Wing Chun private lessons in Swanage
Are you ready to take your Wing Chun Kung Fu to the next level?
Do you wish to learn solid fundamentals from scratch, that are frequently neglected in other schools?
Or are you already comfortable with classical Wing Chun? Would you like to explore the art from new angles, not taught anywhere else in the UK?
Whether you’re a beginner who’s never had a Wing Chun lesson before, or are an expert already teaching Wing Chun to your own students, I can help you get more familiar with the basics and add new dimensions to your game.
Wherever in the world you are from, consider coming to Swanage, on the south coast of England, to experience Wing Chun like you’ve never experienced it before.
To get a flavour of what I teach, check out my free online course.
If you have any questions, get in touch using the form at the bottom of this page.
Location
If you live near Swanage or anywhere within easy travel distance and want to learn Wing Chun Kung Fu for self defence purposes, you’ve come to the right place. I offer private lessons in Wing Chun for Self Defence from my home near Swanage, within Purbeck, Dorset.
Also suitable for residents of Bournemouth and Poole if you don’t mind spending an hour on the bus each way, since the Purbeck Breezer buses have some great deals on – it’s currently only £2 each way from Bournemouth to Swanage and vice versa. The number 40 bus will take you the long way around Poole Harbour, through Wareham. The number 50 bus will take you on a shortcut to Swanage as it boards the Sandbanks Ferry, then from Swanage you can get the number 40 to go further inland.
Wing Chun for Beginners
If you’ve never done Wing Chun before, you may be surprised how quickly you progress. You’ll probably be perfectly blocking random punching combinations (of certain types) with your eyes shut before the end of your free first lesson.
The beauty of Wing Chun is it focuses on the most important aspects of 1-on-1 empty-handed combat, while having a gem of an exercise called Sticky Hands which enables you to pick up the core of the system almost instantly with perfect natural fluency.
And the beauty of training with me is we’ll get straight to the good stuff. I put great effort into avoiding BS, while not neglecting technical finesse.
We also have good one-step drills, for practising how to block a punch from a fully disengaged distance (something Sticky Hands doesn’t fully prepare us for). This way, we can train all kinds of defences against all kinds of attacks from a non contact position. Add this to Sticky Hands, and you’re a well rounded martial artist already.
Wing Chun for Experts
If you already consider yourself a highly experienced practitioner, and are interested in discovering new angles – new ways of looking at the art – and learning additional advanced techniques and theory, let’s see what we can do. Novel things I can introduce you to include the following.
Seung Huen Sau Chi Sau
Prior to Ip Man popularising his steering wheel pendulum version (Luk Sau 轆手) of Wing Chun’s rolling hands drills (Pun Sau 盤手), people mostly trained Chi Sau (sticky hands) using the Seung Huen Sau (double circling hands) method. When you get good at this, it can be a real game changer in Guo Sau (freestyle sticky hands – a form of ultralight technical sparring) and of course in real fighting.
Seung Huen Sau Chi Sau is still commonly trained in Red Boat Wing Chun which pre-dates Ip Man’s Wing Chun, and which Bruce Lee learnt from his father’s friend Fook Yeung. It’s also commonly trained at advanced levels in Ip Ching lineage today. It also closely resembles popular Tai Chi push hands methods, as well as similar exercises found in Yi Quan, Ba Gua, White Crane and other related systems.
The key to this exercise, is in aiming for both hands on top (double Fook Sau) for the most dominant position in trapping and Dirty Boxing. When both players are doing this, it creates a continuous Huen Sau motion with both hands. The key to outsmarting your opponent, from this continuous circling pattern, in order to achieve the dominant position of both hands on top, is to use Broken Rhythm timing – speed up and apply Huen Sau for entry inside, at the right moment unexpectedly, with alternating hands, to latch onto their tension and work your way in – it creates a classic crisp reaction that really couldn’t be any better for you when you want to execute a finishing move cleanly & powerfully. This simple tactic has been a game changer for me, both in Wing Chun Sticky Hands and in Tai Chi Push Hands. This tactic has also been immortalised into the Poon Jong (盤樁) sequences of wooden dummy forms – a great way to get more familiar with the mechanics involved.
Faan Sau patterns
I teach a great Faan Sau pattern that begins with defending from a Boxing style Jab & Cross and builds up to the Seung Laap Sau (double-handed arm drag) and knockout punch from Ip Man’s third form.
These are not random combinations by any means. These moves flow so naturally, and yet there is a clear progressive order to them. The aggressor begins on the front foot, and with each step in the sequence, more control is gained by the defender – it gets gradually harder for the initial aggressor to defend & counter until they themselves are fully on the back foot, then knocked down. The pattern goes like this:
A: Jab B: Pak Sau to Gam Da A: Cross B: Bong Lap Fak A: Wu (balanced move, comfortable position) B: Lap Da (outside gate) A: Jak Jeung (inside gate) B: Lap Da (inside gate) A: Wu (desperation move, less comfortable) B: Seung Lap Sau & KO
Another Faan Sau pattern I teach is based on the Five Elements theory of ideal continuation & countering (from Xing Yi Quan), applied to classic Wing Chun techniques, using symmetrical techniques from a squared-up neutral stance. Unlike the last pattern which builds up to a climax, this one is cyclical thus indefinitely continuous. It goes like this:
A: Seung Jong/Bong (earth) B: Seung Gam/Jam (wood, which pierces earth) A: Seung Tan/Biu (metal, which splits wood) B: Seung Jut Da (fire, which melts metal) A: Seung Tok (water, which puts out fire) B: Seung Jong/Bong (earth, which soaks up water) And the cycle continues, with roles reversed!
Dynamic chain-punching
There’s not much to learn about simple, linear chain-punching. If you’ve been doing Wing Chun for a while, you probably don’t need to learn this from me. Depending where you’ve trained, you may be reaching too far forward with both hands simultaneously, in an attempt to punch faster while sacrificing power and balance. Or you may be not making this mistake.
But what’s almost guaranteed, is you will be very laterally squashed, and as a result of this, over the course of several punches, you’ll experience lactic acid build-up. Even if you’re trying to relax, so long as you’re still holding structure and delivering power, the tension will still kick in, slowing you down and making you vulnerable to being easily thrown off-balance.
The remedy to this, is to mix up your punches. With each shot, gradually rotate the steering wheel left or right, to sequentially throw all the tools in your toolbox, or at least the shots that facilitate a smooth & effortless but powerful flow. This has been an area of interest to me for many years now, and I’ve unwittingly developed a flow that matches the Cycle of Nourishment & Creation from the ancient Five Elements theory (Wu Xing), by focusing on flowing smoothly and staying balanced while subconsciously considering what move the opponent is most likely to throw next (what would be their best counter to the move you’ve just thrown) and as a result, every move in the sequence is the ideal counter to the move the opponent has just thrown if they also did the best, most natural response to your previous move. In Five Elements theory, this is called the Cycle of Pro-Active Suppression and Destruction, but I’ve been doing these combinations instinctively, long before knowing anything about Five Elements theory. If you’re interested, I can coach you in these combinations too. They’re just Wing Chun and Boxing techniques, strung together in a particular way.
Red Boat stance shifting
Ip Man’s Wing Chun does a lot of stance shifting, to rotate the body without adjusting your planted feet. This creates a very sagittally weak structure. Aikido students are commonly taught to pull your arm to the side, to put you in this same sagittally weak position so they can easily push you over, when learning techniques like Tenchi Nage for example.
The older Red Boat Opera style of Wing Chun, tends to adjust the foot placement after rotating the body, for example by swinging the unweighted foot behind to create a sagittally linear stance whenever it suits the hand technique. The same strong stances are absolute fundamentals in practically all martial arts, from Tai Chi to Karate to Ninjutsu to Capoeira. The rotated body with quicksand feet, however, is a feature only common to Ip Man’s Wing Chun. There may be a practical reason for this, but it’s also got obvious shortcomings. Even in the world of gloved-up boxing, Oleksandr Usyk (undefeated, undisputed cruiserweight and heavyweight champion) loves shifting stances in the Red Boat way – he does it very sharply & fluidly. I can coach you in the same kind of footwork – of course I’m no Usyk, but I can coach you quite efficiently in Red Boat style Wing Chun stance shifting, as someone who’s been doing it instinctively before knowing anything about Red Boat Wing Chun. This is often the case with free-thinking martial artists – we often ‘invent’ certain techniques only to later discover that they’re commonly trained in certain traditional martial arts that we weren’t previously so familiar with.
Bruce Lee made similar adjustments himself. Since leaving Hong Kong and learning Red Boat Wing Chun under Fook Yeung in Seattle, he’s never been filmed or pictured doing Ip Man style stance shifting as far as I know – he always had at least a slightly bladed stance when doing classic shifting moves, as can be seen in his posthumously published book series entitled Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method (which he didn’t want released). Even in Chi Sau, he preferred to keep a bladed stance – this is not something I do myself, but when it comes to pronounced shifting techniques I always try to blade-off my stance for sagittal integrity. Note that this same swinging back of the unweighted leg forms the basis of Capoeira’s most important & iconic footwork drill – the Ginga. Now I’m no Capoeirista, but ‘real recognise real’ as the kids say.