41 Reasons to Train Wing Chun

Why Should You Train Wing Chun?

1. Be Able To Protect Yourself
2. Get In Better Shape
3. Get More Focused
4. Learn How To Take A Hit
5. Learn How To Punch Hard
6. Get Comfortable In Uncomfortable Situations
7. Get Relaxed
8. Develop Patience
9. Learn A Traditional Martial Art
10. Improve Your Posture
11. Develop Your Core
12. Strengthen Your Legs
13. Improve Balance
14. Improve Mobility
15. Mental Fortitude
16. Get Stronger
17. Improved Reflexes
18. Longevity
19. Learn A Skill
20. Inner Quiet
21. Avoid Fights With Your Presence
22. Learn More About Yourself
23. Get Control Of Your Ego
24. Learn To Control Your Anger
25. Overcome Your Fears
26. Develop Self Control
27. Learn How To Not Be Controlled
28. Increased Awareness
29. Learn How To Kick Powerfully
30. Simultaneous Attack And Defense
31. Assertiveness
32. Learn To Not Get Knocked Down
33. Develop Knock Out Power
34. Learn To Not Get Pushed Around
35. Learn The Inside Moves
36. Hidden Moves
37. Have Something When You Are Old
38. Stronger Bones
39. Greater Flexibility
40. Distance Awareness
41. Increased Sensitivity

Be Able To Protect Yourself

The number one reason to train Wing Chun (Ving Tsun) is to be able to protect yourself. Wing Chun is jam packed with effective techniques that can help you end a fight quickly when you need to. The system infuses you with effective self defense skills that will be there when you need it. People have been using the Wing Chun system for centuries to help prepare themselves for combat situations.

Get In Better Shape

We all need to be engaged in physical activity to improve and maintain our health. Training Ving Tsun will strengthen your muscles, joints, bones, and your cardiovascular system. The training progresses over time to be appropriate for students of all backgrounds and fitness levels. Staying in shape doesn’t have to be boring, studying Ving Tsun can help keep your workout interesting and engaging.

Get More Focused

Most people already know that training a martial art is a great way to build their concentration and focus, but Wing Chun is especially effective at developing the power of the mind. The Wing Chun system has a number of exercises and drills that help students cut out the noise and get in the zone. Wing Chun helps students operate at peak performance in everything they do by honing the mental muscles that get things done.

Learn How To Take A Hit

If you know how to take a hit, confrontation becomes a lot less of a big deal. If you know you can take a punch you will be much more calm in the face of an aggressor. When you can remain calm in the storm, your probable outcome improves. If something does happen you will be more relaxed and better poised to respond swiftly, effectively, and appropriately.

Learn How To Punch Hard

If you can’t hit, you can’t fight. The number one skill that will help you end a fight quickly is the ability to deliver a powerful strike. The Wing Chun punch is specifically designed to deliver a powerful impact and do so without telegraphing its movement. The bully you are dealing with won’t know what hit him.

Get Comfortable In Uncomfortable Situations

One of the consequences of training Wing Chun is becoming more relaxed. This relaxation will seep into your every interaction. When you can remain relaxed in uncomfortable situations, your ability to respond to whats happening around you improves. The more ability you have to respond to your environment effectively, the less anxiety you experience.

Get Relaxed

What does it even mean to be relaxed? Relaxation comes in so many flavors. Wing Chun teaches you to relax both your mind and your muscles. Relaxation comes from eliminating unnecessary tension in the mind so that you can focus on things you can control. When you have the ability to reduce the tension in your mind it frees up the space to to actively relax your body and eradicate the tension that impedes you. When you eliminate the tension that is slowing you down you are free to do more with the energy you have; you can act with greater effect.

Develop Patience

Developing a new skill can be frustrating and learning Wing Chun is no different. Through methodical practice of the Wing Chun drills students not only develop the skill to defend themselves, but also develop the ability to deal with frustration effectively. Developing your patience involves improving your ability to control expectations, anxiety, and confidence; the greater the patience you develop, the easier to deal with your frustrations effectively. The Wing Chun system is specifically designed and taught in a way that progressively tests your patience over time.

Learn A Traditional Martial Art

To learn Ving Tsun requires learning the forms, drills, and traditions from the Kung Fu family. By observing your teacher and brothers’ interactions with others you learn Ving Tsun through Kung Fu life. Ving Tsun Kung Fu is a lot more than knowing how to perform the drills, forms, and techniques. We are traditional because our students learn Ving Tsun how we learned Ving Tsun. We give them the experience of Ving Tsun so they can develop their own kung fu.

Improve Your Posture

A main focus in Wing Chun is the Wing Chun horse stance. Training the horse stance correctly requires straightening your spine and develops the muscles (and muscle memory) that keep your posture upright. When you perform the drills and focus on keeping good form throughout the movements, upright posture becomes a new habit that improves not only your Kung Fu but also your overall health.

Develop Your Core

Since posture, balance, and unified body movement play such a pivotal role in developing power, Wing Chun training naturally develops the muscles that keep your upper and lower body connected. Through kicking, punching, shifting, footwork, and rooting exercises Wing Chun training engages the core muscles to become stronger without having to do exercises like crunches and torso twists. As you train, your core gets stronger without even realizing that you are working on it.

Strengthen Your Legs

The Wing Chun horse stance and the exercise used to develop that stance will give you a tremendous leg workout. Not only will your leg muscles feel the burn, but the tendons and ligaments in the knees and ankles will become stronger, and most students experience increased range of motion in the legs as well. The Wing Chun horse stance is particularly good at engaging all the muscles in the lower body at once and makes a good leg workout easy to achieve.

Improve Balance

Because the Wing Chun system focuses so heavily on stance and foot work, the muscles that we use to keep ourselves upright and maintain balance (the stabilizers) become very strong. The Wing Chun kick is trained in a way that focuses primarily on maintaining balance and neutrality (avoiding over commitment) which results in a greater awareness of our balance and how we distribute our weight throughout all of our movement. Shifting exercises help develop a greater sense of where our “center” lies and when you move with greater awareness of your center of mass, maintaining and correcting balance becomes effortless.

Improve Mobility

Training the Wing Chun forms will take your body through positions and movements that you never thought you would have gone through before. When you learn how to relax through various ranges of movement and strengthen the inner muscles that are often overlooked, your body becomes better able to move in directions that were not previously accessible to you. Often times a lack of flexibility or mobility is the result of muscular imbalance, when the body is strengthened from all angles (in a more balanced way) we are able to move more freely.

Mental Fortitude

Kung Fu is hard work! There is no substitute for time and energy when it comes to developing martial skill. Toughing it through a hard workout can be physically challenging, but what it takes to push yourself through the burn is a mental challenge. There is no way to develop good Kung Fu without being strong minded. The Wing Chun system progressively challenges the student to be able to do more and endure more. The result is bullet-proof mental fortitude.

Get Stronger

The Wing Chun exercises will give your whole body a workout. Students will see strength gains in their legs, arms, back, shoulders, and core. The stance and footwork drills are particularly effective leg exercises and the traditional 2-person drills will quickly develop the upper body to new levels. The training doesn’t feel like lifting wights, but when the workout is over your body will feel it.

Improved Reflexes

If you want to have a breakthrough in your reflexes, relaxation is required. Wing Chun training focuses on learning how to relax so that you can maintain sensitivity. When you can be in a state of relaxed readiness it is much easier to react to stimulus effectively. When we hold too much tension we lose our ability to see and feel what is happening in our environment. Wing Chun reprograms our muscle memory through repetition so that we are able to respond quickly and effectively. Wing Chun training improves both sensitivity and our ability to act.

Longevity

Everyone knows that exercise does a body good. Few people know that Wing Chun can give you the same results as Tai Chi when it comes to health and longevity. The Wing Chun forms are designed to strengthen the body from within and help us learn how to effectively use our inner power. Training Wing Chun provides a good balance of both inner and external body work.

Learn A Skill

It can be hard to get motivated to go to the gym day after day and do the same old routine. Training Wing Chun will give you the workout you desire but at the same time engage your mind. When you leave the school you will have spent your time killing two birds with one stone. The self defense skills you develop may one day save your life, similarly the exercise may save your health. No skill is greater than that of preserving life, your own or a loved one’s.

Inner Quiet

When you can calm yourself it’s a lot easier to deal with whatever chaos comes your way. Training the Wing Chun form helps students develop the ability to calm their minds and control their focus. When you gain control over yourself and you can silence the voice in your mind, it becomes easier to live in the moment and be with the people you’re with or focus on the tasks at hand. When you are peaceful inside you become more effective in everything you do.

Avoid Fights With Your Presence

When you are calm and confident others can feel it. Wing Chun training helps students become more relaxed, more confident, and more capable of handling most any situation. When you have a deep understanding of aggressive tactics, passive tactics, and assertive body movement, people treat you differently. Body language is the number one form of communication and the greater control you have over your body and the way it moves the more control you have over most any situation.

Learn More About Yourself

When you take on a difficult challenge like learning a martial art, you learn a lot about yourself. You gain a greater awareness of your body, your attitude, and your level of commitment. When you put yourself to the test day in and day out, you inspect parts of yourself that you might not have even known were there. To be able to control yourself you have to know yourself, and so Wing Chun training is as much about self-awareness as it is about self control.

Get Control Of Your Ego

Wing Chun has this tool that we use called the “older brother, younger brother” relationship. It gives each of us the opportunity to experience both the dominant and humble role. For some this can be very difficult, but when the tool is used correctly it allows us to witness our own ego and its tendency to control us. By familiarizing ourselves with this experience we gain greater insight into how it affects our encounters. To have the greatest control over our interactions we must learn how to control ourselves.

Learn To Control Your Anger

Wing Chun is about developing self control. The greater control you have over yourself, the more you are able to stop yourself from the behaviors you dislike. A lot of people think they can’t train martial arts because they don’t like getting hit and it makes them angry, but if those people commit to a program that is progressive and appropriate, they can overcome that concern. For most people there is some certain aspects of themselves that is the most difficult to deal with in training Wing Chun, but the system and its traditions are good at eradicating those undesired behaviors.

Overcome Your Fears

Wing Chung training is specifically designed to progressively expose yourself to what is just outside your comfort zone. By repeatedly challenging yourself within the classroom, you become more capable of pushing yourself to do the things you otherwise would not. The more experiences you have of overcoming uncertainty, the greater your skill in tackling new challenges.

Develop Self Control

To come to class every day takes self-control. To do what your teacher says even when it is difficult takes self-control. To put down your ego takes self-control. To see a curriculum through from beginning to end takes self-control. To improve your balance quite literally takes self-control. When you add up all the actions that are necessary to learn Wing Chun and develop your own kung fu, the amount of self-control you learn how to wield is massive.

Learn How To Not Be Controlled

The Wing Chun system teaches students how to not allow other people to control them physically and emotionally. When you are tense or rigid others can control you like picking up and swinging around a stick, but when you learn to be relaxed and flexible it is much more difficult for others to move you (imagine trying to pick up a garbage bag full of water). When you can at a moment’s notice engage or disengage any part of your body you have much greater control over the outcome of an interaction. When we freeze we are the most vulnerable, the Wing Chun system teaches us to stay relaxed and use force appropriately and effectively.

Increased Awareness

When you learn new movements your mind has to make a whole new set of neural connections. This results in developing what are essentially new senses just like touch, site, sound, etc… When you take the time to understand the nuances of your movement and your interaction with others, your ability to see whats going on around you and inside you increases. You notice the cause and effect of what you do and how it relates to your surroundings. The Wing Chun system is taught in a way that requires you to develop and use your powers of observation and critical thinking; the result is a greater view of what is really happening around you.

Learn How To Kick Powerfully

Most people associate Wing Chun with “fast hands” because they don’t have enough kung fu to see what’s under the hood. The real power of Wing Chun is not in becoming faster but in understanding how to position yourself well and deliver maximum potency in the movements you make. When these become baked into your every movement, all your moves get powered up. The Wing Chun kick, as a technique, is a devastating kick designed to take out the legs of your opponent, but when this kick is coupled with the other Wing Chun principles its power is magnified. Not only is it aimed at a vulnerable target, but the power of the kick focuses the entire mass and energy of the kicker into a focused point for maximum impact.

Simultaneous Attack And Defense

If the fight is inevitable, the only way to stop an aggressor from attacking is to put the heat on them. They have no reason to stop unless they themselves have fear of your counter attack; all the blocking in the world will never stop them. The Wing Chun system teaches you to simultaneously attack and defend. As you’re blocking their strike you are also attacking them. This never allows the attacker any time to reformulate their next move and thus keeps them on the defensive. If their focus is protecting themselves then they won’t be attacking you.

Assertiveness

Wing Chun training changes the way that you hold yourself. The system teaches you how to position yourself so that you are best protected while simultaneously being in a position where others can sense their own vulnerability. When your body language and natural movement take this strategic positioning into account, others will treat you differently. The system also teaches us to remain calm and relaxed and not cause problems, so when you calmly and naturally stand in a strong and strategic position without overstepping your bounds, that’s assertiveness.

Learn To Not Get Knocked Down

Wing Chun training focuses on a solid stance. The training increases your balance, spatial awareness, and ability to respond to incoming forces. When you can stay solidly planted to the ground and yet maintain enough mobility to avoid an incoming charge, your ability to not get knocked over increases. The Wing Chun system teaches us to advance with neutral balance. When you have the ability to attack without overcommitting yourself the likelihood of falling down is greatly reduced. The training will heighten your sense of balance so that you can detect the forces that may unsettle you early enough to prevent them from happening.

Develop Knock Out Power

The Wing Chun system teaches students how to most efficiently and effectively weaponize their bodies. When you study how to deliver the maximum percentage of the power your body is able to generate, all of your attacks become stronger. With any weapon there’s a sharp side and a blunt side, Wing Chun teaches students to naturally and instinctively use the sharp side of every weapon they have. When direct attack becomes natural it is much easier to deliver deep penetrating strikes.

Learn To Not Get Pushed Around

A subset of our curriculum is entirely devoted to how to push people around and how to not get pushed around. We practice exercises that develop the ability to not let people move you and increase your sensitivity to the direction of incoming forces so that you can use those overcommitted forces against your opponent. When you have the ability to unsettle another person’s balance, you have much greater control over the outcome in an altercation. It is much harder for somebody to attack you when they’re off balance and you are able to maintain yours.

Learn The Inside Moves

The Wing Chun system teaches us to feel comfortable fighting on the inside. The ability to fight on the inside teaches us how to stay in the zone where we can remain on the attack, it puts pressure on our opponent and takes away their ability to fully recover. When you train to be strong in an area where others are uncomfortable/weak we can use that to our advantage. If another moves into our space, a little too close, we are comfortable with that and can remain calm and on point.

Hidden Moves

There are the moves you see and the moves you don’t. The moves you don’t see are the ones that dictate the outcome of the fight. When you can deliver a punch without the opponent seeing it coming, you have an advantage. When your moves are so simple they look like the opponent running into your hands there is less to go wrong. The power of Wing Chun is how not flashy it really is. The moves are simple so they work.

Have Something When You Are Old

“Train when you are young so you have something when you are old.” This Wing Chun saying has been around for hundreds of years. If you spend the effort now to learn a martial art that actually works you will have it later when you really need it. Wing Chun teaches self defense and fitness that can be used by people of all ages, the moves do not rely on size or athleticism. A couple years of training will give you more than you need to defend yourself.

Stronger Bones

Doctors will tell you that one of the best ways to maintain bone density is strength training and luckily practicing Wing Chun is a great form of strength training. Not only will you benefit from stronger muscles but the tension applied on the bones will increase bone strength and resiliency as you get older. Wing Chun training involves another type of bone “hardening” as well. From the repeated impact of 2 person drills, use of the wooden dummy, and other training apparatuses your arms and body will become conditioned to take impact better resulting in reduced bruising and a higher tolerance for pain.

Greater Flexibility

Wing Chun training helps you learn how to truly relax your muscles while performing different movements. When you’re able to force your body to relax it’s easier to increase your flexibility. Wing Chun conditioning drills will increase flexibility in your legs, torso, back, and shoulders. Without taking the time to sit down and stretch, your flexibility will improve simply by performing the forms and conditioning exercises. We don’t do static stretching per se, but our conditioning exercises take your body through its full range of motion resulting in greater mobility, strength, and flexibility.

Distance Awareness

One of the most powerful self-defense techniques is simply being able to detect the distance of incoming threats. When you have a greater awareness over a persons’ effective attack range and also your own, you can much better predict what might happen and how to best respond. When you have the ability to avoid the ranges where you are the most vulnerable, you drastically improve your chances of positive outcome in an altercation. Likewise when you know how to apply pressure at your opponents vulnerable distance you can maximize the effect of your presence and actions.

Increased Sensitivity

Wing Chun training encourages the practitioner to pay attention to what’s going on around them. Particular attention is placed on developing the sense of touch resulting in the ability to detect what somebody is doing before your visual system can even detect it. When you have the ability to feel another persons movement or balance through their hands it gives you much greater information on what is about to happen. Conversely, learning how do not give away your balance and movement reduces the likelihood of your opponent being able to control you.

Want to Learn More?

The best way to get a feel of what Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) is really about, is to participate in a class at our school. We have an introductory program that includes two classes (one private lesson and one group lesson). Participating in this program will give you a really good idea of what we do and its practicality. You can sign up for that program via the links below.

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