2025 Wing Chun Residential Course

Wing Chun Kuen is one of the most famous martial arts around today. It is known for its compactness and directness, discarding flowery moves and distilling its syllabus down to the essence of the skill. This leaves Wing Chun with three open hand forms, a wooden dummy form and two weapon forms.

The forms are like a catalogue of principles expressed through techniques. A certain technique often exemplifies a deeper principle that can be expanded to many techniques. It is up to the practitioner to embody that principle so it can be expressed appropriate to the circumstances of a situation. The training ground for this is Chi Sau. Here the principles are pressure tested and the practitioner learns how to apply them. No specific technique works all the time but the principles always stand. Thus, Chi Sau teaches how the principles are applied depending on the situation – distance, angle, energy, speed, structure.

Grandmaster Tse always emphasises that we should do Chi Sau with as many different hands as possible. The residential courses are one of the best opportunities for this. Different people have different energy and a preference for certain techniques. The more situations our skill can handle the better. We should not shy away from difficult training partners. We should face the situation and figure out how to overcome it with the right principles. Once we are in a situation where we are forced to defend ourselves we must rely on this skill. The opponent will not be lenient – they will try their best to overcome us and attack any weak points in our defence.

Chi Sau trains for contact with an opponent but there is also a crucial time before contact. So, this year, GM Tse included how to defend bare handed against an armed attacker. Sometimes we must rush in and control their centre before they can act – sometimes we must avoid the attack and then charge back in while they are overextended. GM Tse covered how to defend against the attacker swinging the weapon from different angles or trying to stab, showing how to use footwork, hand positions and even kicking. First we practiced slowly but then we were told to speed it up. Lastly, we had to defend against two people both holding weapons! Suddenly there was no time to think – we had to rely on our training to do the work and try to flow with it. Any time we paused to think, we would get hit. It really brought home how crucial it is to train until you embody the skill rather than simply intellectualising about it. The contrast between knowing about a technique and actually being able to do it without thinking became quite clear. Interestingly, the name of the first form, Siu Lim Tao – or Minimising Thought, strongly echoes this point.

The course is also a means of minimising your thoughts – at least all thoughts not pertaining to Wing Chun. For a few days, normal life with its chores, potential worries and responsibilities are on pause. You are free to focus your entire physical and mental power on learning and developing.

The course is a way to bring your skill to the next level. It is more powerful than weekly classes. To use an analogy – think of trying to boil water in a pan. Liquid water is your current skill level and the next level is steam. How do you get the water to boil and become steam? Well, you have to turn on the heat and keep it on for long enough – the hotter and longer the better. A weekly class can only heat the water to certain degree. Next week the water has cooled and you might be starting over. If you do two weekly classes, you might be starting each class with the water still lukewarm and so at the end of class it could be bubbling. Add a third class or training on your own, and you might maintain a weekly average of “bubbling” – so, slowly changing into steam. It is progress but it is slow. Take a residential course, and the water fairly quickly comes to a boil. But rather than let it cool down again, you keep the heat on for several days. At the end of the course your water is at a high boil and a big portion of it has now transformed into steam.

This makes the residential course a very powerful experience and the improvement in skill is clear. Being able to see a big change in a short time is a great boost. For the students that attend regularly, this is like a yearly injection of renewed passion and motivation.

Being a Wing Chun practitioner is being in a relationship. Relationships take respect and effort to maintain and grow. But the most important quality of a relationship must surely be passion. Every time I attend a residential course, it is like falling in love with the skill again.

Thank you to GM Tse for making this course possible, for all his patience and clear instruction – his passion for the skill is evident and captivating. Thank you to the universe for giving us warm and sunny days – it was as if summer had come early. Thank you to the capable staff at Harper Adams for a comfortable stay and the kind staff at Vineyard Cantonese Restaurant who cooked two amazing off the menu meals for us. Thank you to all the Wing Chun sisters and brothers that attended – everyone helped out in their own way and contributed to making it a wonderful course.

Now we can start looking forward to next year’s residential course and the upcoming Chi Sau weekend in June!

by Paul Hogg