Bring on 2013!

I'm still buzzing off of the excitement from this past weekend's annual Winter Intensive workshop.  We had students from all over come to join us for this yearly staple of CWT.  I do this workshop every year as a way to get people back into the swing of training after the holiday break.  The outline of the workshop I described in the previous blog post and with the exception of a couple time restraints here and there, I was able to get through most of the material.  Day one focused on chi sau, chi sau sparring and practical fighting whereas day two focused on forms and self-defense on the ground.

It was great as always to see the kung fu family come together and train hard!  Check us out on FB and TUMBLR over the next few days to see more awesome images.

My daughter Maria Isabella also made a surprise appearance in her little Bruce Lee tracksuit :) This year is in for a lot of great events - stay tuned!

Long pole instruction part 3 beginning this week

I'm very happy to be teaching the third installment of the WT long pole training program starting this Friday.  The third part of the training program focuses on chi-gwan training which is the equivalent to chi sau training except with the long pole.   I’ve had the great pleasure to learn chi-gwan not only from Grandmaster Leung Ting, but also from three other highly skilled senior masters.  As a result I have developed a very structured and integrated way of teaching these skills to the students.

The first class begins this coming Friday for all our students who have completed long pole 1 & 2.  Once I have finished teaching the four long pole courses I plan on opening a regular long pole practice class for the graduates.  Unfortunately due to the secrecy and laziness of many senior instructors, the long pole skill is a dying art.  We at CWT are looking to change this! 

Week with Sifu Haw Kuo Part 1: WT meets BJJ in cross training

Two weeks ago we had a visit from my junior kung fu brother, Sifu Haw Kuo.  It was a great treat for the students to see their "si-suk" in action.  Sifu Haw taught some private lessons and taught two of my regularly scheduled tutorial classes.  I love exposing my students to different ways of seeing Wing Tsun as I find this is the best way to help them grow.  Sometimes it takes another instructor to say the same thing I say everyday before the students have that "ah ha" moment.  When students are isolated from other instructors and viewpoints they will never have this feeling or have that opportunity to grow.

Training with BJJ guys doesn't mean you do BJJ! We are WT through and through, we are just not afraid to practice with others :)Saturday morning we pretty much hit the ground running when Sifu Haw arrived at 7am.   By 12pm we had already strategized over breakfast and started our first training session. Our first training session was a bit out of the ordinary for WT people.  Once a month I have a BJJ expert come to our fighter class to teach my guys what BJJ people do and what they might try to do to WT people if the fight ends up on the floor.  This was the first time we did it and it happened to come on the week that Sifu Haw was here so the timing was perfect.  We had a private, small group session with one of my students (and Marcelo Garcia BJJ student) Jose Sanchez.

As I can hear the smug & conservative dogmatists squawking now I must qualify this move unfortunately.  I do not teach BJJ nor do I teach my students to do BJJ.  However, the WT "anti-grappling" or "anti-groundfighting" methods are a bit untested in my opinion (which does not imply inferior, just untested).  The WT methods just need to be tested, improved and re-tweaked.  Unfortunately legions of WT instructors teach their students to defend against "takedowns" or dubious ground moves that no expert would do.  WT people need an operational understanding of what a BJJ/grappler is trying to do on the ground. In this way they can better avoid the pitfalls of getting stuck in an armbar or triangle choke when they are applying their WT on the ground.  I have heard funny stories of WT "masters" who were helpless on the ground against WT students with BJJ skills.  These masters did not even know they needed to tap when caught!  

For this reason I want to expose my students to different people and styles in an effort to improve WT's training methods (not change the principles or concepts).  I also want to do this in an effort to change the negative isolationist image of WT into a friendly and more cooperative vibe with other styles.

We worked on throw, positional techniques, escapes and controls on the ground.  The students had a really great time and learned a lot.  At the end of the class Sifu Haw ran the students through 15 minutes of his modified insanity workout.  Soreness was had for days!

More coming soon in part 2!

Kung fu brothers don’t need to sign a contract with each other

Great minds think alike, the matching hair styles were a complete coincidence. Bantam weight and welter weight.

I had a fantastic past week with my si-dai (younger kung fu brother) Haw Kuo here in NYC.  He came to visit me so that we could train, trade notes, strategize and talk shop for our respective and mutual future plans.  One of the main topics we discussed at length is the paradigm shift that is finally occurring in the WingTsun (“WT”) world.  Despite WT’s popularity worldwide, an institutionalized, almost cult-like "closed-off" mindset has been breaking the art apart internally.  But thankfully this is rapidly changing.  A much needed step out of the 70’s and into the modern-age of innovation has arrived at long last!  The students aka consumers now have choices; real quality choices to learn proper WT in North America.  No longer do they need to follow cult-like regulations and pseudo pyramid scheme business structures.  The market is free and performance is now the decider, not a “monopoly” of WT; there are no secrets!  Sifu Haw and I feel honored to be part of this new and happier face of the future of WT.

The future seems so bright now as our vision of creating strategic alliances with top WT instructors and martial artists of all styles is beginning to come to fruition.  With so many plans underway, it's too bad this week went by way too fast.

As a foundation for understanding our vision, one must remember that a Chinese martial arts family can be defined in Chinese as 同門 (tung mun) which this means something like “of the same door (family)”.  Before there were legal entities of martial arts schools and associations, there was only the distinction of being part of the kung fu family.  This had nothing to do with “business” as many students did not eventually go on to earn a living by teaching martial arts.    It would actually be normal for a student to move or leave and begin teaching his own students.  These people would still always be considered part of the lineage of that particular kung fu family.   However as “business” became the motivation and associations sprung into being, suddenly if a business relationship didn’t exist then suddenly the “family” one didn’t either.  This is completely against the tradition of Chinese martial arts!  It’s quite ironic that when enforcing compliance basically through blackmail is the goal, suddenly the senior is your “family member”, but when the business relationship no longer exists they disown you like you never existed (photoshopping (badly) out of photos is not unheard of, as are spurious legal threats).  

Since we both exited from a WT association last year, Sifu Haw and I have created something new in the WT world.  We have created an alliance, namely the Open Alliance Wing Tsun Network.  We did not create it for the reason of installing yet another “institution,” but to establish our vision that WT can only grow outside of the closed and isolationist nature of associations in this day and age.  Our alliance is to abide by a code of progressive thinking and mutual cooperation to finally achieve a mainstream, ethical and moral name for WT in North America.  Associations and academies that continue to trumpet the notion of isolationism will only fall apart in this new age.  If the open and progressive way MMA and many other arts are trained is any indicator, students/customers will go to the schools that remain cutting edge and avoid the ones that operate in the 1970’s mindset.  A martial art cannot grow by putting up the iron curtains and denying the progress of the outside world.

Sifu Haw and I both run our own independent WT schools.  Haw has his Art of WingTsun banner in San Jose, California which he runs with Sifu Marcus Clever; this school has been growing recently.   Sifu Haw has plans to keep growing and potentially to open new branches as well.  We both cooperate with the great Sifu Elmond Leung and in the future potentially also with Sifu Chris Collins of Hong Kong among other top WT instructors worldwide; and all of this is at our discretion! What this allows us to do is to expand our network, access different quality modalities of WT training from top experts across all eras of WT, and ultimately impart this combined rich experience unto our students.  Associations or academies that only follow one stream (most often not allowing their students to train elsewhere with or without permission) ultimately short-change their own students, especially when they claim to be the “only source,” and/or magically create technicians overnight.  People are our greatest resource and isolating ourselves from different perspectives and challenges does not make us grow.  In fact isolation is the death knell of many great institutions!

With this progressive drive to grow our schools and to grow as martial artists and individuals, Haw and I work together for the simple reason that we wish to.  This does not mean that there are any contractual or financial obligations between CWT and AoWT.  In actuality I consider him just as much a member of CWT as I know he considers me a member of AoWT.  We are si-hing-dai (kung fu brothers), and we can cooperate with each other without it being a “business deal.”  The sad thing is that in the modern Chinese martial arts world this is actually almost unheard of, although it was the de facto mode of operation in the old days. But for Haw and I, being martial brothers doesn’t mean we have to control each other or each other’s students.  We invite each other for seminars to expand our students’ horizons, teach each other’s students to help them achieve their goals, share information and train so we can improve our skills, and we manage magically not to get upset that we have different logos on our shirts.  Amazing!

Amusingly, we both have a slightly different presentation of WT and teaching methodology and our programs differ slightly too (though we follow identical concepts, they are expressed differently because we are different people).  Regardless of this fact, we can train and cooperate as we wish, unlike those who have a “financial arrangement kung fu family,” which is somewhat of an oxymoron in any event. Being able to adapt, change and incorporate different viewpoints is the necessary step that is vital to the growth of WT, and indeed it is at the heart of the WT fighting concepts.  I’m proud to be part of this future with the support of Sifu Haw and many other premier instructors of the WT world.

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family” - Anthony Brandt

(Note: I will follow this blog with another detailing my crazy busy week with Sifu Haw.  It was a pretty insane week, with or without guests here in NYC, far beyond the scope of this article)

Are you learning self-defense or ‘assault paranoia’?

In this modern day and age, our “civilized society” has not guaranteed us freedom from barbaric incidents of assaults.  Even here in midtown Manhattan where the neighborhood is gentrified (certainly not the Manhattan of 20 + years ago), things can still go horribly wrong.  On the day after Obama was elected, I myself was the victim of a potential mugging.  Luckily I was able to keep the situation as calm as possible and when I was forced to physically defend myself it came as a shock (which was my strategy) to my would-be assailants. 

The crazy thing is this happened in a relatively busy part of Midtown on a Friday around midnight.  My training worked as it should and I was able to fight them both off and escape without incident.  Having said this, every other time I had to use my martial arts skills it was for reasons of ego and “macho libre”, but this was the first time I was ever assaulted.  I’m very thankful to my Si-fu for his Blitz Defense program which allowed me to maintain a “hidden guard” or fence while I convinced these guys I didn’t know anything, allowing my attack to be a shock.

Having said that, other New Yorkers who live in different areas of the city may certainly be faced with more opportunities to defend themselves physically.  With this in mind it’s important to ask yourself what you need from self-defense training.  Is it because of where you live, a dangerous person in your life, or occupational (bouncer/security)?  Maybe your reason is just fitness, fun or because you always wanted to be able to “do kung fu”.  Any reason you want to do martial arts is legit, don’t let others tell you why you should want to do martial arts.  If you never fight a day in your life, martial arts is still one of the most beneficial and positive hobbies you can take on.  Don’t let ‘self-defense’ gloom get you down.

The unfortunate downside to modern self-defense training is what I call “assault paranoia”.  Self-defense training should give you the tools to reasonably defend yourself (minimize injury, avoid potentially fatal situations) in a realistic situation.  This doesn’t necessarily always mean a physical confrontation.  Verbal de-escalation, awareness of escape-routes, and even decent enough cardio to run, may be the best additions to self-defense training one can have.  I firmly believe as a self-defense instructor these aspects need to be covered in addition to the physical martial arts preparation and training.  The Boy Scout motto of “be prepared” is perhaps the best way of viewing self-defense in all its potentialities, not just the physical confrontation.

Having said all this, I’ve also been around the old martial arts block for a while.  I have unfortunately seen some of my close friends join martial art schools for the sake of learning self-defense only to become paranoid agents of constant impending doom.  These martial art schools took my otherwise mentally stable friends and turned them into borderline emotionally disturbed people who fear ninjas, soldiers and gang-members waiting for them at every intersection of 42^nd Street.   If martial arts training is making you more paranoid (contrast that with “more aware”) of potentially dangerous situations then I have news for you:  it’s not improving your quality of life.  Quite the opposite, you are living your life in complete worry and fear of something that may never happen.  Often this “assault paranoia” is the reason why people choke when they actually need to defend themselves.  Without a healthy balance of reality and self-confidence, one is left a victim to the whims of other people as well as their own irrational fears.

I recall recently a visitor to my school who had trained at another martial arts school.  His instructor was a former military officer in Africa.  The visitor related a story that he had once successfully thrown his instructor to the floor and rather than being commended for his good work the instructor threw an imaginary grenade at him and said “now what?”  Due to the fact that the student had no military experience he had no idea what the best course of action was.  Then his instructor scolded him and proudly told him what he “should have done” in this extremely common situation (that’s called sarcasm folks).  This was just one incident of many similar ones.  At the end of the day the student realized he was not doing military combatives or tactical training – he just wanted to learn martial arts.  Every time he successfully did something in class, he was told he was wrong because hypothetically someone could jump him from behind, pull out a switch-blade etc. etc. etc.  Enough was enough!

This is not in any way to downplay the importance of military combatives or tactical training.  I am a big fan of modern combatives and very interested in all these aspects as one of my good friends, Sifu Chris Collins is one of the top guys in that field.  My issue is with overzealous instructors turning otherwise normal people into paranoid victims of their training.  There are countless videos of tough guys beating the snot out of their students in an effort to toughen them up to the "realities" of the street.  This is in fact just a lack of understanding of the role of educator and of proper teaching modalities.  What they are doing in reality is unleashing their own insecurities on their dedicated yet non-resisting students.  At the end of the day the students lose.  The poor students of these tough guys are still unable to defend themselves properly, just with a lighter wallet than before and a bunch of bruises to compliment their poor souls.

If only instructors would put their students first and not their own ego and need to dominate in the forefront. An instructor is only noteworthy if his students eventually surpass his or her skill.  I would add that an instructor is also noteworthy if they don’t impose their own mental anguish or insecurities on their good-faith students.  Leave them better than when they came!