Its time to check Paul’s learning progress. If he has been practicing regularly there won’t be a need to prepare for this. Just do it on the fly, setup the phone and hit record.

Perform 5 sets of the sequences below. The 1st set is like a trial run to get into the flow, the 2nd and 3rd go at a smooth even pace, and the last two sets the timing can vary if you are visualizing an application, or demonstrating control of space and lines, even as you are using power.

6-Blocks one after another
Step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 6-Blocks.
Then step forward with left leg, perform single left hand 6-blocks.
This is Set-1, repeat for 4 more sets.

6-Blocks in Sequence
Step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 6-Blocks 5 times in a row.
Then step forward with left leg, perform single left hand 6-blocks 5 times in a row.
That’s it.

6-LH, 3-WS, 3-NS one after another
Step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 6-LH.
Repeat for the left side.
Next step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 3-WS.
Repeat for left side.
Finally, step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 3-NS.
Repeat for left side.
Repeat above for 4 more sets.

6-LH, 3-WS, 3-NS in one sequence
Step forward with right leg, perform single right hand 6-LH, followed by 3-WS and 3-NS.
Repeat for the left side.
Repeat above for 4 more sets.

6-ES
Step forward with right leg, perform 6-ES.
After ending right 6-ES your left leg will be forward; now perform left 6-ES
Repeat 4 more times.

That’s it. In future progress check we will examine the 2-handed versions of 6-Blocks, 6-LH, 3-WS and 3-NS. We may also look at the long pole.

Do you want to be soft?

Or do you want to be hard?

Or somewhere in between?

And no, this is not a post about erectile dysfunction…………..

Maybe its because I learned Tai Chi first that I somehow ended preferring the soft approach. However, saying that one wants to learn the soft arts won’t get us very far.

Why?

Tofu is soft. So is noodle, wet or dry. But have you seen anyone get hurt by tofu or noodle?

On the other hand take a strand of wire. A wire is soft in that it can be bent. Put a few strands of wire together and twist them together.

Now they are soft and also strong, resilient. I used to have a few bunches of these twisted wires from an engineering project but I threw them away due to the rust. However, they were useful for conditioning the body.

So to say that you want to be soft is meaningless unless you define exactly what this means.

A useful definition of being soft is to define it as follows :-

i) Bending with external pressure without collapsing
ii) Using sufficient and necessary (minimal) strength to perform the task

This definition allows us to examine what principles and training methods allow us to achieve our training objective to be soft yet functional.

First, we ask the question – what do we mean by using sufficient strength? For example, when performing the Sam Bai Fut section in the Siu Nim Tao are we using just enough strength, too much strength or even strength that is not necessary to do the movements.

From here we can work towards achieving the objective of using sufficient strength. If you are on the right track you will feel that your movements are effortless. Yet when pressured by your opponent your structure won’t collapse.

When your opponent’s pressure is very strong and causes your correct arm structure to deform do you resist or does your arm automatically bend with the force and move into another strategically advantageous position? If yes, then you are like a willow bending with the force and returning it.

This is only the first part of the learning of being soft. The second part is how to use softness to be hard or to focus or amplify the force that you can now harness by not wasting unnecessary strength.

The first part of this post offers an alternative way to practice the Siu Nim Tao.

The Opening sequence serves up a method of compress and release using the principle of converting potential energy to kinetic energy.

For the Punching practice we can redefine the practice as follows :-

2.0 PUNCHING

2.1 Left vertical fist moves to centreline. Ensure the wrist-elbow-shoulder alignment is kept so that the power can move smoothly out. Prime the Dan Tian by compressing it

2.2 Release the Dan Tian and let the left fist punch out naturally along the body’s power line (this is why getting the basic stance correct is important) using the Dan Tian

2.3 Fist change to palm up

2.4 Perform Huen Sao, change into horizontal fist, re-prime the Dan Tian

2.5 Pull left fist back to side of body; keep the Dan Tian primed so that you can punch any time even as you are withdrawing your arm

Repeat for right fist

Learning and practicing individual exercises is an easy way to pick up skills. However, there are some who are like me, prefer to practice a form over a number of solo drills.

All the exercises mentioned in the earlier three posts can be practiced in the Siu Nim Tao form, which for the purpose of illustration I will use the Ip Man version (meaning the version I learned) as reference.

From the three posts we have the following exercises :-

a) Redefining the Learning
i) Huen Sao exercise

b) Redefining the Learning 2
i) Forming the basic stance
ii) Basic vertical fist punch
iii) Using the core to punch
iv) Side body punch (Pin Sun Chui)

c) Redefining the Learning 3
i) Principle of immoveable elbow
ii) Using the core to move the arm in Sam Bai Fut

Below I list the Siu Nim Tao sequence I used to teach to students :-

1.0 Opening
1.1 Feet together, palms up, arms extended
1.2 Perform Huen Sao, change to horizontal fists
1.3 Pull horizontal fists back to side of body
1.4 Open up feet to shoulder width
1.5 Sit into basic stance

2.0 Punching
2.1 Left vertical fist moves to centreline
2.2 Left fist punches out
2.3 Fist change to palm up
2.4 Perform Huen Sao, change into horizontal fist
2.5 Pull left fist back to side of body
Repeat for right fist

3.0 Sam Bai Fut
3.1 Left fist open to palm up, move to centreline
3.2 Slowly move left palm forward until it can no longer move without losing immoveable elbow
3.3 Left palm performs Huen Sao, change into Wu Sao
3.4 Slowly move Wu Sao back towards body
3.5 When Wu Sao is about 1.5 fist distance away from body, change into Fuk Sao
3.6 Move Fuk Sao forward until maximum range without losing elbow placement
3.7 Change Fuk Sao into Wu Sao and repeat 3.4 (for the Fuk Sao sequence perform three times)
3.8 Once Wu Sao comes back the last time, perform Pak Sao to right and come back to centreline
3.9 Execute Jing Jeung
3.10 Change vertical palm to palm up
3.11 Perform Huen Sao, change into horizontal fist
3.12 Pull left fist back to the side of body

Here is how I would redefine the practice of the Siu Nim Tao :-

1.0 OPENING

1.1 Feet together, palms up, arms extended

1.2 Perform Huen Sao, change to horizontal fists. To repeat the Huen Sao exercise, turn both fists so that the palms face upwards, open up the fists into open hand, and repeat the Huen Sao drill for 10 reps

1.3 Pull horizontal fists back to side of body

1.4 Open up feet to shoulder width

1.5 Sit into basic stance – check knee bent, check adduction, check tailbone tuck in, check Dan Tian configuration, check upper body

1.6 Open up both fists, extend arms forward and do Huen Sao as per 1.2. First hold the body posture and focus on Huen Sao. Later, as you become more familiar the Dan Tian should connect even as you do Huen Sao (do you feel the connection? Feel the power?)

This is the first part of how we can redefine the practice of the Siu Nim Tao.

P.S. – the part about doing the body posture can be a challenge even when I taught it in person so not to worry if its something that you don’t get right away. But like learning to ride a bicycle you just keep at it and success will come.

In Part 2 I mentioned to learn how to punch using the Dan Tian. This practice can be quite a challenge but doable as long as you stick to the practice.

In Part 3 there are two things a beginner should focus on.

The first thing is understanding the principle of the immoveable elbow. The easiest way to learn it is by practicing the 6-Blocks.

However, Block-2 is a technique that many Wing Chun styles do not have so we can reorder the six movements exercise into a five movements sequence using techniques that are found across Wing Chun styles as follows :-

Block 1 –> Block 6 –> Block 4 –> Block 5 –> Block 3 –> Block 1 and repeat.

Block 2 comes from an old style Wing Chun that I learned and is a technique that is commonly found in many other styles whether Southern Shaolin, Karate or Taekwondo. It can be useful when a particular problem arises in the practice of Poon Sao.

The second thing to practice is to take the Sam Bai Fut section and practice it with the use of the Dan Tian to move the arm back and forth. If you have practice how to use Dan Tian to do punching then this would be easier to practice. If not, just keep at it.

And that’s the end of Part 3.

We begin our learning by loosening the arms, training them to be like a willow branch. As the training moves along, we can convert the property of softness to be like steel cables. This is a story for another day.

A loosened arm facilitates the transmission of force. From physics we know that acceleration is one of the key components of the formula for force. A loosened arm can be used like a whip, picking up speed as the arm moves like a sine wave, then accelerates to snap the power out into the target.

This would be Part 1 of the learning.

Part 2 of the learning takes off in a practice we stand in the basic stance and learn to do the basic vertical fist punch without any force. Just focus on the movement. Learn how the wrist, elbow and shoulder align.

If you get this part, you can extend the alignment lesson by practicing the Pin Sun Chui. This practice helps you to understand the mass component of the force formula.

The next practice would be to learn how to do the basic punch by using the core. In Chinese martial arts we normally say that this is using the Dan Tian.

You can call it whatever you like, just remember that in a basic stance to do a punch means to consolidate the involved parts of the body to move as a mass, mobilize them by using the Dan Tian to move like a whip, then slam the fist into the target.

Using the Dan Tian to punch is not something that comes easily. It takes a bit of practice. Nah, cancel that. It takes a lot of practice, tons of it.

So much for Part 2 of the redefined learning.

In 2015 I released the eBook 2 Dots : Six Learning Steps for Mastering Wing Chun’s Kicking Model.

In the eBook I outlined a straightforward learning process based on what I had learned from one Ip Man lineage that focused on the use of kicks.

I recently met a Wing Chun practitioner whose lineage is from one of the Big Five Ip Man disciples. It gave me a snapshot of the practice of one Wing Chun today. And yes, some of the things I found in the past still persists to this day.

Interestingly, I found that the skills of the kicking model is still quite relevant today even if it was just applied to hand movements. However, I would make some adjustments today to the model with additional insights from some of the older Wing Chun styles.

This is how I would redefine the learning. I would start with a simple course of Huen Sao. Lots and lots of it, focusing on getting rid the arm of unnecessary tension.

This practice can be learned in a minute. A 7 day course of 3 practice sessions of half hour each session per day should address the malady.

I would move on to how to stand in the basic stance. Then go into how to use the core to connect lower body to upper body. Lastly, how to pose the upper body. This takes mindful and effortful practice.

In case learning the basic stance is too boring, try practicing Huen Sao while standing in it. If you keep losing the structure then you need to keep practicing until you can keep the structure.

This would be Part 1 of the learning.

If you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive?

This is a generic type of question so the answer is pretty much any car will do.

If the question is modified to “if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive if you want to have a comfortable drive” then your answer could be a car with plenty of leg room, leather seats and great company.

And if the question is “if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by an autobahn over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive if you want to get there in the shortest possible time” then you would want a high performance sports car with low centre of gravity.

If you then modified the question to if you want to get from Destination A to Destination B connected by a river over a 300 km distance what type of car would you drive then obviously unless there is a road spanning the river you would have to cross by boarding a ferry (assuming that such a service is available) that can bring your car across or ditch the car and go for a boat.

Learning the martial arts can sometimes be like this. There is no one size fits all. You want to find the right vehicle to get to where you want to go depending on whether the destination can be reached via a normal road, a rough terrain, jungle road, river or even ocean.

Similarly, when I wanted to teach Paul how to develop arms that react like the proverbial willow tree branch in that when an opponent applies pressure on his arms they would instantly and automatically absorb, and spring back without hesitation to counterattack thereby optimizing the speed of response by converting the technique into an automated reflex action, I put together the 3-NS training sequence.

What I did not emphasize is to be soft or be like a wet noodle. Instead, the emphasis is only doing it over and over until one can perform it without thinking, without hesitation, from which point the arms are at. Not to mention that one need to tweak and refine as one goes along.

Why did I not put the focus of the training on being soft?

The reason is because to do so would defeat the purpose of training the arms to be like the willow branch. You might be puzzled as to why being soft is contradictory in this case. If you are, puzzle no more. In the old days I would recommend to head to the library or bookshop and go straight to the science section. Nowadays, you just do the search in Google and the AI would throw up the answers.

I first came across the explanation in a book on architecture. And of course, the same explanation can be found in mechanical engineering and physics. Yes, the answer is literally out there in these three areas of study.

When you understand the core principle you would grasp why trying to be soft defeats the purpose of training in this manner and why so many try to be soft yet still miss out on mastering the skill because they are focusing on the wrong thing.

The small, mundane things matter. The RELEVANT, small, mundane things.

In the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the author summarized the conclusion of an article “The Mundanity of Excellence” which examines the excellent performance of competitive swimmers as “….the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.“

In the next paragraph the author continued :-

Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who completed the study, observed: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

The above basically tells us that if we strive to be excellent in our choice of martial arts study we need to break down the learning and practice the hell out of each segment.

However, don’t just blindly practice. As pointed out by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote the classic “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” it is deliberate practice that we desire, not just 10,000 hours of blind practice.

For example, if you desire to be soft in your practice you can’t just will yourself to be soft. More often than not, such wishful thinking leaves one with limpy and floppy arms that collapse under strong pressure.

Reading about how soft should be conceptually is useful, but only just a tiny bit. Instead, what we need is the method.

Yes, there are methods (with varying results) that can help us to attain our goal. The method starts us on our journey and the landmarks indicate if we are on the right path. The baseline references tells us if we have reached our destination.

Every little bit moves us along the path to mastery. The sum of the parts defines our level of skill. So the clearer and more defined your learning is, the higher the chances of you getting it.

For example, it is not useful to just train to be soft. We need to ask why be soft, what is its usefulness, what are the characteristics of functional softness, how do we train it, how do we benchmark our training attainment, how do we know when we have reached the baseline (which begs the question what is the baseline), how do we apply it, how do we refine the softness gained, and so on.

When you treat the study this way sans the style, lineage, personalities, politics, verbiage that typically infests a gathering of humans, you filter out the factors that cloud and confuse the learning.

If you can infuse the learning with science it will give you an independent source to verify against. You may be surprised to know that for all the claims of being scientific, effective, etc many practices are in fact not that scientific nor effective when held up against the light of published knowledge relating to the human body.

At one time I used a work van to do delivery. One day the transmission suddenly lost power and pumping the pedal just won’t increase the speed. I sent in the van to the authorized workshop for repair.

The problem was solved……. momentarily. It came back again and the 2nd repair involved changing a more expensive part. So I thought problem solved, right?

Nope, the problem was not solved. In the third visit it was suggested that a more major repair might be required. I asked if this major repair was carried out would it fixed the problem once and for all. The workshop could not say for sure so the repair was out.

This major repair involved replacing the engine and if this will not solve the problem there could be other unknown issues. The repair could turn into a black hole in which we can keep throwing in money but never solve the root cause. In the end, the van was sold off.

I mentioned this as a parallel example of fixing our martial arts practice. Some of the problems with our practice can be fixed easily by zooming in to the problem area and doing the remedy practice.

However, sometimes the problems are so many that trying to fix them all becomes a major challenge. Where should you begin the remedy? Would fixing one problem create a different problem? Or would fixing a few related problems be a better approach?

I guess this depends on the individual. For some, a piecemeal approach works whereas for some it might be better to throw out the existing practice and start from scratch, not that the latter is any more easier. The reason is that it is not easy to stop the progress obstructing habits just because we decide to stop our existing practice. You simply cannot eradicate the habits acquired from previous practice just like that. More so, if you are continuing to attend class where you have to keep practicing the same habits because these habits are considered good.

Another possible consideration is to work on one’s existing strengths. However, one should not underestimate the pull of weaknesses that unaddressed continues to influence, even drag our attempts to make progress.

In wanting to make progress we should analyze what we know, what we do not know, and what we are not even aware that we do not know. We need to take a bias minimized examination of ourselves, ask how badly we want it, and what we are willing to give up to get it.

Recently I asked Paul to take a look at the Netflix reality series Physical:Asia. There are a number of lessons from the team challenge quests that we can apply to our own learning. For example, in one challenge the first part of the quest was made known, however, the second part was not informed.

The other known information is that each of the 4 teams had to put up 3 participants (out of a team of 6) to take part in the first part of the quest. It is interesting to watch how each of the teams decide who to put into the first quest. One team decided that they will put in their weaker members and keep their stronger members for the unknown second quest. This flew against the strategy of the other three teams to put in strong members to try to win the first quest.

As expected the team that put in the weaker members lost the first quest. However, for the second part their remaining members were now stronger relative to the members of the other three teams so they won the second part. If they had put in their stronger members for the first quest they would have lost the first and second quests. But knowing when not to try to win and where to concentrate their effort allowed them to go to the finals and this team eventually won the final quest as well to emerge champion.

Amongst all the teams in the challenge, the winning team was not the strongest team. Neither were they the weakest. Their only advantage was that the team members had taken part in the earlier two seasons of the Physical:100 challenge so that gave them experience even though in the earlier Physical:100 challenges the winner was one person who had to take part in solo and team quests.

The strongest team in Physical:Asia was Team Australia but they did not make it to the final 4 teams, a shocker considering how well they did in earlier challengers (they had members who were stronger, faster and bigger). Their end of the road came when Team Japan noticed a way they could enhance their winning odds in the battle rope challenge by switching the order of their team members around. Team Australia kept their team members in the same order in the second around. Using this strategy Team Japan beat Team Australia and they were out of the competition.

I would consider Physical:Asia as a textbook for learning how to apply strategic thinking, how to use your strengths and weaknesses, how to coordinate effort, manage timing, when to fight, etc. Use these lessons and apply them to analyse your own learning of your choice martial art.