Snake vs Crane Wing Chun

Philip Bayer: Make the Punch Count

By Steven Moody August 9, 2018 Leave a Comment

…it all becomes useless if you do not have sufficient punching power.
Philipp Bayer, Wing Chun Illustrated

Wing Chun Illustrated makes some of its articles available on its site and this article from 2016 is a must-read. In it, Sifu Philipp Bayer makes the fundamental (and really, it should be obvious) point that without punching power, you have nothing. You can be amazing at Chi Sao, but ultimately, Chi Sao is about learning to get through obstacles in order to hit. But if your punches have no power, what good is it to get past obstacles. Chi Sao is not teaching you to evade getting hit — its teaching you how to get past the opponent’s defenses (instinctively, thus at high speed) so you can knock them out or otherwise incapacitate them.

I think Bayer is one of the clearest and most to-the-point writers on Wing Chun. This is somewhat ironic since he’s German and English is his second language. However, I lived in Germany for two years and I found most Germans speak excellent English, since they all learn it in school from an early age. But Mayer’s clarity comes more from his mastery of the language and more from his mastery of the fighting technology and his no BS approach to trying to communicate its secrets.

Many thanks to Wing Chun Illustrated for making this article available.

Make the Punch Count: Power Development (Part 1)

Movie Fights: Liang Yang vs Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill

By Steven Moody July 30, 2018 3 Comments

“If anyone was to be a Jedi, it’s Liang. He is insane.”
Daisy Ridley

Liang Yang is a Chinese stunt person/actor who has worked on movies such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Skyfall, and Game of Thrones, where he served as Pedro Pascal’s (Oberyn Martell) stunt double. Most recently, he appears in the excellent fight in the bathroom in Mission Impossible: Fallout, where he simultaneously beats the craps out of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and August Walker (Henry Cavill), the American CIA assassin.

Predator Armor Training

By Steven Moody July 23, 2018 Leave a Comment

“Asymmetrical Adrenal Stress Scenario Based training has proven to be the very best and quickest way to overcome the negative effects of the adrenal rush and even to use the power of adrenaline to fight with the ferocity and force necessary to prevail against a real attacker. Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Symmetrical armored assailant scenario training is where both combatants wear protective armor to spar with one another. Most of the other body armors commercially available are designed for this style of training. Some of them allow pretty hard contact, and there are plenty of effective training systems out there that train this way. But they don’t allow full force strikes to the head and groin, and thus are less effective training for a real fight. Another point is that most fights are typically asymmetrical events where the attacker usually has the psychological advantage of surprise and often of physical strength or some equalizer. Since we do as we train, asymmetric training is the best way to train for an asymmetric event. Asymmetrical training is a cutting edge yet largely misunderstood method of training. Students are trained in the desired skillset to be applied in the fight scenario. The padded attacker surprises the trained defender, elicits the high adrenal rush, and the defender dynamically overcomes the freeze response to fight with full power strikes to vulnerable moving targets. The padded attacker plays a unique dual role of both aggressor and coach to provide a dynamic and effective scenario experience by rewarding when a full power strike is thrown. Thus the fight is not so much a test, but the final fusion where the training all comes together very quickly and effectively. This training permits low training time with maximum retention. Any Body Armor used in such training has to allow for absolutely full force strikes to vulnerable areas to allow the safe experience of “flipping the switch” into and out of the adrenal rush, and the muscle memory to hit with maximum power to vulnerable areas. Anything less than full force is actually much less in this case and greatly reduces training effectiveness.”
Predator Armor website

Our school recently purchased a set of Predator Armor, a technology that utilizes special padding to enable the training partner wearing it to sustain full power strikes to the “head” in simulated confrontations. This sort of training has been perfected over many years in such systems as Model Mugging and the work of Peyton Quinn. They say you “fight like you train,” but in fact, you fight at some weird partially reduced, partially enhanced percentage of your training level, since adrenal stress causes you to lose fine motor control, lose the capacity to fully see and perceive your environment, to be more impulsive, and on and on (see this article for more details), while you may experience reduced pain thresholds, increased strength and ferocity, and other adrenal effects. Its a great idea to find out exactly houw your body reacts.

Here is a video showing my teacher, Greg LeBlanc, working with a training partner wearing the suit. I wouldn’t want to be taking those shots on my bare skull!