Below I examined some of the concepts and training methods we used a the Wing Chun Boxing Academy in the early to mid 90s, and reviewing it based on my subsequent somewhat brief experience of 3 different wing chun lineages, namely William Cheung, Samuel Kwok (Ip Chun and Ip Ching), and Moy Yat.

Freefighting

After finally leaving the Wing Chun Boxing Academy at the end of 1996, I joined Glasgow Wing Chun after about a month's break. I trained there for a few months before relocating. It was a different style of Wing Chun Kung Fu, of the Samuel Kwok lineage (Ip Chun and Ip Ching). After some weeks of looking and asking around, I found this wing chun school and turned up to one of the classes one night, and the chief instructor was very happy when I said that I had done Wing Chun for 4 years and wanted to train, as my class was comprised of beginners. We did some chi sau and sparring, which I found very confusing, and he took me apart. I didn't understand what was going on as he was terminating his strikes, which is something we rarely did with the Sofos brothers in the interest of speed and keep a flow going. I then explained how I'd trained before, i.e. 'freefighting' and he said that yes we could do it this way and he started briefly doing very rapid freefighting, but then stopped and said there was no point as it was good for flow but wasn't actually achieving very much. Later in the class I was training Chi Sau with one guy who had been attending classes for just 3 weeks was almost bettered several times. We did not start chi sau at Shaoshan until after about 2-3 years from memory. Sid/Andrew's chi sau was lacking in break out moves and has a forward energy that rendered it highly detectable. It was clear to me at this moment how the structure and technique I had learnt was highly flawed.

'Counters' was the precursor to freefighting in terms of training, and new students would start with 'counters' and only ater after maybe 2 years move onto freefighting. If Andrew thought the students weren't making enough effort with their freefighting from lesson to lesson he would scold them about it and tell them they were to go back to counters again. In counters, each person executes one move in turn and waits for the training partner to execute their move, then they execute their move, and so on. This is not like a bong sau/lap sau drill or pak sau/punch drill, where you react to a strike before it lands. Here you wait for the strike to be terminated before making your counterstrike. The person who has landed the strike leaves it there in contact with your body in waiting for you to remove that arm from your person with a block and a simultaneous strike. The issue with this is that not only is there too much thinking time in trying to think of different moves, as often students will just keep doing the same 2 moves all the time, but that you are blocking something that has already landed which makes no sense in a fight. If someone was to hit you in a fight and leave their arm out then if you managed to recover from their strike quickly enough you would take advantage of the outstretched arm and go for a break or lock. So in my opinion, this way of training creates bad habits and a confused mind regarding wing chun concepts, which could result in hesitation in a real situation.

Freefighting, which Sid claimed to have created, is sometimes referred to by ex-Sofos students as 'slap fighting', is a style of sparring, initiated with an arguably abstract circling punch/pak sau drill for a few seconds, and which can be very fast and looks a bit like some of the fast grabbing moves in Steven Seagal films. The term was presumably used to be descriptive, but the use of this term is contentious as it is not quite free in the sense that there are definite rules about how to do it, and it is not all out fighting. Yip Chun uses the term 'free fighting' in his book 'Wing Chun Martial Arts: Principles and Techniques' (1993) to refer to full contact Hong Kong rooftop style fights, which is arguably a more descriptive use of the term.

The actual initiation sequence of freefighting involves the fist being pumped forwards to within the reach of the other person's guard hand where they will pak sau it to the side and pump their own fist forwards, and you do the same back to them. So both of your fist arms are going in a circle in front of the other person's chest and pumping forward and back. So you are not really trying to actually strike the other person in reality but occasionally you might exaggerate the fist motion to try to strike the chest, but it really has little power as you are doing so with little distance and with a nearly straight arm. So I don't think the start of the freefighting is very realistic but you can build up a lot of rhythm and speed, but to what end other that providing a means to allow someone to break out of it and go into freefighting.

What follows then is similar to sparring or the attacking moves in chi sau once you break out from the sticking hands, but is faster, and doesn't involve terminating many of the moves and is an exercise in presenting the forearm to the opponent and 'pumping the centre line' (using moves that encourage fast flow and the continuation of that flow), without actually really doing anything. The idea is to gain the centre line but not do anything with it, whereupon your training partner, then reacts to that move by whatever comes to the arms/mind, to regain control of the centre line. Etc. Often once you had gained the centre line, if the partner didn't respond instantly, you would leave your hand where it was and try to demonstrate that you had the centre line and signify that you could hit them, without actually doing it. Finally the partner would respond and the flow would continue.

Often during freefighting, the better practitioner will 'slap' the training partner around the face a few times, to indicate that they need to keep up their arms, maintain control of the centre lineor that their arm is still there and has not been stopped, rather than actually landing proper strikes and doing a logical sequence of range closing and pinning moves. But the person doing the slapping would leave their arm out extended or close to extended. As with counters, what the other person is expected to do is to connect with the forearm of the arm that has done the strike on them, counter it and carry on freefighting. A punch held out is no longer a punch and has no meaning, and it is chasing something that has already been and gone. If a strike has landed, the person attacking does not leave it there and there is no point blocking something that has just landed. This is not strictly true if it is a grappling move, but otherwise it applies. In a real fight, people jab, they do not punch and leave their arm out. No training I ever had at the academy involved dealing with people jabbing straight and direct punches. The only street fighting training involved predictable and wide swinging hooks, involving the same arm eact time (i.e. predictable, telegraphed). Most other schools I've seen, when performing chi sau, if one person lands a strike on the other then they stop and go back to chi sau, that previous exchange is now 'over'. Then start again. To me, that makes more sense. Other schools tend to either do chi sau, 2 or 3 onto 1, or proper sparring with sparring gear, but not freefighting. Actually using sparring gear and landing strikes fully or 50% can teach you to actually train like you would fight in the street and this realism was completely lacking from the Sofos brothers' training, meaning you lacked a lot of confidence as it all seemed theoretical and you never trained to land your strikes hard, so you would presumably have to really concentrate in a real situation to actually land them properly as you had never done it before using wing chun. This might result in you using muscle strength rather than structure and stance to land powerful strikes, going against the ethos of wing chun.

Occasionally you would close the distance gap between you and your partner, land a few palm strikes on the face softly, often grabbing the neck, or with lap saus on the arm, and then moving in for a 'sweep', to 'finish' the freefighting. This sweep would be a basic trip where you balance precariously, move your leg to the back of theirs and yank your leg back to make them lose their balance. This is in my opinion a beginner's judo move. This is the only finishing move we were taught and which the instructors would use on us. However, for several reasons, this is bad training. Firstly, it is trying to mimic a training partner falling to the floor because you've hit them several times. So in other words, you don't need to trip them if they have gone down like a sack of potatoes after a proper strike to the head (in a real fight). Also, the sweep is crude and you lose your defensive position momentarily, although technically that shouldn't matter as the opponent should be incapacitated etc. A lot of the time, you would do a sweep in freefighting after closing the range slightly as you had been freefighting for a while and you didn't know what else to do. The concept of maintaining the range and exchanging so many blows, and finally sweeping, is abstract and not related to the reality of a fight. So after the sweep takes place and the other person allows you to put them on the floor without resisting (or you would be scolded), you quickly get up, dart forwards and present your pseudo-punch outside forearm to the partner again to continue freefighting without going back into the pak sau style drill unless you've totally lost it. If you don't get up quickly enough, the training partner would dart forwards and tap you a little with their front foot as if to say 'get up!'

So overall, flow and speed rather than actual practicality was the goal of freefighting. What you train, you will do 'in anger'. If you don't train something, you won't be very good at it (terminating moves in an unpredictable scenario). There was no purpose in the freefighting that made sense in practical terms. Very little progressive closing of the range. The purpose behind each move was missing and the structure of the move was flawed.

If one considers what series of moves would occur in reality, as soon as one strike is landed, a logical and rapid series of strikes occurs, closing the range culminating in a poweful close range strike (utilising the fact that the opponent is unable to strike you because of your positioning, range and how you have trapped their arms etc.), which will drop the opponent to the ground (if he hasn't dropped during the preceding strikes).

Good Wing Chun training is to drill in lightning reflexes for practical situations and reality. As freefighting was seen as dynamic and exciting looking, the practice of slowly practicing a preset series of moves was seen as boring and not performed. So the result is that freefighting resulted in one concentrating on easier to perform moves and not really gaining much proficiency in sets of moves that came less naturally. Sloppiness was therefore ingrained into most students. So rather than practising every conceivable permutation and practical sequences of moves (in a realistic scenario where the opponent doesn't keep regaining the centre line after repeated hard strikes), and building total confidence in them, the focus is on fluidity and 'freedom' and not paying attention to where one's real weakness are in move sequences. Perhaps the focus being on repeated strikes on expecting the opponent to continue fighting as effectively is based on the assumption that the actual strikes have very little effect on account of the impractical stance and the elbows being too far in. In a general sense, one had to acclimatise to 'freefighting'. When I first saw it, I thought it was rubbish and that I'd never end up doing that. And that I'd only land strikes properly and work on my structure. But ironically I did later on. It was only after leaving the academy and viewing other WC styles that I realised that my original (gut) impression was correct. Freefighting looks good only to those accilimatised to it in the school and to those people who have no idea about martial arts. Freefighting is performed with the concept that one is training with one's hardest opponent, and that anyone else one fights for real will be easy to tackle. Perhaps this is true for the most rudimentary of opponents but not for an experienced streetfighter or anyone with martial arts experience. In the latter scenario, one might wish one had actually trained to land strikes on the opponent.

Freefighting or chi sau only ever flowed when there was a 'spring'. This was Sofos speak for each practitioner exerting a slight force forwards in his arms that met with the other person's similar forward force, so that it anyone dropped an arm etc, then the other person's arm would 'fly' forwards (but to a point of course apparently) into a strike or other move. However, relying on this, and relying on the relaxation of the opponent to be able to actually shift his or her arms is a flawed way to train and divorced from the reality of a fight. The need for relaxation to actually shift the partner's arms at all showed a lack of using the body's actual natural structural strength. This was also evident in that sweeps never worked when one's partner was resisting, which was something virtually all students noticed in classes. If one resisted, then the instructor or practitioner would say something like 'Don't resist, as I can just hit you'. But if that was the case, why didn't they hit you earlier? Wasn't that the whole point of freefighting? If you are not going to hit the other person, just just make tiny moves to take the centre line but not actually do anything with it, then why bother freefighting at all. And indeed, the person resisting the sweep could equally 'just hit' the other person, as they were preoccupied with trying to make their sweep stick. Surely freefighting should be more like sparring, with constant attempts to land strikes on the training partner. If you don't practice this in class, it won't come out of your body when you need to use it in 'anger'.

Certain 'freefighting' strike moves were totally ineffective and lacked a sense of reality. For example, sometimes an instructor would land a (side) chop on your stomach. Whilst a chop is effective if striking soft tissue such as the neck, which has no structural protection, landing this move on the stomach would not be very effective! On occasion students would land a 'fook sau' on their training partner, as a terminating strike. This is a good way to break your wrist or to damage the veins on the top of your wrist. No one ever taught us what it was for. A fook sau is not a terminating strike move but a block to prevent an arm coming up, and precursor to a hoong sau (wrist roll - like a fencing move) and then a strike or a lock, for example.

There was a general trend in the last 6 months or so at Shaoshan for the instructors to really go excessively fast in freefighting, faster than you could cope with, just to slap you around the face repeatedly. The instructor would then tell you to relax and not to resist but to try to do your best to defend yourself, (but with relaxed and floppy arms that can be easily pinned or moved to help the instructor). You would possibly deliberately get struck in the face somewhat hard so you'd get a fat lip or nosebleed, and the idea was to get your mind used to be thrown about and struck, but without tensing up, so you don't lose any of your speed in your freefighting when under duress. However, the logic of this is questionable, if you are getting struck that might, tensing up is the least of your problems, if you aren't fast enough to stop the moves anyway. Also, it is in a way conditioning you to be a victim of abuse and to just take it without complaint, until later you can become the 'abuser' yourself. I think you'd be much better served doing the complete opposite and slowing it all down so you could break down the moves and keep repeating until you actually improve your blocks and counterstrikes, and drill in some great, solid combinations of moves that can come out effortlessly.

The general philosophy behind freefighting is for speed, but also to manhandle the opponent, move them around, slap them around the face, and encourage the training partner not to resist, but to keep using their technique to regain control of the centre line. One is not encouraged to think about attacking the instructor, but simply to passively defend oneself. The concept of surrendering oneself to blows and not resisting and stiffening up, but simply keeping a clear mind and using the techique is part of the 'zen' approach promoted. However, it is difficult to really relax when you are constantly being shouted at and being made to feel guilty about various things. And in addition, the strikes that the instructors land on the students are not real strikes, but rather soft, and in a sense quite pointless, as they don't really prepare the student for the reality of how a fight transpires and what it is like to get hit hard in the face, when you would likely freeze. And if the student was actually hit hard, they would be rather lost and not know what to do. Hitting people to 'toughen' them up is thus rather ridiculous, and instead it is better to give the student confidence through strong technique and stance. The concept of 'surrendering to whatever abuse is given' was certainly pervasive in freefighting training, but also in a general sense in the school, with students having to take whatever was dished out by Sid, Andrew or the instructors. And never being allowed to resist. Is this training in Buddhism? Or pointless bullying and brainwashing students not to question anything or think for themselves. Freefighting also only ever seemed to work when the other person was relaxed and allowed you to manipulate them physically. Students never sparred properly with sparring gear. This was reserved for special gradings for the instructors, like 4th Scroll etc. This really was a missed opportunity.

Another bad habit picked up by most practitioners in freefighting is the tendency to chase the hand and chase a connection/stick to the other person's arms. It is thus possible to outfox the training partner by drawing their arms out from the centre, as they seek to stick and 'cover' themselves against your moves. But as you draw the person's arm or arms out, you know what they are going to do, and you move around their arms as they make their move, or you just go straight for the centre with a strike. Training a person to stick to the other person's hands is not always wise and is a form of restrictive conditioning. It has its place clearly, but it should not rule one's technique.

A real fight only lasts a few seconds. A kung fu bout similarly shouldn't really last more than five seconds or so. Freefighting artificially prolongs the bout in a somewhat abstract manner. Sweeping is an irrelevant concept often, as the person who lands the first strike usually has the advantage as the person being hit loses their concentration or strength for a brief moment, enough time for the attacker to pin them or strike them again and close the gap. After being hit several times, the defender may well be unable to fight back with any conviction, and may drop their arms and open themselves up for a final strike. This is where the attacker can use their positioning to leverage their whole body weight into a very powerful strike, for example, to the ribs, which usually drops the opponent. Having the visually put the person on the floor during training with a sweep, because you can't hit them very hard, is rather abstract. Certainly, in some instances, you can use a person's momentum to throw them to the floor, but it should be not used all the time.

Table Fighting & Circle Fighting

Table fighting and the practice of drawing a chalk circle on the ground to do freefighting within was portrayed by the brothers as being highly sophisticated and advanced a concept. The table was a DIY piece of apparatus, with one square side and one round side with some posts in between to hold it together and painted black.

Adherence to the circle or table was often at the expense of realism and coping with different scenarios/ranges. Also, the concept of trying to stay within the circle with footwork, often if it meant leaning excessively backwards and executing moves which were not putting you in an ideal position in terms of defensive strength, is highly flawed. It is better to use footwork to make sure you are in the best possible position in general.

The freefighting tended to focus awareness on the forearms only, without a general body awareness, so people were frequently going outside the chalk circle during freefighting, and on the table, students were often scared of falling off so they did not move around so much and occasionally became unbalanced when they put one foot on the edge.

Quite frequently, when freefighting on the table, the Sifu or instructor would grab you if you were about to fall off, and pull you back in, so you could continue freefighting. If the are going to do that, it defeats the whole point of using the table in the first place. I believe that if students had not felt so unstable with such a small stance, leaning backwards excessively and being as side on as possible, then they would have felt more secure in their stance, and through having a stable base and really rooting into the ground could develop more awareness of their lower half of the body. If you feel like you are about to fall over with the slightest push, then you aren't going to develop bodily awareness.

Fighting on a table is in my opinion a fun gimmick and a bit like dancing on a table in a bar or nightclub when you are drunk, it is a way of being the centre of attention and showing off. So I am sure the Sifu would enjoy being on the table, almost like 'being king of the castle' and porbably enjoyed pushing students off the table, as if certain moments in freefighting necessitated pushing someone off because the bout was considered over. Pushing people off a table is probably a bit of a laugh, who isn't going to enjoy doing that. I recall instructing on the table with some of the Shaoshan students a couple of times. But whether the table has any benefit to improving your wing chun is debatable. Otherwise other schools would be doing it.

At the UCL freshers' fair, in 1991 or 1992, both kung fu clubs who taught at the Bloomsbury Fitness Centre were present, to enrol new students, including Andrew's club and the Tiger Crane club which was much more of a normal kung fu club. Andrew's club was much more overdramatic in general. At the fair, Andrew got up on their allocated table to freefight with one of the instructors, which caused a commotion and caused many to turn around and watch. I recall one of my instructor friends mentioning it and perhaps Andrew himself. I was not there myself. It was wildly inappropriate and one could cynically say it was an attempt to become the centre of attention for a few minutes.

So I believe table fighting was partly done to be different from other schools and pretend to be sophisticated and partly for fun and to look dramatic. Having students draw circles on the ground after changing partners for freefighting was also an excuse for the instructors to order you about and act like they knew what they were talking about when they may not have had much to say otherwise, like a point of focus.

Stance

In addition, most Wing Chun, e.g. Moy Yat, employs a fighting stance whereby the torso is more or less square on to the opponent, allowing the practitioner to use both arms at their full range if necessary. Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do used a fencing style stance, whereby the person was side on. The reason for this is that his attacks were based on speed and the element of surprise and comprised of a single strike that was designed to hit the opponent before he could defend himself, so less need to use the back arm which is further away when side on. Sid and Andrew however applied this to Wing Chun, and decided to create a bizarre stance.

The Sofos stance was officially 60/40 weight distribution, but in reality it was more 80/20. It meant the student was leaning back and almost falling over during footwork drills, was quite immobile, and had no power. It also meant that the stance was very narrow and unstable. Putting more weight forwards radically improves the stance, power, stability and manoevrability. A good strong stable stance should allow high manoevrability, but also provide a solid platform for which arm techniques can root from. It provides an ease and effortless of performing arm movements and provides nature structure and strength support to the arm movements. This is what is missing in the 80/20 stance where one has to try much harder to perform the arm movements and one has no power. Power often comes from tensing up in such cases or adopting a wider stance (and hope no one notices).

A wider stance with a more central weight distribution feels more natural, and when you perform it, it makes sense to the body and feels good. Any good martial arts style should feel good naturally and give you natural confidence. A narrow, unstable stance keeps you struggling and your body does not feel like one unit. One feels like the ground has been pulled from underneath one and the strike has little to push itself forward from. It is like trying to fight someone in a swimming pool who is standing on an underwater ledge or steps, whilst you are treading water. Not only was the student leaning back and off balance (in case someone tried to sweep his front leg) and less able to move than if he was in a more 60/40 or 50/50 stance, but also he was turned sideways with his back shoulder hunched down and the head tilted to the side. This was conducive to back and neck ache but also not conducive to allowing both arms to reach the opponent or to effectively defend. It made movement very difficult. Blocking with the back hand was only possible when a strike was almost on the body, and did not allow a wide range of defensive hand movements. The stance was almost like a sick joke, making life as difficult as possible for the students, so that presumably, when they were later 'allowed' to adopt a normal stance, it would seem much 'easier' and be very powerful as they were used to have an unstable base from which to generate power from. Why not adopt the correct stance from the beginning? Sid never practised this ridiculous stance, so why should the students?

Also, when Sid or Andrew themselves were demonstrating the correct technique, they would use a wider stance and different arm shapes to the students, but the students were told to do it a different way (which would evolve and open up over time so we were told). In practice, their stance was wide (not pole stance wide, but shoulder width or so) and almost 50/50 or 60/40, but they made their students adopt a much narrower, 80/20 stance that made their footwork very difficult to the point of being very unstable and almost falling over backwards, and took all the power out of their arms. Most people would agree that any teacher who doesn't practice what they teach you is either a fraud who doesn't believe in what they are teaching or they are playing psychological games with you.

At the end of 1996 I think it was, I actually trained with one of Andrew's former instructors, after I had left the school. He had quit because of a knee injury, had not trained in years and we trained at his house was very impressed with my new found skills. I had attended a William Cheung seminar shortly prior, and demonstrated to him that using the same hand techniques as Sid/Andrew taught, but by widening the stance and making it 50/50, my power and stability were greatly improved. This he acknowledged at the time and found very interesting.

I attended at least one seminar with this former instructor, held by Grandmaster Yip Chun, in October 1996 in Luton, and was accompanied by a junior Sofos student. I must have gotten talking to this student about grandmasters at some point whilst still instructing - I would not have done so unless he had raised the subject with me as it would not have been appropriate and would have been too risky in any case - and come to some understanding. We both noted the footwork used by different practitioners being different to the Sofos style (i.e. more 60/40 or 50/50 with wider stance), and during the seminar, found that it really worked well. Later on, that former instructor rejoined Andrew's SAS school as an instructor. I believe this former instructor friend of mine also attended a William Cheung seminar down in Whitsable, Kent that I had been unable to attend, hosted by Sifu Dominic Bekes, which he told me he enjoyed, probably in 1997 from memory.

Andrew also relayed stories of schools where all one would do for the first couple of years is to do footwork or sit in a horse stance. Andrew was relaying the importance of stance work yet there was a distinct lack of leg strength in his students and little leg training was actually performed. Although footwork practice was a regular occurrence, it did not seem to be a practice that strengthened the legs, nor to build competence or foundation in students on account of the virtually 80/20 stance which rendered students unstable.

Sid evidently liked the concept of withholding the technique he wanted to practice to his lower students, allegedly secretly teaching his instructors a different style with a wider stance than anyone in the academy in lower classes. The style Sid allegedly taught his instructors according to my friend in the instructors class at the time was based on a presumably artificially constructed Wing Chun style combining his WC arm movements made to look more like traditional kung fu moves mated to the wider horse stance rather than the normal wing chun stance for unarmed combat. This is not something I personally trained in my classes. This style was taught by Sid as a one off at the Chi seminar in 1994 in London, which was I think open only to the instructors and senior students including myself. So we trained with a pole fighting stance and with slightly modified arm movements from our normal wing chun for a dozen or so techniques with our training partners simulating rather unconvincing hooks and slightly more realistic stabbing attacks with a rubber bladed knife. Sid claimed this was 'ancient Ng Mui' Wing Chun. This horse stance in Wing Chun is only supposed to be used when fighting with a pole, to generate power. There is a training exercise known as Jin Kyun (Battle Punches) which involves walking forwards and backwards in this deep stance using punches, which is not used for actual combat but to build up strength and the ability to hold the stance with the pole (The Wing Chun Compendium, Vol.2 - Wayne Belonoha). Sid presumably just added hand techniques to it to make it into a new WC-based style. See my Chi Seminar Notes pdf and the previous page for more information.

Footwork

Sid and Andrew's footwork was not very mobile, the weight distribution aside. With the exception of 'walking' or 'darting' forwards and backwards, the back foot never moved. In walking or darting, the back foot was supposed to remain on the ground and dragged as part of the movement. This resulted in a kind of inertia, accentuated by the fact that most of the body weight was over the back foot. It was therefore a real effort to try to drag this back foot along the ground. In would be harder still to do so on the street wearing grippy trainers on tarmac for example, and virtually impossible wearing trainers and standing on grass, compared with kung fu slippers on a well polished floor in the studio. This inertia would often lead to the upper body moving out of synch with the lower body, thus destroying the power generated from rooting into the ground and punching from the feet.

In one senior class, Sid started complaining about how everyone was freefighting in circles but not moving much at all. We had not done enough drills involving footwork and performing counter attacks etc. so it was not really ingrained into our bodies. Sid said 'ours is a very mobile Wing Chun' and suggested we needed to move from the spot more. He did not explain or demonstrate as he assumed we had been taught all this before in our beginners' classes years earlier. So the class continued and everyone was doing what I would describe as 'gratuitous' and excessive footwork, moving around, really without any particular reason in terms of a logical attack sequence. It was quite a funny sight.

The concept of co-ordinated hand movements was a case of 'more is better'. A walk forwards move, where one would bring the back leg through the centre line and place it out in front, using the hips for power, and accompanied by three punches was not very powerful. This was partly because the weight was too far on the back leg, but also because there was no half step at the beginning or end, and because there was no power in the first two punches, as there was no stability of rootedness in the stance. The last punch is really the only punch that would count, and its power was sapped by having performed two punches just immediately prior in the middle of the move. Whilst training, practitioners often felt these 'machine gun' punches to be very weak and ineffectual, especially when hitting pads held by a partner. Other Wing Chun styles only perform one punch with a walk forward, making this punch count. A walk backwards move, where one would bring one's front foot backwards and place it behind one but keeping the other foot still, would be combined with three punches (to swap arms to feet the same arm same leg out in front) was even less powerful. It makes no dynamic sense to be punching whilst moving backwards as there is no power from the root of the stance and one is taking momentum away from one's punches with the body. In other Wing Chun styles, one simply swaps arm as one walks back (ending with a half step of the foot that remained still) in preparation for the next move. Clearly the three punches were included to look good, regardless of the reality and practicality behind them. Only the dart forwards and dart backwards had the correct number of punches, even though the weight distribution was wrong and the probably wrong hand was punching first (i.e. being side on, punching with the back arm first (the arm that is furthest away from the opponent), rather than being square on and punching with the front arm (closest arm) first.)

The shift forward or shift back - essentially a move where one steps out to the side at 90 degrees - always had one foot remain on the spot. The terminology has now changed in both Andrew's and Sid's academies. This restricted mobility and often put the practitioner too close to the opponent or wooden dummy and slightly at the wrong angle, making him unstable and likely to fall over and bounce off his opponent. I later re-learnt the footwork, and the shift forward and shift back was preceded by a half-step of the foot that is shifted from at the start of the movement, and a half-step by that same foot at the end of the movement. The half steps help to drive the momentum of the practioner forwards or backwards depending on the move, allow sufficient space to move around the opponent or wooden dummy to get the right angle and allow for a strong stable position, and also combine a turn of the hips with a thrust of the whole body, creating much more power and unity in movement of the stance/legs/torso and hand techniques. By keeping one foot still throughout the move one is effectively relying on a hip movement alone and there is very little forward momentum, especially as the weight is then almost soley on the now back foot (that did not move in the shift forward). The 80/20 stance also made the movement slower, weaker and more clumsy than it should have been.

A similar principle applies to the pivot in and pivot out. Having nearly all the body weight on this back leg that stays motionless, and relying on the hips to turn you around through 90 degrees makes one feel rather unstable and saps all the power from the move, as opposed to using a half-step forward at the end of the pivot which is more stable and has a dynamic forward motion and momentum, and is easier to perform.

The correct way to perform the shift and pivot described above make the dummy form better and provide stability and the correct angles. I often saw students always falling over and bouncing off the dummy, and not 'blocking' the dummy's arm properly as the footwork was wrong and not moving the position of the body out of the way of the 'strike' enough.

In hindsight, I do not think the footwork at Sofos was particularly sophisticated or nuisanced in terms of subtle details, when comparing it to the Moy Yat lineage (and probably others). For instance, a turn to go from front pigeon-toed 'front'/training stance to side on was only ever 45 degrees with the 80/20 weight distribution. In Moy Yat Wing Chun, it is known as 'shifting' and there are different weight distributions for the side fighting stance (when shifting from pigeon toed training stance) depending on the application, e.g. 50/50 for an attack coming from the front or more onto the back leg and facing square onto the opponent's attack if the line of attack is coming in at an angle. Also a step is not usually used in MYWC as it takes longer as is more easily detected. So I feel there was a lot missing from Sofos footwork both in terms of angles and hip/torso/foot technique but also in understanding how it can be applied in different situations with attacks coming from different angles and lines of attack (c/f Wayne Belonoha, The Wing Chun Compendium Vol.1), even if from a casual observer they looked very similar.

Front basic (front) stance, Sid and Andrew's footwork involved either a shift forwards, or a turn (relying solely on a hip movement for the power). Rarely was a side step incorporated into the footwork when performing punch/block drills, which is optional in other Wing Chun styles, nor was a simple step straight forwards (economy of motion - from one corner of the triangle to a point on the centre line on the opponent) - a proper shift had to be performed where one foot would touch the other or move to the centre line before moving forwards. This way is slower. Wing Chun should be as direct, fast and powerful/structurally sound as possible.

Arm Techniques

The Academy never really taught the concept of a feint or diversion in an opening attack. These are often used in fencing or martial arts like JKD. In Wing Chun, they can either be destabilising moves, like treading on the person's front foot as they move backwards (causing a wide stance and surprise etc.), or moves that destabilise (causing arms to drop or distract the person) by causing pain, for example running your leg down the front of their shin, kicking the shin. Once the person has experienced severe pain, they are usually much easier to engage.

The bong sau/punch drill was performed with a backfist rather than straight punch to target, rendering the direction of the punch upwards and not forwards and being totally useless in a fight.

I was taught to always keep both hands out even when doing the rapid punching or chain punching, so that the back fist was in close range, half way up the forearm of the other arm, to be able to execute the next punch quickly and reach its target quicker. However the problem with this is that there is much less power, as there is not enough distance for the fist or palm to pick up enough speed and power. If you were just going one single strike from that back hand, then you could execute it like a one inch punch, i.e. twisting the whole body and dropped your weight down to really generate that power, but if you are intending to deliver multiple strikes then you can't really do that. So you need to draw the back hand back slightly more to create enough space to deliver a compromise between fast reactions/short distance to strike and power. All other wing chun styles you see draw the rear fist back further roughly in line with the elbow of the other arm during chain punching. I initially thought this made them poorer styles until it was explained to me.

Sid and Andrew claimed to use the concept of a triangle, which all Wing Chun uses, but the application was flawed. The concept is keeping the arms in line with a triangle between the shoulders and the point of furthest reach in front of one (in the centre). However, in Sid and Andrew's Kung Fu, the elbows are not in line with the sides of the body and the sides of the triangle, but are kept in close to the centre line (so they cannot be used in an arm lock apparently). And often too close to the body. The disadvantage of this is that the arm loses its structure and the moves have no power. But shifting the elbow out slightly (in line with the actual triangle) and by ensuring the elbow is always at least a fist's length away from the torso, the power of moves can be greatly increased. This is what Bruce Lee did.

I believe that many more subtle details were missing from the hand techniques taught by the academy. A few examples include: No defined tan sau after each strike and before the huen sau on the sil lim tau; no real sense of the bong sau in sil lim tao starting off as a tan sau like in Moy Yat's style; the elbows in the chum kil were emphasised as if you were looking to elbow someone, i.e. from the shoulder, rather than leaving the elbows and lan saus as they were and creating the power solely from the turn and hip as in other styles of wing chun; also in chum kil, the downward pak saus don't have that downward 'snapping' motion, but the guard hand simply slides down the forearm, which is a totally different type of movement and energy; the tan sau has no 'circular scoop' at the start like some other styles of wing chun, but goes straight out - this has pros and cons.

An incident described below where a friend in the instructor's class sustained an eye injury during freefighting from a bil jee from his training partner, who was one of the less experienced members of the instructors class and one of my former class mates, is a textbook example of misusing moves from the Bil Jee form. There is a general consensus in the WC community that bil jee moves are not to be used in chi sau, for example, not because they are too advanced, or the 'holy grail' of WC, but because some of them are unsociable, dangerous moves not really suitable for a friendly training environment. In addition, they are emergency moves, only to be used if your bodily structure is heavily compromised, rather than to be used if you have many choices and options for moves, as they break many of the principles of WC and are really bad technique. Also one's training partner doesn't learn anything from being subjected to them, and you will not improve your wing chun if your moves from the first two forms are sloppy and you rely on bil jee moves to get you out of trouble in training, as it is those moves that are failing that you need to practice more. It is really the whole ethos of wanting to strike your training partner to show you are better, and a bil jee to the face and stopping right before the eyes or throat, to show you can do it, is really not a sensible or clever type of training. Similarly, using bil saus with any accompanying move with the other arm, when you could use a combination move that doesn't require crossing your arms or drawing the arms back too much, is poor technique also. At the Chi seminar in December 1994, when we were being shown Sid's Jin Kyun based wing chun that he claimed was Ng Mui wing chun, to walk forward, in other words to take a big step forwards from the back leg to move it to the front whilst in a horse stance, he told us to hold out our hands like bil saus in front of the body, and to slide the back hand under the front arm to switch arms. Such use of bil saus is again not appropriate for standard footwork as it involves crossing the arms and potentially trapping your back arm under the front one. It indicated Sid's fixation of Bil Jee moves being more ‘advanced’ than moves from the first two forms and thus suitable for inclusion in his ‘advanced’ 50/50 horse stance footwork based wing chun.

Warm Up

A warm up before each class got underway was employed by both Andrew and Sid. This consisted of a partner holding a large pad with both arms, and the other person closing in and doing three elbow strikes and three knee strikes. The person holding the pad would hold it out for the elbows then hold it facing down and lower for the knees. Typically they would try to time it so that they pushed the pad out to meet the incoming strike - if they did not then it would feel very awkward for the person doing the striking. After each set of 3 elbows and 3 knees the person would dart back then dart back in and repeat. There is no 'knee' strike in wing chun as far as I am aware, so I don't think this is actually wing chun. There was no real tuition on the exact way to do an elbow in wing chun, e.g. gwai jaan (The Wing Chun Compendium Volume 1 by Wayne Belonoha). We tended to just strike the pads with the corner of the elbow as well as the flat, fleshy part of the forearm. In gwai jaan, the idea is to only use the hardest part of the elbow, i.e. the bone as using the forearm reduces the power of the technique. Also, no context was taught regarding elbow strikes (nor knees). Elbows are not a technique to go out of your way to use on an opponent when you close the distance with each move to put yourself into a disavantageous close position just so you can 'finish' with an elbow strike or sweep (a dubious practice), but are more a last resort technique when you are unable to strike or your arm is pinned and the opponent has closed the range on you. This is not something you can train for as such elbow strikes can be dangerous to perform. It is better presumably to keep the opponent at a more secure distance and just keep striking them until they are no longer a threat.

Then two punch pads were used for punching. This would typically transpire whereby the person holding the pads, one on each hand, would lift one up and the person training would do a back fist and straight punch with the other hand. There is no backfist in wing chun as far as I am aware. Also the back fist is generally a strike for softer parts of the body, such as the nose, as it is easy to damage the fist otherwise. However, this was never mentioned to us. Then the person holding the pads would lower the pad, then lift up the pad again to head or throat height but trying to confuse the other person by not following a sequence, i.e. it could be either the left pad or the right pad. They would typically either try to hold the pad as still as possible or to meet the incoming punches, and if the timing wasn't right, again it would feel awkward. The rapid punching was nearly always rather feeble and lacking in power, and the knees and elbows only felt substantial because the partner would push the pad out to meet the elbow or knee. If he or she did not, then the strike hardly had any impact at all.

The last part of the warm up was pracitising kicks, with the other person holding an old tyre between their knees and holding it with their hands. Only one basic kind of kick was taught at the academy to most students. This used no knee action, but a nearly straight (slight bend in knee), and a combination of lifting the leg upwards and forwards and rotating the hips. The kick was not initiated from a bent knee to generate the power. There were three different variations on this kick, landing the foot the toes above the heel (vertical), or with toes pointed inwards (45 degrees), or with toes pointed outwards (45 degrees). During the warm up, the person kicking would kick the tyre repeatedly until told to stop, and the strength of the kicks, whilst not really powerful at the start would get progressively weaker as they tired. There was no real power in this kick, and the person kicking would almost bounce off the tyre if it wasn't a flexible one. Not very practical in self-defence and in a street fight. The wing chun kick is supposed to be a lifting kick, taking the most direct route to the opponent, rather than lifting the knee up and then extending the kick to kick forwards, which would be more powerful but slower. I have seen other instructors at different schools in videos perform such a kick and it does use some knee extension even if most of the movement if the lifting of the leg and the power is generated partly through the movement of the pelvis. The way we were doing it wasn't quite like this and we all felt that our kicks were fairly ineffective. Some great nuance and teaching regarding the kicks would have been helpful assuming the instructors knew.