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.

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I got a comment on the last post from Ving Chun Kuen via my email:

“Toi Da? Can you give a simple description. His order/method seems interesting.”

Sifu Lam’s method (at least the one that came down to me) was to teach Bong Sau recoveries.  You are attacked from a bad angle and throw up the “wrong” bong (your flank is exposed).

So you have reflex actions you put into your body to attack from this bad position immediately upon finding yourself there.

The order I gave was random.  There are four possible Wing Chun responses to the situation, all attacks: Pak Da, Lap Da, Tan Da, or Toi Da.

You’ll do one and go from there.

For the bong to be “wrong,” the punch must be from the opposite arm.  He punches with his left and I defend with my right arm as a bong (or vise versa).  So in the case above (his left, my right), I turn toward my right while catching him by the wrist with my right hand (no thumb) and pull his arm across his body with my arm completely straight.

The ending position is good for a push with his arm straight, your arm straight, his facing offline, and putting your left hand on his left shoulder with your elbow down you can take position.

“Hello,have you ever heard of a move or drill (or whatever) in Wing Chun called : foon hao ? It’s said that it is used in advanced chi sao but unfortunately I can’t find anything about this move on the internet (hope i pronounce it correctly)Many thanks in advance”

That sounds like Fung Hao (also called Fak Sao) which I believe translates as “neck sealing hand.”

One manifestation of this hand in the forms is in Siu Lum Tao, when you do that sort of chopping out to either side.

As usual with the SLT, this is training two hands at once (no one is chopping the neck of two people simultaneously, except perhaps Austin Powers).

In practice, Fung Hao is not the “best” hand as your go to move (no structure) but it can be useful in various scenarios, usually as an inside action (fast).  One way its used is the defender catches the incoming strike with an inside lap — the lap hand takes the hand offline (defusing it) and then re-attacks.

The classic application (as shown in the primary drill) is the “defender” ends up cutting toward the attacker’s neck with a quick succession of blade hand strikes (driven as always by the elbow) to the larynx or thereabouts.

They called it “neck-sealing hand” because if you do it right, you’ll crack the larynx and their throat will swell and strangle them.

Be careful with your training partners!

We usually apply the strikes to the shoulder muscle for safety.

There are like five variations of this drill, including one where you end up walking past the partner and throwing a strike with the ridge of the hand on the outside of the index finger (opposite the thumb), a little going away present as you escape past your opponent.

The interesting thing to note is that this hand is deprecated.  It is not a grounded strike made with the elbow down, so its efficacy is limited.  This is no money shot.  This is an “Oh, shit” maneuver and not to be relied upon.

Fancy chi sao players (like me back in the day) will do this because its hard to defend against, but in a real fight your opponent might decide to suffer one of these while knocking you out with his ground supported chained attack.

Below Gary Lam demos on my Sifu, Greg LeBlanc.

Its surprising how fast you can get with this technique, but maybe its a bit misleading!

Five fingers of death!

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