Gak sau?

[mook jong man]

While we wait for mook's answer, I'll throw my 2 cents worth in.

Last weekend I was training with a few guys. I was having one side blast in with a realistic, hard driving pak dar. The other side's job was to effectively defend against the attack and launch a counter offense.

One of the guys I was doing this against was having trouble. he asked me how do you determine in a split second, what is tan sau energy and what is bong sau energy?
My response to him was he is asking this question in the wrong place in his training.
The place this demon is dealt with is first in dan chi sau and then later, chi sau...not when someone is coming at you with a heavy punch, bent on caving in your chest.
Practice the chi sau drills for hours and hours. Thousands of reps, until you are absolutely sick of it.
By training this over and over, you have developed confidence in what you are capable of doing.

This is the only way you will be able to relax and face your opponent with any semblance of calmness and allow your arms to reflexively respond to the forces placed upon them.

Don't have too say too much really , Yak Sao's two cents worth was more like two dollars worth .
Because he hit the nail right on the head.
After you've logged up a few thousand hours worth of training you are quite comfortable dealing with heavy force , you know you can relax and not have your arms collapse in on you.

You know that you can dissolve that incoming force without too much effort on your behalf , because you have done it many ,many times before.
Of course in a real situation you will be scared , that is normal , but scared or not you will do the technique anyway.

 

[WingChunIan]

The reason I asked the question is because I've been getting quite a few bruises from blocking punches, with either a tan sau or a bong sau and I thought would practising a drill like that help condition my arms.

try practising tan sao and bong sao correctly instead. They should intercept and redirect, not block! Oh and the dummy isn't for conditioning your arms either, in fact the pain of clashing with the dummy is a very good indication of when you are getting it wrong.

 

[WingChunIan]

Well, for one, how are you "blocking" the punches? Many Wing Chun practitioners will, I think rightly say that we do not "block." We try to divert, or redirect an attack - and if we have to take something bluntly, try to absorb it. So if you are thinking of any of these as hard blocks, that's your problem. Remember, we want to be subtle in Wing Chun; there's no need to crash into a guy's arm and knock it away. We want to move it just enough that we can take it off center and slide in.

Completely agree, unfortunately even this most basic concept seems to lost on some of those out on youtube