I feel as despaired as you, dungeonworks.
I’d spent time trying to explain to you & poor guy – supposedly a scientist – that one can’t validate the effectiveness of a method conceived purely for combat in a sports arena. It’s like trying to validate the fire resistance of a material without using fire! Or, testing the capabilities of an airplane underwater. Off course, just like wing chun in a sporting context, it wouldn’t do well simply because it wasn’t conceived for that particular purpose.
I also illustrated clearly that the results & achievements of any \ all sporting events is specific to its own rules & competition environment. Winning a kickboxing or MMA competition simply means that – you are good under those particular rules \ environment. It only validates the effectiveness of the style\methods being used within those rules & parameters. Change the rules \ environment slightly, and you would get different results. This is very easy to prove. Put the best MMA people in western boxing, and they would have trouble with any professional boxers. Put the best wrestlers in Thai boxing, and they would be beaten easily under Thai boxing rules \ conditions. Put the fastest F1 cars under conditions which doesn’t allow it to exhibit its strong points, and it will lose. It’s the rules & parameters of the sport which dictates the best approach \ method to be used. Unfortunately, wing chun doesn’t do well under any rules. But of course, some people who buy into the pepsi & popcorn mentality and TV shows can’t or refuse to accept that.
If only people bothered to conduct their own researches thoroughly, they would comprehend the profile of the wing chun combat method a littleÂ…
- In wing chun fighting, the objective is to inflict as much injury to your enemy as quick & as efficiently as possible, doing whatever it takes with no rules. The intent is to damage, destroy, and kill.
- We attack the weakest points with our strongest weapons, not relenting & without mercy until our opponent is defeated.
- Wing chun has many fighting strategies. For example, we use the surrounding environment to our advantage. If a big window were available, I would try to divert \ deflect my enemy into the glass, hoping the broken glass will slit his throat as he falls through the glass. Or, I would try to ram my opponentÂ’s face into the corner of a brick wall.
- Be totally ruthless once engaged in combat, being totally calm, cool and collective.
- We sacrifice absolute power for speed & accuracy in our attacks.
- We use the easiest methods to apply. For example, clawing out a large chunk of your face with our nails; poking into your eyes; biting; kneeing into your testicles. These tactics are so easy to apply, even a female can do it easy. Off course, people say your opponent can apply those techniques as well. Yes, they can, but unlike trying to punch someone out, or grapple them to the ground, these tactics can be applied by anybody, so itÂ’s a question of who can apply it first.
Any one with a little intelligence can see from some of the key points above why wing chun can never be applied in any sporting events. We can never use what makes this method of fighting so effective. Even if all those techniques were allowed, no moral person with conscious would enter a ‘sporting’ event with such intent & mindset.
It’s also apparent that you have ‘duel’ standards or\and bias towards kickboxing, MMA, and related events. You say other styles’ effectiveness can be validated by kickboxing, MMA, sparring….but you can’t accept the same regarding wing chun.
Again, if you only took the effort into researching wing chun a little, you would know that wing chun adopts a large sparring syllabus into their training, starting with chisau and then progressing into gwohsau. Some people will say chisau & gwohsau isn’t sparring, but that’s down to their own training limitations. When I use to train intensively, my trousers use to stick to my shins from the congealed blood sustained from kick sparring. I’ve lost a lot of blood from bleeding noses, mouth, etc. I’ve even sent opponents’ to hospital from gwoh-sau practice – not intentional, but accidents happen when people spar intensively. When I was with my first teacher, Kan wah chit, people were taken away on a stretcher, from friendly demos! Wing chun gwoh-sau isn’t fighting, but the intensity is what you & your partner is capable of, and it’s just as intensive, if not more so, than any other form of sparring methods adopted by other styles.
I will conclude by saying that in this day and age of the gun, it’s rather pointless to focus too much on the effectiveness – or disparity – of different styles. Just practice what you believe in, but more importantly, what you enjoy doing the most. In truth, people who invest so much time & money in obsolete fighting methods are dinosaurs anyway, who still don’t realise that there are far easier & quicker ways of doing things. I don’t know about the US, but here in the UK, any streetwise kid with money can arm themselves with weapons. Only a few weeks’ ago in my city, gang members were caught with M10s – submachine guns that would pump metal into your sorry *** regardless of whether you practiced kickboxing or wing chun. Even if we discount firearms, picking up a iron bar would more than dissuade any K1 champion from fighting with us. Further more, most fights nowadays don’t start on a 1-to-1 basis, it’s usually multiple thugs attacking 1. So, how does your ‘sports’ derived style deal with that?
For my part, I love wing chun because I don’t see it purely as combat; I enjoy it because I see it as human ‘chess’. The sheer enjoyment from competing with my fellow martial arts brothers on a skill level, and to push my own personal limits to new boundaries, is the real reason for my perseverance & determination. Using it for bashing people or competing in a sporting event is the last thing on my mind.
In the meantime, perhaps you & the scientist could verify whether wing chun is effective or not in actual combat and not in the ring. Go and look for the wing chunners that has a reputation for fighting and threaten them & their families (you have to do this because they may not take you seriously otherwise and therefore have no ‘intent’ on fighting you). Take your handycam to record the proof. Of course, if wing chun was as ineffective as all those ring events prove, those chunners would never be able to pull off their bs ‘too deadly’ bilgee to the eyes techniques, or the silly stomp kick to the knee nonsense, as no-one has been able to execute them in the ‘ring’. You’d be able to post the proof on ********do, and expose wing chun for the fraud that it’s.
All in the name of scientific research, and the ONLY way to validate a fighting methods effectiveness.
I will exit this thread now, as I feel there's nothing further to add, and hope people don't take what I'd said as an insult. My point was, and still is, that you can't validate a method's effectiveness in anything other than what that method was conceived for.