I've recently reached out to a fellow Wing Chun practitioner because I was planning to travel to his city. I haven't corresponded with him in years, and in our last correspondence, he had asked me for some advice for his training, particularly around him getting "stuck" when working out with people who give him a hard time. I found it interesting to revisit the advice, given my own sense of progress in the intervening 5 years. To my pleasant surprise, the advice had aged pretty well, and it's still predominantly the method by which I continue to develop. I thought it'd be a good idea to share this with folks who might also get some value out of it.---
Hey [redacted] ,
You're doing fine, and shouldn't be too hard on yourself. Just be mindful of the areas you feel the need to improve, without having it affect your confidence.
In any case, you're going through a stage that everyone either has or will eventually go through. We were taught to develop our root and structure to such an extent that it's natural to want to rely on it. But as in with software development [editor's note: we're both software engineers], you gotta know where to spend your efforts optimizing for performance. Your structure has developed to the point where it is no longer the bottleneck, and you have to work on the next bottleneck. And when that no longer becomes the bottleneck, you move on to the next one. Eventually it might come back to structure again. 🙂
As you might have sensed, to key to discovering where your bottlenecks are lies in your "ting jing" [listening energy]. But you have to turn that inwards and listen to your own body. If you listen to your body closely enough, you should be able to feel your own "stuckness" before your opponent. And once you've mastered the ability to listen to yourself, the path forward is simply a matter of experimenting until you find a way to become unstuck, less stuck, less easily stuck, or even stuck for a shorter amount of time. If you can "hear" the difference between these gradients, and you make yourself mindful of what sort of actions, energies, and intents result in which, your body will eventually discover a way forward. If there is one take away from our short exchange, my impression was that rather than being so focused on what you were trying to do to me or prevent me from doing to you, you might instead consider how our exchange, at every level, was affecting your sense of balance, position, and intent. Then be mindful of the circumstances where you were perturbed more and the circumstances where you were perturbed less, as well as those circumstances where you were secure and had the advantage.
As for how this might apply to your personal training, just keep it in your mind from now on as you train, and apply it to all exercises you do. Not only chi sau, but dan chi, lap sau, poon sau, wall bag, dummy, etc. as well. Pay attention to how everything you do affects your sense of "centeredness" and sense of tension throughout your body. Then optimize for maximizing centeredness while minimizing tension. And when you do practice chi sau, try not to go so fast or so hard that you lose your ability to listen to yourself and distinguish between the gradients. Go only as hard and fast as your ability to listen allows you to. Always try to play at that boundary, and over time, the boundary will expand, and your ability to hear yourself will be maintained even under greater pressure.
I hope at least some of this made sense and helps to some degree. I don't claim that this is the best path, but it's the path that I travelled and am still traveling on. Feel free to let me know if you have any more questions.
Best,
Alan
