is about the pros and cons of Wing Chun. It is asking for examples of the pros and cons. Most offered pros, so I had no reason to repeat those things. Therefore I offered some cons. I am sorry if my examples seemed "weak" to you, but I am sure you can understand why I did not elaborate, just by looking at the length of my original post.

 

Thanks to Drunken Monkey who has offered both pros and cons in this thread, and accepted my examples graciously and open-mindedly. I always look forward to reading your posts. Keep up the good work.

[pvwingchun]

Guy_Who_Fights

 

I offered up pros to your cons. You offered up red herrings which you presented as pros. You are are right there were an awful lot of pros being thrown out maybe there is a reason for that.?.?.?

 

It seems to me you posted up what was supposed to be a balanced argument and someone called you on it.

 

Good Wing Chun is not effective in the situation you described so yes that is a bad point of Wing Chun. If you want to do a pro and con argument in Wing Chun you have to compare apples to apples. Wing Chun is not meant for the ring in the manner which you were testing it therefore the results you received. Take the gloves off and get nose to nose with a good Wing Chun fighter and try and duplicate the results.

 

I would characterize this as a fighter vs fighter argument and not a pro vs con argument. You were clearly the better boxer by not allowing your opponent to fight his fight. I think you would find it a different story if you got someone with superior skill and took your boxing away from you. What it really boils down to is a superior Wing Chun man will beat a good boxer and a good boxer will beat and inferior WingChun man. This is true of any martial art.

[Drunken Monkey]

whoa...

 

like i said, he just recounted his experience.

 

would you rather he make statements without even trying?

 

* * *

 

i've sparred against a couple of tkd guys, both from different schools.

 

one guy i can pound into the ground because he can't keep me outside of my comfort range. i can see lots of things that he is 'doing wrong' according to how i see things.

 

but then any tkd guy can use YOUR points and turn it into an argument when it wasn't meant to be.

 

i mean, it's obvious that if the tkd guy was better then he would've been able to keep my out of my range.

 

the point is, it doesn't matter whether the other guy is good or not because this wasn't about whether the guy was good or not, it was about what he saw when he sparred against a wing chun guy.

[pvwingchun]

Let me say this again. This is fighter vs fighter argument being made not a pro vs con Wing Chun post As Guy_Who_Fights described. Very simply from the post it was obvious that almost every Wing Chun principle was broken so of course he found weaknesses. If principles were adhered to he would not have those weaknesses. Let's get back to talking about pros and cons not what we are talking about which is a debate based on the better fighter in the ring.

 

I will present the first pro and con.

 

Wing Chun is very effective in a street or self defense situation. Wing Chun is not good in the ring against a boxer using rules.

[Guy_Who_Fights]

Take the gloves off and get nose to nose with a good Wing Chun fighter and try and duplicate the results.

Why would I get nose to nose with him? One of the major points was that keeping my distance gave me a distinct advantage.

 

I was stating my opinions of the pros and cons through the example of one particular fight experience I had. If you're going to rip me apart for using that method, don't forget to rip Jesus apart from teaching through parables, which is the exact same thing same thing.

 

Also, I never said I was presenting a blanaced argument, I stated quite clearly that I was stating cons to balance out the thread, which was mainly pros.

 

And again, we were not fighting by boxing rules. It was basically a street fight with no eye gouging (hence he was allowed to hit me in the throat). And if we got into a clinch, there was no referee to break us up - we kept fighting. So your last comment,

Wing Chun is not good in the ring against a boxer using rules

is obviously true, but it does not apply to the match I spoke of in the slightest.

 

Anyway, that's enough of this for me. Write whatever you want as a response, I am finished checking in on this thread, so I won't see it to defend it. This is becoming more like a senseless bickering session - something other forums have enough of. I think we can spare this one and keep it a good forum.

[cymry]

Everyone has the right to post their opinion. Stop biting their heads off when they do.

[Thuggish]

wing chun, like everything else- is different with each fighter because some people are better than others at fighting. with a good teacher, a good student/fighter, and a good knowledge and capability- wing chun can be devestating on the street. but the instincts have to be there- the killer blows have to come like that. remember that on the street anything can happen to anyone- a kickboxer might demolish the guy with wing chun in one kick, the boxer might pound the guy to death (which is something boxers are incredibly good at- they do it all day), or the wingchun guy could hit him in the eyes or throat and call it a fight (after hitting a few more times.) it is very hard to judge anything on the street- and honestly, nothing prepares you for a street fight fully untill youre in one. fighting in the ring is close, actual cage fighting is as close to street fighting as it comes. personally, id trust less idealstic, if you will, styles- like boxing where you pound things. dont get me wrong, im a fan of wing chun- but if its me against some guy, id rather be a muaythai badass who can punch and kick things super hard than in wing chun.. especially since i still know to hit vital areas like his throat. thats what wins street fights.