One of my students is about the graduate from UC Berkeley and move back to LA, and I don’t know if he will continue his training, so I’m trying to sort of wrap it up for him and tie all of his skills together in a nice bow and make him as ready as possible for a real life encounter.
He’s been training with me for a few years, but only during the semester and only an hour or so a week, so let’s call it about the equivalent of a year of training in a normal Wing Chun school, minus access to a dummy or poles or most other equipment.
We use some striking pads and a shield a little bit but that’s about it.
We train in our street clothes, which we do by necessity but I also think it helps make it more natural. I usually train at Greg’s school in street clothes as well, even though this often often ends with me a sweaty mess.
I’m pretty proud of how far my student has come along. The whole thing has been an experiment of sorts — whats the best way to teach Wing Chun. I taught them the forms (SLT and Chum Kiu) but we do them pretty irregularly (I would be shocked if they do them at home). We only train a half an hour at a time (my lunch break).
Since I hurt my shoulder earlier this year, we’ve been working around my injury (I can’t do Chi Sao at the moment, really). We have been doing various sorts of slower flow drills.
I demoed some of the drills I’ve been doing in another post, and lately I’ve been doing a broader drill which I adopted more consciously after watching the new Interim Flyweight champ Conner McGregor on The Ultimate Fighter TV Show.
Here is the scene from The Ultimate Fighter.