One of the most exciting things you will do in your wing Chun training is putting what you learn into practice. No I don’t mean walking the streets and coming across a fight or causing one, only hoping you will be attacked so you can show the world what you have learned.
One of the best ( and controlled) ways is though tournament fighting. This helps in terms of developing your technique in a “real word “ application but also give you a steep learning curve and a lesson that you will ever learn during your classes.
For me I remember my first tournament. I trained during our class I was totally pumped and scared to death. I did what I could, trained harder than I ever had and h. It was so much fun and I felt a sense of strength and confidence I thought I never had. Surely I could take this into the fight and dominate my opponent. This was wing Chun for crying out loud the most deadliest fighting system devised my man.
I remember being padded up, watching my other classmates prepare and fight their bouts before me. Then the reality hit, those nervous bits of chatter that go on in our minds…this is real.. this is actually really going to happen ..my mind was running 100 miles an hour ..it was when the referee called my name that I snapped out of my hypnotic dream. I was pitted against my opponent a Tongan guy from a karate school. Just before the ref called the fight ..another thought crossed my mind “..hang on I’ve never really been in a fight before where the guy wanted to deliberately hurt me…..!”
Great time and place for this realization to suddenly come forth -well it was on. I danced around parried, blocked.. in my mind I was swift, with the movements of a gazelle, I was silky smooth and light on my feet….unfortunately the reality was that my feet felt like they had cement shoes and where bolted to the ground, my arms where flailing all over he place and my mind was wandering off to the tall brunette beauty who had just taken her seat on the bleachers.. in short I froze !!!! Just as you would expect I was dispatched like it was nobodies business… Lucky for me it was a point scoring fight..and in rapid succession boom boom boom.. I was gone ,done and dusted as they say.
What happened ?? I let the situation overwhelm me I was fighting myself before the opponent and I was lucky it was just a tournament…in real life the outcome would have been much worse…….next fight I had was more realistic and continuous and I was ready.
The worse case scenario had happened I froze and was beaten badly and very embarrassed. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. The worse case scenario happened and it was all good.
We think too much about what may happen, when the reality is it never as bad as what we think. The next fight – some 2 hours later was one of the best fighting performances of the tournament. Usually these things are slow affairs where both fighters are stand off ish and out of the 10 minutes there is probably 3 mins of fighting.. well I am proud to say we stood toe to toe for the full duration and after all of that it was a tie.. I had fought an opponent with much more experience and a hell of a lot more stamina than me and more than held my own. My fear of losing of what might happened was gone… I was free to move and attack as I wished and blocked out the crowd and negative thoughts. I was free and able to move at will. The lesson here is it is only when we abandon that fear of failure and focus on the task at hand on its merits is when we have true learning and succeed from it.
It was this thinking that allowed me to win the black belt trophy while in my first year ever of martial arts… be sure to tune it again as I describe exactly how I did it.
