Ip Man, a pioneer in the kung fu style that influenced Lee. Hong Kong filmmakers hope to change that by bringing Ip’s story to the big screen.
On Tuesday, action stars Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung from the U.S. TV series “Martial Law” prepared to start shooting one of two planned movies about Ip. They joined Ip’s sons in paying tribute to their father at his hometown in the southern city of Foshan, a four hours northwest of Hong Kong.
Looks line Donnie Yen is going to play Yip Man and I’m not sure what role Sammo Hung has in this production.
Slightly related — while looking at the Wikipedia article on Yip Man I noticed a reference to Wing Chun Magazine. Fans of WC might want to check the magazine out. It appears to be freely available online but you do need Adobe to read it.
My March video stream will be featuring some of my favorite eye and throat attacks. Since I’m giving back to my taekwondo instructor by teaching her some of these, I thought I’d share them with my audience as well.
I could not find a suitable spear-hand strike from karate or taekwondo. This video appears to be kung-fu. However, you get the idea what would happen if applied to an eye. In taekwondo we practice a vertical spear-hand. In the video you see a horizontal strike. Personally I do not care for the spear-hand and this is coming from a guy who really likes to break.
The finger strike that I was taught came from a very Americanized version of Wing Chun. These two videos capture two of the basic drills and concepts that I learned:
I was taught to snap the finger strike out like a jab and take care to let your fingers flex upon hitting a solid target. This way you won’t break them. You can keep the fingers close together and aim for one eye. Or, you can split the difference by letting your middle two fingers split along their nose. This in turn ensures you hit at least one eye. In the conditioning video he does do the flex but he also does a claw hand which I was not taught.
A heavy bag or piece of pine board mounted to a garage wall makes a really good target for conditioning and practice. Again: The key here is not to hit ridged like a karate or taekwondo spear hand. Rather, let your fingers bend a little when they hit solid. All you are looking for is that 2-3 second delay that you are going to get if you actually hit someone’s eye. If you know what you are doing that’s all you’ll need.
While we are on the topic I also found some very good eye gouges from Streetfightsecrets.com. Here you can see two very basic eye gouges that I was taught in the Army. Nothing fancy here but they work.
I’m going to close with their video on throat attacks. This is another of my favorite areas to attack. I was told it only takes 4 lbs of force to collapse a windpipe.
At 3:19 you can see a variation of the horizontal knife strike my sifu taught me. You need good wrist flexibility and conditioning to make it effective. However, it’s very effective when thrown like a jab. Once again this is a good one to practice on a heavy bag. He also adds some other throat strikes that are worth a look, too.
One of the first throat attacks he talks about is something he calls a yoke-hand strike. In taekwondo we call it an arc-hand strike and it shows up in the black belt form, Koryo.
Some people might call this dirty fighting. However, is it a fair fight if I go up against someone who outweighs me by 50 or more pounds of muscle? I’ll let you be the judge on that.
I’m hoping I’ve gotten my injuries out of the way for the next few months. The head seems to be better and the rest of me is pretty good too.
We have a tournament in April to start getting ready for. I’m still debating about sparring. For sure I’m going to break and compete in weapons for my first time ever. Sparring we shall see. We have some new people who are going to need guidance for one. Then there’s the fact that even with just the “school black belt” they’ll probably make me compete against other black belts that are half my age.
These tourneys are a crap shoot. Sometimes I’ve had fair competition against people my same age, rank, and weight. More often than not they are younger and usually outweigh me. When that happens one of the masters always give me the option to bow out. I never do. A few times I held my own but on at least one occasion I got murdered. So, I’m leaning towards no because the Cho Dan confirmation test is the following month and I’d like to be in one piece.
Despite having my bell rung hard, I was able to muddle through teaching sabum the next level of the snakes and palms drill:
Here’s the snake and palm drill from an intermediate pattern:
Attacker throws center line chest punches or grabs
Defender palm blocks attacker’s right with a right
Defender palm blocks attacker’s left with a left
Defender palm blocks attacker’s right with a left (cross body)
Defender palms attacker’s left with a right (cross body)
Defender snake blocks attacker’s right with a left (abbreviated knife block)
Defender snake blocks attacker’s left with a right (same deal)
Defender snake blocks attacker’s right with a right (a circular loop under their wrist with a knife edges; hence the “snake block”)
Defender snake blocks attacker’s left with a left
You just keep cycling through this pattern until you get a rhythm going
Chi Sao and Lap Sao are a nice distractions, however the boxing and snakes and palms drill go best with taekwondo. We actually had the snake and palms drill flowing for a while. So, I think in a few weeks we can try mixing the attacks from high to low. Also, at the advanced level the pattern gives you practice in trapping and grabbing range. This way you can also trap or grab and practice counters too.
All the blocks are short, non-chambered, and natural. It’s fun watching sabum try to break her habit of wanting to blast with something chambered. However, she’s learning this one up really fast.
