For those versed in non-Wing Chun methods but now training in Wing Chun, one of the first things you probably noticed are the relatively few forms vs. the multitude of forms in other arts. In many arts, it is not uncommon to see 10, 20, even 30+ forms making up their respective systems.
So how can an art such as Wing Chun only have 6 forms?
You will hear a lot of reasons for this, but in my opinion, there are 2 main reasons:
-
The simpler that something is, the more efficient it usually is. And the more efficient it is, the more effective it can be.
-
While many arts repeat the same movements but in a different pattern, Wing Chun teaches new and/or expanded concepts with each progressive form.
The first revolves around the basis of “why” a movement is created. The use of any action needs to have a clear-cut reason for being, a realistic function. The more complex the function, the more difficult it will be to use it, and the more basic it is, the better its odds of success.
For example, some arts have a long series of maybe 4 or 5 steps to deal with a wrist grab. In one particular response, an attacker grabs the wrist and the defender grabs the attacker’s wrist. Using his/her hand that was first grabbed, he/she now grabs their other wrist and, through an angle of pressing down, pries the attacker’s hand loose. This is followed up with their own counter-attack.
That is a series of 4 movements in response to a simple wrist grab.
By comparison, Wing Chun’s response would simply be to lash out with punches from the free hand, taking the previous response of 4 movements down to just 1. 4 movements replaced by 1 movement means efficient response, and the more efficient something is, the better your odds will be that it will succeed.
So the concept of functional use is the foundation of how the movements should be approached.
The second factor involves taking those movements and creating a logically progressive path for learning and training them.
When I was learning taekwondo, I reached 2nd degree black belt. By the time I reached this level, I had learned 14 forms which amounted to approximately 25 movements per form. With 14 forms and 25 movements per form, that is 350 movements.
But when analyzing the actual number of unique movements (movements that were not repeated), there were only 48 in a combination of punches, kicks, elbows, knees and grappling actions.
So out of 350 movements, only 48 were truly unique in and of themselves. This means that the remaining 302 movements were really nothing more than the same movements being repeated in a different order than previously learned, and/or performed from a different side, preceding/following another movement previously learned, etc.
Now, I will not say that Wing Chun does “not” incorporate a bit of repeated actions, because it does. One look at all the forms and you will see various movements being repeated throughout most of them. However, these “repeats” are not for amassing a storehouse of actions; instead, they merely allow us to transition from one action to another, as well as expanding on how the concepts can be used in different ways.
So while there are similarities between the repeated movements, they still have a real purpose.
In plain English: We keep things simple in order to make it more reactive, and we do not amass a storehouse of movements merely for the sake of trying to learn movements. If you focus solely on trying to learn a lot of movements in order to deal with every possible attack, what happens if you are attacked with a movement you have not learned the defense to?
Focusing only on learning the movements without the concepts that makes them work in the first place is termed as ”movement-oriented,” and this type of training is self-defeating. It can take years of training to learn every movement associated with just a few different attacks.
Instead of being movement-oriented (which is a complex action), Wing Chun is “concept-oriented” (which is a basic action). By not re-hashing previously-learned actions over and over, and by learning “universal” responses, the same concept be applied to a variety of attacks without having to learn new movements for each and every of them.
One example is kicking.
By learning the concept of “how” to kick, the concept can now be applied to jamming an incoming kick so that it cannot reach you (called Jeet-gerk or “Jamming-kick/ Stop-kick”). We can also “explode” our steps, as well as use the kicking concept to wedge the legs into the opponent’s legs in order to disrupt his balance, thereby bringing us into our preferred range.
One concept (kicking) that suddenly has 3 different uses.
This is the overall nature of Wing Chun and why we have so few forms. It is this reasoning that keeps Wing Chun simple, which in turn makes it efficient.
email2friend