Wing Chun Slapdown

I just got back from training in the park with a few Kamon friends. I’ve pretty much been out of training since working in Reading, so I was really interested to find out how they had progressed and whether I could still slap them with kung fu.

I have to say everyone has got pretty good during my break. However, surprisingly I don’t think my own training has suffered too much from sleeping on it for a few years. Obviously I haven’t improved in that time and everyone else has, but I don’t really think I’ve gone backwards particularly. I seemed to be holding my own.

I think actually ego and pride often interfere with training in martial arts. I’ve always been quite humble – I think having an ego just means you miss out on a whole load of material that you could be learning from. For example, a senior student may not pay attention when working with a beginner. However, just very occassionally that person will be doing something better than you. It happens. When it does it’s very important to be able to recognise it, so that you can improve your own technique. It’s very easy to have too much pride to accept this, but then you’ve lost an opportunity to learn and refine your own skills.

I quite like that everyone has improved lots. I’m not really concerned with status and hierarchy and insecurity about people being better than me. In fact I prefer it when people are more skilled, because there is more material to absorb. I can see how people may find it hard to return to training and accept that people have moved on, but personally I don’t feel that this will be a problem for me.