Why Wing Chun Is Not Easy To Learn

Wing chun is a relatively new martial art. Many other martial arts have a long and established history, whereas wing chun was only beginning in the 1920’s. Wing chun gets a lot of it’s style and ideas from traditional wushu, but cannot really be considered to be anything like the modern day form.

All martial arts have self defense principles and are generally separated into either grappling or striking. Wing chun is a striking martial art, but really places an emphasis on countering your opponent. Other martial arts do of course counter opponents, but also have standalone techniques as an aggressor.

Wing chun employs strategies such as redirection, interception and trapping of the opponents hands. There are really not many martial arts which teach you to trap the hands of the opponent. Almost everything taught in other striking arts is about striking the opponent to either the head or the body.

Wing Chun Is Not Like Other Striking Martial Arts

Like many other striking martial arts, there are both positives and negatives to learning Wing chun. Whilst it is not a 100% effective striking and blocking system, it does have it’s own unique uses and techniques.

Martial arts such as karate, muay thai and taekwondo have a certain degree of overlap. These three martial arts all contain some of the same punches and kicks. The rulesets differ, some of the stances differ as well, but overall they could all compete and look similar in a kickboxing competition.

Wing Chun differs from these martial arts and is somewhat unusual for a striking art. Due to the unorthodox nature of wing chun’s striking, this makes it more difficult for beginners to learn and understand.

Even blocking and redirecting the energy of your opponent is quite an unusual thing to learn. Most other striking arts teach blocking and dodging. Whilst they may put a little bit of thought into the centreline and redirection, these are the core principles of wing chun. Without these ideas, wing chun cannot be learned.

In addition to this, wing chun will often make use of a wooden dummy to simulate the hands, arms and legs of an opponent. Other striking martial arts often use equipment such as the heavy bag to practice their techniques. Wing Chun strikes cannot really be practiced without counterattacks. This is what clearly differentiates it from other martial arts.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Wing Chun?

Whilst you can learn the basic fundamentals of wing chun in under 10 hours of training. You will not even be close to mastering or fully understanding anything.

If we are to compare wing chun to driving a car, it may be quite a similar analogy. When learning to drive a car, after 10 hours, you could probably drive 20 miles or so without crashing. The same could be said for wing chun. 10 hours deep you would have a basic understanding of the art and have some thoughts in your head about what needs to be done.

With that being said, after 10 hours of driving, you would not be ready to become a nascar professional or even drive on a highway. Wing chun is similar in this way too since you aren’t a professional fighter, neither would your skills be good enough to defend yourself after such a short amount of time.

Overall it takes many years of dedication, practice and perseverance to become proficient in wing chun. You will need to spend a lot of time mastering technique and understand that you still have a lot to learn after decades of practicing.

Your ego should be small enough that each time you train, you still realise how little you know in the big scheme of things.

Common Mistakes That Slow Your Progress

Focus On One Thing At A Time

This can be boring to begin with. When you start Wing chun, you will be exposed to a lot of things at once, it may even be somewhat overwhelming. This is because your brain cannot learn too many things at once. It may be boring to practice with a partner whilst focussing purely on the centreline. However, over time you will find that you no longer need to focus on the centreline because your body already knows what it is doing.

You have freed up some cognitive space in your brain and can now focus on something else. As certain movements and techniques begin to become second nature, you will be able to learn more and more concepts.

Going Too Hard & Too Fast

Going harder or going faster is not going to make your technique any better. In fact, it may make your technique worse or injure somebody.

If we imagine someone who has never dribbled a basketball in their life and asked them to walk the length of a court bouncing the ball, it’s likely they will make some mistakes, but get there in the end. Now imagine if we asked them to sprint the court. There is absolutely no doubt that they would keep losing control of the ball. It would look nothing like dribbling at all.

The same theory can be applied to wing chun. If you’re simply spamming random movements, your technique will not improve. In the beginning, you will need to go unrealistically slow and not rush things. If you don’t spend time to think about what you’re actually doing, you will never improve. You may feel that your wing chun is excellent to being with. But sooner than later, people who started training around the same time as you will start to overtake you and continue to pull even further ahead.

Being Too Stiff

It is a well known cliche by now, but when Bruce Lee famously said “be like water” he meant that you must flow, but sometimes you must be hard. When you are a beginner to wing chun, you will certainly not flow. This is no fault of your own, as you can’t be expected to do anything fluidly without sufficient practice.

Over time you will realize that stiff and robotic movements are really not suitable for wing chun. The whole idea of the martial art is to rapidly adjust and counter the strikes of your opponent. If you are too rigid then this is something you will simply not be able to do.

The only way this can really be removed is through time. When you have put enough hours into going to class and practicing technique you will begin to feel more fluid in your technique and less stiff.