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David Peterson Interview by Combat Magazine

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Gert-Jan Ketelaar:
David Peterson: If you always assume that there’s always something to learn, you will always be successful! 

Interview by COMBAT magazine

The following interview was originally published in ‘COMBAT’ magazine over two issues, Vol.30/No.9 & Vol.30/No.10, September & October, 2004.

David Peterson is that enviable marriage of the practical and theoretical. A teacher of longstanding, David is articulate, eloquent, and a natural orator, but at forty seven years of age, his diamond hard body is testament to the fact that rigorous training is still an integral part of his daily routine. An Australian student of the legendary Wong Shun Leung, David reinforces his Sifu’s philosophy when he tells me that Ving Tsun is strictly a combat art, designed for survival, and the interview is as much about the life, times, and philosophies of his respected teacher as it about this amiable roving ambassador of his art. Modest yet effortlessly interesting, David rarely wastes a word, hence the length of this interview, and the overriding image I am left with is of a man as in love with his art now as when he started as a teenager and how many of us can truly say that?

Combat:
You’ve had a long-term association with ‘Combat’, David.

David Peterson:
I’ve written for ‘Combat’ magazine since 1988, when Bey Logan was editor, and Bey and I pretty much became lifelong friends and in actual fact, a very strange connection developed between us, as Bey turned out to be the step-son of Tino Ceberano the founder of Gojukai in Australia and Tino and I had been mates for years. So, Combat magazine, for me, is like an old friend.

Combat:
It’s been a number of years since your last article, so would you give new readers a brief personal history, please?

David Peterson:
I began my martial arts back in 1972 in a system called Shaolin Ch’uan –fa with an instructor called Serge Martich-Osterman, half German, half Italian, who spoke fluent Chinese - spoke fluent Mandarin, swore fluently in Cantonese! The training was pretty rigorous and consisted of standing on a cold concrete floor in bare feet, bare chested, whether it was snowing or sunny, two to three hours in the horse stance with lots of punishing exercises in between and not much progress.

Then I heard about Ving Tsun and the Bruce Lee movies were coming out and that led me towards the Ving Tsun system. I worked with a person in Australia for almost ten years and helped make him a very rich and famous man but I realised, as time went on, that what he was passing on may not have been the full goods. I tracked down certain people, I was studying Chinese, and eventually became a Chinese teacher, so I could find out about things first hand in the language, and I started to realise the only place I was going to learn the ‘good’ stuff was Hong Kong. I had a rather nasty break up with the particular gentleman concerned and I don’t use his name anywhere because I don’t want him to get any credit for something he doesn’t deserve.

In 1983 I sent a student of my own to Hong Kong, who was in a position to go, he was single and had the money. I wrote a letter, in Chinese, to Sifu Wong Shun Leung, even though I didn’t know him and introduced myself to him and my student ended up sleeping on the floor of the school for six months and became Sifu’s favourite foreign student at that time. John Maino (the student) and I kept in touch by phone and letter and he tried to teach me across the waters; I had a small group of students who came away with me (from the other instructor) and we were doing the best we could to understand without being able to see or feel it and when I finally arrived in Hong Kong at the end of that year, Sifu treated me like a lifelong friend and with my Chinese we were able to communicate straight away and that was the start. The first night was the hardest because I went there with ten years of martial arts training and discovered that I didn’t know a **** thing.

Combat:
It must be hard to put your ego aside and simply start again.

David Peterson:
That was the absolute hardest part of the entire trip to Hong Kong. That very first day I was torn between anger and tears because I had a big decision to make - do I go back home to Australia and pretend I still know everything and delude myself and my students or do I go back to the beginning and start again? Common sense prevailed because ego is not one of my biggest features, thank God, so I went back the next night and took another battering, and the night after, and gradually it became easier to deal with and Sifu was very kind, he gave a lot of his time, as did the other students, especially Au Yeung Kim Man (Cliff Au-Yeung), who is still teaching, and I started to get somewhere and two and a bit months later, I went back to Australia knowing something about Ving Tsun.

Combat:
Looking back, do you feel that the whole experience made you stronger?

David Peterson:
I think it really did - if I hadn’t of had that, I probably wouldn’t have been motivated to train as hard as I was training, it maintained the spark and lit a fire that still burns, and as my UK colleague, Clive Potter, keeps saying, it’s like a drug; once Ving Tsun gets in your system, you cannot get it out.

Combat:
Your experience of not getting ‘proper’ teaching sadly seems quite a common story and problem within Ving Tsun.

David Peterson:
It’s prevalent in a lot of martial arts but Chinese martial arts seem to be stuck with the stigma, namely that there are martial artists and then there are ‘bull****’ artists and the sad thing is, the martial arts industry is probably the one industry in the world where you can get away with absolute nonsense for a very long time without getting discovered. In martial arts, the days where you challenged an instructor to see what he knew are well and truly behind us, therefore you go to a martial arts class assuming that the person taking the class knows what they’re talking about, so if they’ve got a good mouth and a few tricks that work well at a party, they can suck you in very easily. It all comes down to one thing, if it (the method being taught) isn’t simple, direct, and efficient, then it’s not the best way of doing it.

With Ving Tsun, I guess the first thing you do is find out what the person’s lineage is because certain instructors are well known for being good instructors and others less well known. Obviously if a person claims to be of a certain lineage, then you have to do some checking. Now with the Wong Shun Leung students, there’s only a few of us Worldwide, that Sifu taught directly, so its only a matter of asking one of those other prominent ones and you’ll get an answer straight away - if you say to Clive Potter or Philipp Bayer in Germany or Gary Lam in America, did David Peterson learn from Wong Shun Leung, they’ll come back and say yes. I’m fairly well known through my writings as being a direct student - it doesn’t mean I’m a great student, good fighter, or good teacher but I did learn from him. Other people can claim that but if you can’t check, have one or two people say yes, it’s true, then I’d already be suspicious and seek out somebody else.

Combat:
When you first went to Hong Kong, what was the state of martial arts like in Australia at the time?

David Peterson:
Karate has always been prevalent in Australia, particularly the Goju and Shotokan styles and Kyokushinkai is also very popular. Taekwondo is very big, it obviously markets itself very well as the family martial art but Kung Fu wasn’t so well known and apart from William Cheung and his particular lineage of Ving Tsun, there wasn’t much else in terms of well known Chinese martial arts. Since then it’s changed, there’s a lot more systems of Ving Tsun and Chinese martial arts available but its still a case that Karate and Taekwondo are the dominant martial arts and that’s probably Worldwide. Jiu Jitsu is having something of a hold on the market because of the recent interest in the grappling arts, but that’s probably it.

Combat:
We share the same language but are separated by thousands of miles; are teaching methods different in Australia?

David Peterson:
I think training’s always different in some respects because teachers are different. My own teacher, Wong Shun Leung, was one of those rarities in the martial arts, in that he was not only an excellent exponent of Ving Tsun, but he was a very gifted teacher as well. He could coach you from a distance and it would appear that he wasn’t paying much attention but he’d just wander over in the midst of what you were doing and put your arm in a certain position or say a couple of words and suddenly the result was amazing - or he’d come up with a drill on the spot and you’d increase in skill a hundred, two hundred percent in moments. He could convey the art as well as do the art.

We’re all different, my way of teaching, Clive’s (Potter) way, Gary Lam’s in America, we all teach differently but the results are still there and that’s the good thing. Sifu always said, it’s not how it’s done, it’s whether or not the most important components are passed on, and how they’re passed on will differ from person to person but if the outcome is that each student gets the best of what the teacher has to offer, that’s all you can hope for. My class tends to be a mixture of Hong Kong style and Western style. I’m a trained teacher outside of my martial arts and have been exposed to a lot of ways of teaching.

I’ve been a teacher for the last twenty four years, mostly in Chinese but also other subjects and English has always been something that I’ve loved, English Literature. I’ve read as widely as I can and as with my film and music tastes, I go from one extreme to the other and love it all, I have pretty eclectic tastes. Writing came to me pretty easily, and writing about something I loved came more easily again. With teaching you learn from experience that people learn in different ways, the Hong Kong way works very well with a Chinese audience because people expect to go into a class and be ignored by the teacher and be left to their own devices, that’s the way its done; Westerners, if they’re putting money on the table, want the product given to them. Some people will be able to mould to either way and some won’t and I try to find a happy medium because, like Ving Tsun itself, there are many aspects, you have to touch on everything and get a balance.

Combat:
Would you still recommend to people that they go to Hong Kong to get ‘authentic’ Ving Tsun or simply for the experience?

David Peterson:
A bit of both, the experience is wonderful but I think that there’s still a standard, a quality that exists there that we still haven’t quite replicated outside of Hong Kong. I think we’re getting closer and closer as time goes by but there’s still an edge that some of the Hong Kong students have, particularly the original students, that we can gain from. I always found that every time I went back to Hong Kong I always improved and I always encourage my students to go and they always come back inspired, with a different feeling in their hands and different motivation. Wherever they go I tell them to seek out instructors because there’s always something that one of us has absorbed that the others haven’t and they should seek that out.

Life is about learning, every day, and already, in the short time I’ve been in the UK, I’ve seen things in Clive’s class that have made me think, ‘that’s something that hasn’t occurred to me.’ Our pasts are almost identical, we’ve spent similar amounts of time in Hong Kong, trained with the same man, but everyone reads a book differently and it’s important that we share. What’s very sad in Ving Tsun circles is the fact that so many people have split and gone away from each other, believing that they can’t teach them anything and that’s a big mistake. If you always assume that there’s always something there to learn, you will always be successful.

Combat:
Ving Tsun isn’t an art that lends itself as easily to marketing as Karate or Taekwondo, so how can we promote it properly?

David Peterson:
This is the hardest thing that I’ve found in the years I’ve been running schools in Melbourne. I do it on a part-time basis, so I don’t do fancy ads or have big signs but I’ve also found that what we do doesn’t appeal to everybody. Most people when they want to study martial arts want to learn how to become invincible without getting hurt. What people don’t realise is that it’s like learning to swim; you don’t sit in a chair and read about learning to swim, you have to get wet. Combat is combat, it’s about getting hit and hitting people, it’s about pain, sweating, bleeding and bruising. Most people don’t want to experience that part, they just want to be invincible, therefore, and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, arts like Karate and Taekwondo tend to appeal to a greater number of people because it appears that you don’t have to get hurt to do it.

Ving Tsun is about real fighting, its not a sport or meditation art, its not even a fitness art; we’re too economical in our body motions to even raise much of a sweat in a cardio vascular way and as a result I often have to say to people if you want fitness you’ll have to run around the block outside of training hours. I teach the shortest distance between my fist and the person’s nose. I think no matter how far Ving Tsun goes in the future, the authentic, die hard Ving Tsun will always have smaller audiences because of the nature of what Ving Tsun is, it’s a combat skill, not a combat sport, and that’s where the difference lies.

Combat:
Competition elements are creeping into Ving Tsun; what are your views on that?

David Peterson:
In Hong Kong in 1999, at the first World Ving Tsun Conference, there had been talk about becoming part of the Olympics, becoming a sport, promoting it to the masses as a health exercise, and so on, and I upset a small group of elderly members of the Ving Tsun community who were pushing this view by standing up and saying in my presentation to the conference that Ving Tsun was not about sport or competition and it’s a big mistake to go in that direction. There was a very positive response from a large section of the audience and (laughs) not a very positive response from a small section of the audience, but that is my view and I know that if my teacher were still alive he would be sitting there saying exactly the same thing. Ving Tsun is not about competing in the arena; it’s about survival in a dark alley.

Combat:
Can you understand the logic of wanting to explore these other avenues, on a commercial level?

David Peterson:
Obviously because they want to make a living out of it and in the United States, for example, it’s a very big living, then you do have to present it in different ways because that’s the marketplace, you’ve got to sell your goods, so there’s a certain amount of watering down and bastardisation of the training - self-defence classes for women, self-defence classes for kids - it puts money on the table but it doesn’t necessarily teach good Ving Tsun. I’m afraid I can’t look at myself in the mirror in the morning knowing that I’ve taught ‘Mickey Mouse’ Kung Fu, I have to teach the way I was taught it, which was very honest, very direct, and about combat.

My teacher made it very clear from the beginning that we were not playing, it was very serious and he added to that every single time - if you think you can train in a martial art and not get hit, you’re kidding yourself - and that’s the way it is. Now there may be a way to market that to a larger audience, if the larger audience is interested in that kind of approach, but personally I don’t feel that they are.

Combat:
You’re not saying that women and children can’t train in Ving Tsun, are you?

David Peterson:
No, what I’m saying is that if women and children want to train they will have to train as hard as everyone else because you don’t get results without hard work. Gung Fu means, ‘a skill through effort’. Even if Ving Tsun was developed by a woman, and in the Wong Shun Leung family we think it’s a nice story, there’s a lot more to it, it makes it sound attractive but I think Ving Tsun has been a continuous development through many generations and many hands, not one person having a revelation by watching a couple of creatures have a battle in a bush. It sells tickets to the movies but it doesn’t really tell you the truth about Ving Tsun. I would probably think, in my heart of hearts, that somebody smaller and weaker may have had a very large role to play in the development of the system because its not based on how big, fast and powerful you are, it is very much a thinking person’s art, it uses the biggest ‘muscle’ in the body, the brain, and as a result women and children can certainly do it, but its harder for them in the beginning because a woman can never match a man’s strength and a child is much smaller than an adult, so its harder for them as well.

Its very hard to train with a child, in Ving Tsun, because they don’t have the size to come at you in the same line, the strength to absorb your energy, and I think the best age for a child to start is probably fifteen or sixteen, when they’re bigger and more co-ordinated and able to concentrate for longer periods of time. In the Japanese and Korean arts you can have children as young as three practicing and doing very well, but could they use it in a fight? That’s the question. Could they do it in a demonstration? Of course, because they have co-operative partners - trying to make your technique fit the scenario is the key, not trying to make the scenario fit the technique, and that’s where I feel some of the well established martial arts fall down in the real world arena. What my Sifu passed onto us does work under extreme pressure - it may not mean that you’ll win but it does give you the ability to survive relatively unscathed.

Combat:
How worried are you that Ving Tsun is being gradually watered down?

David Peterson:
It’s inevitable that there will be Ving Tsun and Ving Tsun, namely those that do it because it’s attractive, fancy, and appeals to the masses and I guess there’ll be the die-hards who stick to the original ideas, but then there’s a difference again, and I keep harking back to the Wong Shun Leung lineage, our Ving Tsun might be traditional in that its being done in an old-fashioned way but its also evolving. My teacher said that you can’t stand in a vacuum, and its our aim that our Ving Tsun continues to grow and develop. We don’t want to stop with what was working in the 1870’s, the 1950’s or even the 1990’s; it needs to evolve to something better. With sports science being as good as it is these days and modern training methods, there’s no reason why you can’t further develop the Ving Tsun art.

Combat:
Isn’t Ving Tsun perceived as a complete system?

David Peterson:
There is a part of Ving Tsun that is a foundation that must always be present and that exists within the first form, Siu Nim Tau, ‘young idea’, our preferred translation. My teacher felt that calling it a ‘small idea’ made it sound insignificant, ‘young idea’ is something that can grow. The Cham Kiu form enhances and further develops the ideas in the first form and collectively, those two training forms embody the core elements of the Ving Tsun system. In addition the wooden dummy looks at what can go wrong and how you can get around the mistakes, and the Chi Sau is, comparing Ving Tsun with language learning, how you communicate through conversation, how you express yourself. The Biu Ji form is something different again, unlike the first two forms, which have very precise sections and certain attributes and concepts, Biu Ji is much more open ended and you could theoretically add things to the Biu Ji form.

Ving Tsun’s Biu Ji, by that definition, is an open ended form. Biu Ji developed as a collection of emergency responses, largely what to do when things go wrong. Biu Ji points you in the direction of what to do to survive, hence we don’t like the translation ‘thrusting fingers’ or ‘stabbing fingers’ or ‘death fingers’; it’s great for advertising (laughs) ‘learn the deadly art of thrusting fingers’, (laughs) it’s wonderful, but we prefer the idea of ‘pointing fingers’ in the direction of looking beyond what’s out there. He (Wong Shun Leung) originally described it as the finger pointing at the moon, what Bruce Lee was quoting in ‘Enter the Dragon’; Bruce Lee was very influenced by my teacher and it was very likely that he got the expression from Wong Shun Leung. Sifu felt that the whole idea of Biu Ji was to make you look outside the system and see what else is out there, he always said it doesn’t matter what you hit he guy with, as long as you hit him.

Combat:
There are those within Ving Tsun that would be resistant to the term ‘modified’ Ving Tsun.

David Peterson:
I understand why they think that way but I look at the word ‘modified’ and think that’s an improvement, my definition of modified is that it’s been changed to make it more efficient. So when certain lineages talk about us as being ‘modified’, I just smile and say that’s good. If Wong Shun Leung were alive he would tell you that his Ving Tsun is different, that he’d changed it because he’d found ways to make it more effective. He even convinced his own teacher, Yip Man, to change things; Yip Man made changes to the forms and training methods because of my Sifu’s experiences in the real fighting world and he kept finding new ways to use parts of the form, another application for a technique, that’s how his mind worked. These guys that want to live in the past and say that’s how it was done by the nun, that’s great historically but does it work today? If the answer is a definitive no, why are you sitting in a time warp?

Combat:
Is it important that someone within your lineage has had experience of real combat?

David Peterson:
Yes. In this day and age we have to go to work, front up for families, we can’t afford to get into fights and have broken bones and not only that, it’s illegal, you go fighting in the street and you get arrested, if you don’t get killed. The fact that Wong Shun Leung and some of his contemporaries went out there and did it, and he had more fights than any of them, he joked it was because he was the smallest, he got the most experience and we get his experience through him. I can’t lay claim to much experience, I was a full contact kick boxer in the ring for a number of years in Australia but I’m not anywhere in the calibre of my instructor, but with the experience I’ve had personally, combined with the experiences of others, you learn a lot.

Combat:
Within the Ving Tsun system you work on the centre line theory and as a kick boxer you’ve worked with lateral movement, does it help clarify what works and what doesn’t?

David Peterson:
You have to look at it from two perspectives, the ring and the street. In the ring you’re limited by rules, my teacher used to describe boxing as one of the toughest martial arts in the world but he said it was a game. He meant that with the greatest respect but because of the rules and regulations there were certain things that a boxer could and couldn’t do. In the kick boxing ring a lot of the rules are the same, the shape and size of the gloves prevent a lot of the straight line attacking and we can’t trap and control in the same way but it doesn’t mean that the basic structures don’t work.

The centre line works very well but you must be aware that your opponent is using different lines and you don’t limit yourself to your own line. If there’s an opportunity to hook or uppercut, you use it. I’ve had students come to me from other lineages who are great kickers or boxers and I don’t tell them that they’ve got to leave that behind, I tell them that if they can incorporate it, then do so, it’s more challenging to me as the opponent and if it’s accessible to you, it makes you a better fighter. Why take away something when it’s a good something?

Combat:
Has having done other arts reinforced your belief in Ving Tsun?

David Peterson:
Yes, because it all comes back to the fact that we have found out, time and time again, that a handful of the most basic Ving Tsun concepts and techniques overwhelmingly deals very well with what other people do. A direct student of mine, a fellow called John Smith, has a young student called Nick, who recently took on the former Australian Lightweight Boxing Champion, and he totally destroyed him within a few moments and he (the boxer) said he’d never felt more ‘threatened’ despite having dozens of fights against the best boxers in Australia. He said it was like fighting a freight train and Nick was only nineteen or twenty when this happened, with only three years of training, and he destroyed a former boxing champion.

Combat:
What ‘works’ to make Ving Tsun so effective?

David Peterson:
My teacher, Wong Shun Leung, they say that in his fight days, he rarely went beyond three techniques and generally speaking it was three punches. In fact, he told us that when he taught us to use things like the Taan Da, where you use the Taan Sau in a punching or palm attack in a combination strike/defence, he didn’t ever remember having to use that in his fight career, it was always over in a couple of blows because the most simple was the best. He would tell us that most of the stuff in the forms he never really had a chance to know if it worked. In fact, he used to find out through his students what worked, because in his own experience he was so **** good that he didn’t have to delve very deeply into the toolbox, he could shut you down with a couple of moves.

Combat:
Do you feel that Ving Tsun is under pressure from the new era of mixed martial arts and reality self defence training?

David Peterson:
I feel the other way, I don’t feel under pressure at all because I believe that what my teacher taught us incorporates much of what these other arts are doing anyway, its just a matter of whether or not you can see with your own eyes that it’s there. I don’t think that I have to go and do grappling to handle a grappler. I’m almost forty seven years of age and been training since I was sixteen and its taken me this long to begin to understand one system; I can’t spare the time to learn other systems but if you fully appreciate what is in your own system, generally speaking you have what is necessary to deal with these other things.

Combat;
Does Ving Tsun have grappling techniques or is it a counter-grappling system?

David Peterson:
By its very nature, the Chi Sau exercise is an exercise in counter grappling, it’s teaching you to work at the worst possible range, where the hands are already in contact and the body is already close, but the shapes and tools it applies are designed to redirect and prevent a grappler getting a hold, whilst at the same time allowing us to get a strike in and it’s all about striking. If you have a pain diminished opponent you have an opponent that can’t do so much damage.

At a different level, the very nature of Ving Tsun, fighting at the range we do, lends itself very easily to grappling if you choose to go that way. What I’m saying is that I don’t want to grapple a grappler, he’s far better at it than I am, I want to keep him at a range where I can prevent him grappling or if I get taken into grappling range have the common sense to keep hitting with anything until I can get out of grappling range.

Combat:
What relevance do the Butterfly knife and pole forms have in modern society?

David Peterson:
In some respect there’s a relevance as my Sifu once said that having a knowledge of one short range weapon and one long range weapon of that kind, it does enable you to basically pick up anything of a similar nature and use it as a weapon - a knife and fork, a broom stick or a snooker cue - the principles still apply. A lot of people possibly don’t realise that the techniques in the pole form are almost identical to a lot of hand techniques if you were limited to fighting with one arm. In fact, the legend tells us that the knives were Ving Tsun and the pole came later, was introduced to Ving Tsun.

The way I see it now, it’s almost the reverse, the pole is so much like the hand techniques it’s as if it was almost meant to be there and the knives are actually quite different. In fact, the footwork in the knives is extremely different and does not contain the concept of ‘springy’ energy because the last thing you want is your knife springing forward into your opponent’s body, which keeps you in range of his knife. So there are certain things about the weapons that are very relevant to modern combat but there are things that are not relevant because we’re not in an age where those weapons are lying around waiting to be used.

Combat:
How would you like to see Ving Tsun develop in the modern world?

David Peterson:
The most important thing is honesty; my teacher was always open, honest and a man of integrity, he wouldn’t teach you nonsense, he was trying to equip you with the means to survive. That’s why he never taught weapon defences, as such, he didn’t want you to walk out onto the street with a false sense of security. So what I’d like to see is an honesty within Ving Tsun family and a stop to all the bickering about lineage and ‘my teacher’s better than yours’; it doesn’t do us any good, it just makes us look like a bunch of fools. The Wong Shun Leung lineage is hopefully there as an example to the others, we don’t bicker amongst ourselves and we share our knowledge, we’re working towards an improvement within Ving Tsun and if everyone could come to that table and share the food I’m sure Ving Tsun would become the most dynamic and well known martial art in the world, it has that potential; it’s as if it was made three or four hundred years ago but had the future in mind.

Paul Suryadi:
Nice interview. Did make me wonder...

I'm getting the impression that it's not so uncommon at all for "WC" practitioners to take up VT after spending years on the former. Have there been any VTers who've switched to other styles/systems/arts for any reason?

What's the VT scene within Hong Kong like? I'd like to think there's at least less politics going on there than here...

Funny to read that WSL never had to use the bulk of the techniques in the forms. Might an offshoot of VT one day be reduced to only launching punches, exclusively?

Gert-Jan Ketelaar:
Hey Paul!


--- Quote from: Paul Suryadi on July 07, 2006, 06:12:23 PM ---Nice interview.
--- End quote ---
No . . .   a real cool article!!!

We have seen more than a few practitioners starting of in ‘WC’ before they move on to WSLVT. The problem is that a new guy cannot see if the school or teacher he is going to train with is any good. And if he can improve yourself somewhere else later why not? From my own experience not many of my students changed to other lineages or other Martial Arts after being introduced and trained in the WSLVT system.

Difficult to put in writing what the HK scene is about, but I can promise you the people there aren’t that different as you might think. So politics are everywhere, also in HK. A lot has to do with status, money etc., same as in all area’s of life. On top of that we train to fight and not exercise the art of ‘who is the most humble’. With many coaches and students there is too much ego involved that stands in the way of real progression. On the contrary David Peterson in his article here, and in many other of his articles, is really sharing information, without holding back.


--- Quote from: Paul Suryadi on July 07, 2006, 06:12:23 PM ---Funny to read that WSL never had to use the bulk of the techniques in the forms. Might an offshoot of VT one day be reduced to only launching punches, exclusively?

--- End quote ---
If I only good train just one thing it would be hitting. But since that isn’t the case, I also train for example Tan Sau’s were the elbow is perfectly in and the power forward, to help improving my punch. The Ving Tsun forms are NOT meant to be looked at as techniques and applications. Many of the moves in the forms are to develop the right body structure and the muscles to punch. That means also doing forms, chi sau, lap sau, mok yan chong, etc. Doing lots of movements with the elbows on the centre line and forward power is a way to train punching power. When it comes to fighting, try to keep it simple, just hit when you can. Don’t worry about using all you know. If the opponent is tough you might find yourself in situations were you have to use more out of the toolbox.

All the best,

GJ.

Aidan Tierney:
the latest issue of Combat magazine has an interview with Alan Gibson[a sifu here in the UK]Alan has trained with many lineages of vt/wc and has now immersed himself in the WSL line[he says in the article he is hoping to bring David to England for a seminar soon if you guys are interested...]I agree about politics in Hong Kong.Although I was only there for a short time it struck me as being just as it is elsewhere,maybe its because HK is a very competitive place ,Sifus have a small catchment area for pupils.Enjoy training,Aidan.

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