Friday 11 January 2013

Video nasty


YouTube is an easy way to lose a few days of your life, especially if you start your trawl with a search for: "Wing Chun versus..."
It's so addictive seeing the practitioners, and the style, go up against exponents of muay Thai, aikido, karate, Shaolin and any other martial art you care to think about.
Sometimes Wing Chun comes out on top, sometimes it doesn't. I don't mind, it's just entertaining to see people spar, or in some cases fight, using the techniques that I am developing myself.



The only downside to YouTube's hundreds on hundreds of videos like this is the comment facility.
Rather than discuss the skills on show, so many martial arts practitioners use this tool to argue about which art is more effective and therefore the best.
The Wing Chun guy beat the karate guy so it must be better... Muay Thai beat Wing Chun so it must be superior... and on and on.

It's all rubbish of course. Firstly because it's impossible to assess the effectiveness of styles, only the people practising them.
A brilliant Wing Chun practitioner will beat someone who is very good at karate just as someone brilliant at karate will defeat someone who is very good at Wing Chun.
But by watching the videos, it's impossible to say how long the people in them have trained for, who they have been trained by and how hard they have practised.
That's before you consider natural attributes like size and strength that help or hinder their techniques.

Then there's the fact that while there are hundreds of videos of people facing each other using different styles, a smaller percentage are real fights with no holds barred.
Even in the brutal Ultimate Fighting arena there are rules and I'm sure many styles are hindered greatly when it comes to having some of their potent weapons removed.
In Wing Chun, we love a poke to the eyes or a smash to the groin. But you can't do that without inflicting real damage oon someone and that's not allowed in competition.
We don't even like gloves as they take away some of the power we can get in to attacks using our wrists.
Other arts, I'm sure, must be similarly hampered when they are taken to competition.

Finally, I'm uncomfortable with the concept of 'best' when it comes to martial arts.
I'm under 6ft and woefully inflexible so the raw power of muay Thai or the high-kicks of karate don't suit me.
But the speed, explosiveness and effeciency of movement in Wing Chun does.
A friend of mine is huge and loves the aggression of kick-boxing. It allows him to harness his natural power to great effect.

Then there's the concept of best being about which style allows you to hurt the person in front of you most effectively.
I'm not interested in that. For me, the best style is the one that I enjoy the most because it's the training I get the pleasure from.
I hope I never have to use my Wing Chun skills on the street because I don't want to have to hurt anyone.
The 'best' way of defending yourself is surely not to get in to a fight in the first place.

Now stop wasting your time reading this and let's watch some YouTube.

@DanPountney