"YHWC - Striking into MMA"

Ying Hung Wing Chun - Striking into MMA.

 

In the early days of the Ultimate Fighting Championships 1 & 2 the organisers sought to find representatives of every style to compete in a no holds barred tournament to silence all arguments of the age old question of whose style is the most effective when it really comes down to it. 

The event was full of fighters representing many various fighting styles, from Karate and Kung Fu, to Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, to Muay Thai and Penchak Silat.

 

Over ten years have passed since those first events in the early nineties and the sport has come a long way since those early battles between the likes of BJJ legend Royce Gracie and Pancrasion fighter Ken Shamrock or American Kick Boxer Pat Smith and Ninjitsu Expert Scott Morris.  These were true style versus style fights, the combatants were not trained in multi disciplines and didn’t really know what to expect only to be prepared for anything, the early Ultimate Fighting Championships had no weight class either true to the martial arts challenge match ethic.  Of course we all know how a tall gangly Brazilian guy named Royce Gracie managed to defeat larger opponents to emerge as the first UFC world champion and this sparked as much of a re think in martial arts as Bruce Lee had thirty years previously.

 

Over time a new breed of fighter has come along and Bruce Lee’s original concept of cross training martial arts to become an all round fighter has certainly been taken to another level.  It is interesting to note that although there are exceptions to the rule such as Hidehiko Yoshida for Judo or Semmy Schilt for Karate; most modern MMA fighters come from a background of combat sports (in fairness both these fighters competed in a sport capacity.  Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Greco & Freestyle Wrestling are the accepted lynch pins for grappling and boxing or Muay Thai are very much seen as the accepted disciplines for striking in MMA competition.  Is this simply because they are the most effective styles in a skilled fight or are there other more subtle reasons? 

 

Many Traditional martial artists point to the idea that because there are some rules in MMA then their arts are made less effective but my personal opinion is this is simply an excuse to cover what they feel are gaps in their abilities and not a particularly strong argument.  If your training and style stands up then it will be effective against whatever in any set of rules that doesn’t actually remove its basis.  Ok granted if you are a striker and you aren’t allowed strikes to the head in a competition then admittedly that’s a problem but most of these arguments go down to far smaller areas than this like throat or groin strikes being disallowed, if you can hit a small target like the throat surely you can hit the chin???  

 

I feel the reason for the acceptance of Boxing or Muay Thai as THE  MMA striking disciplines is that they train in a manner most realistic to what happens within MMA competition not that their techniques are the most effective.  This is not to say techniques from these two highly respected disciplines aren’t effective only that they are not the only way.  Both Muay Thai and Boxing fighters must modify their skills for MMA competition to deal with takedowns and stand up clinch work and of course in a boxers’ case to deal with kicks and knee strikes, I watch some pro boxing nowadays cringing as they duck and weave imagining what would happen if their opponent could utilise such strikes.  So if these two combat sports can modify their training to suit MMA then why can other martial arts not modify theirs….?  Answer: they can. 

 

For many years Wing Chun Practitioners argued their fighting art couldn’t be fairly represented in combat sports as semi contact proved nothing (I’d agree there) and full contact matches usually employed boxing gloves and took away many of the techniques utilised by a Wing Chun Fighter (true to some extent).  As mixed martial art competition entered the martial arts debate these old arguments dissolved as the early matches with no gloves and later ones with 4oz gloves took away none of Wing Chun’s favoured methods…So why is it still so rare to see competitors from a Wing Chun background? 

 

Grappling skill is one answer and few MMA fighters last long without at least enough ground skill to be able to return to their feet or stop the takedown in the first place.  The question is though, isn’t that a skill any stand up fighter would want to have?? Even for the street in the event of ending up on your back it’s a potential life saving skill.  Few Wing Chun practitioners spend much if any time developing the ability to stay on their feet if things aren’t going so well usually with the misconception that they’d be able to take their opponent out before the fight went near to the ground, the ones that do often have the second problem of not being proficient enough in the art of takedowns to cause their training partners sufficient problems as to effectively train take down defence.  I watched two relatively experienced Wing Chun practitioners doing the first sparring they had done for some time and in under a minute they ended up in a grappling situation, neither with any kind of clue how to progress to a finish or to break back to a position to start striking again; so in a fight then who would have won?  The one who was fitter or stronger? Is that what they spent years training for? 

 

As mentioned earlier training regimes is another answer.  Boxers and Muay Thai fighters are rarely out of shape, their training regimes are tough and involve a high level of conditioning, Wrestlers develop strength and explosive power along with the fitness to survive a match, Judo practitioners are usually reasonably fit and competitors train hard for what can be exhausting tournaments so why is it that many Wing Chun practitioners think they can get away with such light work outs?? Now this is not to say there aren’t some fit Wing Chun guys out their but from what I have seen from up and down the country they are the exception not the rule; is it because Kung Fu is so clever or powerful you will defeat your opponents effortlessly like on the movies?  I actually wonder whether the idea of the little old kung fu master defeating bigger, younger more physical opponents is part of the problem in that it attracts people to martial arts who have already bought into the wrong idea and there are plenty of instructors ready to feed that perception without ever having to prove their own ability to deliver a useable and effective fighting system.

 

 

There are many possible answers to individual examples however I feel the real more complete answer lies deeper in the recent history of so called Traditional martial arts. 

 

What is a Traditional Martial Art??

The term Traditional has come to represent any style that can first trace its roots back a century or longer and often that incorporates rituals and practices of those era’s in order to create a particular ambience in training. If the system does Kata or Forms then it is often perceived as ‘traditional’ purely on that basis. However what I feel it has also come to represent is the stop point in that systems evolution where to copy and reproduce is more important than to test and create and herein is what I believe to be the problem.

 

How many times have you heard the “Yip Man said this” argument?  But beneath every “Traditional” martial art has been a history and evolution of techniques and training methods where someone once decided that this was the most effective method most likely after testing it in a completely real situation where failure could have led to death or serious injury.  The tradition of testing martial art ability is as old as martial arts be it in an arena or on the battlefield.

 

 

 

Challenge matches have always been part of the martial arts culture and go back centuries be it between kung fu schools, local fighters battling to see who was top dog; vale tudo matches in Brazil or duels in Feudal Japan. There are examples of these challenge matches throughout martial arts history, the famous samurai Miamoto Musashi who fought countless duels until he proved his skill the greatest of his time, Kimura who travelled from Japan to Brazil to answer a challenge from Helio Gracie and won with Ude garami which became known as the kimura that we know today. The man widely recognised as the founder of modern Wing Chun; Yip Man took part in many challenge matches himself including a fight with a Choy Lee Fut teacher Leung Sheung that was reputed to have launched his career as a professional martial arts teacher. 

Without such challenge matches a fighting art will stagnate but with them styles can evolve and grow.  The founder of the now accepted “traditional” style of Judo: Jigoro Kano early in his career trained in many schools of Ju Jitsu before founding the “Judo” school which was at the time simply another school of ju jitsu.  However in this school they practised ‘Randori’ (live sparring with safe breakfalling and tapping out) Kano ’s ‘Judo’ challenged other Ju Jitsu schools and beat all the old fashioned kata based systems and later evolved into what became a distinct style: Judo.

 

Within the past thirty or forty years such matches are few and far between. As we have seen in the paragraph above the old masters often had to beat all comers to be accepted as having a high level of skill and only then would their style be accepted as effective, martial arts history is absolutely full of these stories. How many modern day traditional martial artists; many who make bold claims to be masters can boast such a background? Or maybe more to the point how many modern martial artists would risk putting their reputation as an instructor, SIfu, Sensei or indeed Master of a fighting style on the line by showing themselves as not to be the invincible fighters that their students often perceive them to be??

 

 

 

 

Modern Day Gladiators?

There is however one group of modern martial artists who can claim such a background, Mixed Martial Arts fighters.  They take on the best fighters firstly in their area and if they progress then maybe nationally and if they are truly skilled internationally.  The constantly evolving, growing and changing techniques that win MMA fights should make every TMA sit up and take note. Fighting is what gives a martial art its definition, if you learn a martial art to meet new friends or to impress your workmates that’s fine but it’s not why it was developed

and without testing and application it will soon lose its direction and its grip on reality and subsequently so will its followers.

 

MMA competition is the new arena for such challenge matches.  No need to feud or risk prosecution or potentially fatal injury but a perfect arena to test the skills you have spent so long developing.

 

 

When is a Lap Sau not a Lap Sau??

 

Within Wing Chun there seems to be a constant debate as to what really works, ask an MMA fighter with ten fights under his belt and he can tell you with a degree of certainty what works for him without any need for debate.  But now I’ll return to the point of this article, the representation of Wing Chun within MMA competition.  It’s my opinion that Wing Chun is an excellent striking system regardless of where you choose to use it and there is no reason as to why it won’t work in MMA.  However I will add that it very much will depend on how it is trained.   As mentioned earlier in this article the now famous martial art of Judo was once simply a strain of Ju Jitsu that employed a particular set of training methods that eventually saw them become a distinct style.  Brazilian Jiu Jitsu would not be so effective without its ethic of constant live sparring, their techniques are constantly tested under pressure which in turn helps the practitioner understand about timing, set ups, fatigue and adrenalin, all things that many training methods simply lack

 

Wing Chun could have seen that evolution through Bruce Lee but his early death meant that we never really saw what his conclusions would have been, I feel that Jeet Kune Do would have been quite different had he lived to steer its direction. Many times I’ve heard Wing Chun guys voice the opinion that Bruce would have gone back to his Wing Chun roots later in life. However I believe Bruce would have been quite disgusted at the state of the system in the 21^st Century and whether he would have been its saviour or its destroyer is a question that shall remain unanswered. 

 

The Chi Sau Question.

Many Wing Chun practitioners seem to replace sparring with Chi Sau (the famous sticking hands drill) One night whilst training at the club of my friend from a different school of Wing Chun . I was doing some pretty heavy sparring with my training partner Ben.  We’d landed some heavy shots, clinched, struck with knees and generally mixed it up, MMA sparring? No, just sparring in a realistic manner. My friend commented “I didn’t see much Wing Chun going on there!”   I’d applied my structure, my stance, used lap dao, jam sau, man sau and many of the clinch techniques from the dummy form but maybe it wasn’t as pretty as when I did it in chi sau. The timing and sensitivity needed to apply these techniques in full contact sparring was gained in chi sau but your fighting ability will not be learned there.  I see Wing Chun practitioners get more and more involved in the battle of the upper hand in sticking hands and lose all sight of why they are doing it in the first place.  Other martial arts utilise drills to learn certain skills but they don’t see a high level of skill within these drills as a high level of fighting ability, only as a stepping stone.  In wrestling the pummelling drill is important to develop timing for techniques such as ‘duck unders’ & ‘arm drags’ but without the ability to use them in actual live sparring or competition then they are useless.

 

Learn techniques from the forms, use chi sau to develop your awareness and sensitivity, use sparring drills to develop timing and gain live experience and then learn to fight with full trust in your techniques.  When Wing Chun does that we’ll see more and more practitioners wanting to prove their system within the MMA arena not wanting to make excuses as to which rule will prevent them from success.

 

So when will we see Wing Chun in MMA??

 

When I joined the Chu Sau Lei system under Alan Orr I was already involved in both Wing Chun and MMA, had already fought, had a BJJ blue belt and some wrestling experience.  Alan has the same goal as I do which is to prove Wing Chun stands up in any arena and is far from the sick cousin of boxing or Muay Thai when it comes to striking arts.  I would go so far as to argue that technically it actually needs far less modification than either of the two for MMA competition.  Where it really needed its modification was in its training methodology.  I trained in boxing gyms and Muay Thai to gain sparring experience against tough guys whilst trying to utilise my Wing Chun but often entered a wilderness of confused hybridism.  It was only when I started the Chu Sau Lei system that it all began to make sense.  There was a time that I saw a Wing Chun training night as a relative night off compared to MMA or MT training, when I started training in the Chu Sau Lei system I began to see a night of MMA as the night off…..funny how perceptions can change.