WT is WC is WT...

At the beginning of November, I traveled to California for a conference and vacation, and had the opportunity to visit Sifu Jin Young in Los Angeles, aka China Boxer. Some of you may have seen his teachings before at his youtube channel.


A selection of Sifu Jin Young's students in Los Angeles, California

I love visiting different schools. From seeing some of the youtube videos, I was looking forward to hearing his philosophy about training Wing Tsun/Chun.

I was not disappointed.

Sifu Jin takes his training and teaching seriously, and has a generous and passionate attitude towards teaching. His students were great to train with too.

Structure

His focus? (at least what I gathered from one group class)

Developing structure.

Ever since 2008, I have been working on developing structure via training in Calgary and Vancouver. So, it was great to see this theme repeated and repeated. Hearing about it from more than one lineage must mean structure is important!

He uses various very interesting and applicable drills to help students develop proper structure and familiarizing them with using whole body-chain movements.

Are you training with your partner?

Or are you training against your partner?

As emphasized repeatedly by Sifus Ralph, German, and Asad, I saw the importance of this point again during Sifu Jin's class. The drills we were working on relied on each partner's feedback and appropriate resistance. Each student not only focused on making themselves better, but made efforts to help their partners. There were no egos here!

Commonalities between lineages

The overlap of teaching throughout the different schools I have visited, including the visits to Ulm 1, 2 and Munich, reminds me about the commonality between different WT/WC lineages. Unfortunately, when comparing WT/WC schools, we tend to focus more on the differences rather than looking at the similarities.

It doesn't matter which lineage we are learning from, as long as the instructor: 1) Knows and applies WT/WC skills principles, and 2) Can teach it. Can the instructor teach and show students enough such that they can develop the skills to become a good practitioner, and perhaps even a teacher themselves as well?

Another commonality? The group class of 90 minutes was much too short, as usual.


An even more serious pose

If you are ever in Los Angeles, give Sifu Jin a message beforehand and I’m sure he’d welcome you to join his class.

Happy training!