STICKY-HAND FIGHTING SKILLS
1. BASIC HAND TRAP
The idea behind hand trapping is to use one of your hands to cut an opponent’s arm down upon his other arm, so that it is pressed upon his body and is momentarily dead. This situation occurs when one of your hands is on top of your opponent’s hand. At that instant, an opening for a strike to the head exists. Repeated hits can be performed while maintaining the trap by alternating the hands that respectively hold and punch.
Another form of trapping hands involves using the opponent’s own body to cut off his attack. This occurs when the attacker gets into an opponent’s side and, with one of his arms, locks up the opponent’s upper arm, forcing it onto the opponent’s chest. Once again, a clear shot at the face is possible, and again, repeated hits involve maintaining the trap and alternating the hands that respectively hold and punch.
The cut-and-punch trap can be countered by moving your bottom hand out of the cut and using the internal close-body taun sao, deflecting the punch and immediately counter-attacking. The side trap must be evaded by footwork, moving to release the pressure on the upper arm, parrying the pressing arm, and countering with a bil jee, back fist, or side hammer-punch.
2. ONE-STEP GUARD-CLEARING TECHNIQUES
There are a number of techniques in sticky-hand fighting that are called one-step guard-clearing techniques. Typically, these techniques involve one deflection or angle-altering hand move, with a follow-up attack. The taun sao and punch/palm-strike is the simplest of these.
From a taun sao with the inside hand, turn out the opponent’s outer hand, and strike through the opening. Or alternatively, perform this move, but fake a strike, and attack instead with the opposite hand. Another good technique is to alter the angles of the opponent’s defense, so that an opening materializes. For example, in the rolling hands, when you rotate from bong sao/fook sao to taun sao/punch, with your left hand in bong sao, try applying a slight circular force to the motion forming the taun sao so that your opponent’s hands both move to the left. At that split second, a free path opens up for an attack.
Apart from these techniques, there are many other one-step guard-clearing techniques. You may push a hand out of the way or lift it up; a hand may be cleared by the downward force of the jut sao, or a bil jee strike may be forced through using the piercing-hands technique from the Chum Kil form. The opponent’s hands may also be drawn downward, so that they come together (constituting a partial trap) and a strike made through the opening to the hand which is then created.
3. ROTATIONAL FORCE
The Wing Chun fighter’s hand must be flexible like a snake, one of the animals that is used to symbolically represent the system. Many sticky-hand skills are based upon rotation of the wrist or elbow to secure strikes. You may, for example, by haun sao or wrist twisting, get both of your hands on the superior inside position and force the opponent’s arms out of his center-line, attacking with a double palm strike. Again, if your hand is on the outside position, you may rotate your hand inside the opponent’s center-line and flick your fingers into his face. Another excellent skill from the Bil Jee form is to rotate an arm that is on the inside of an opponent’s upheld arm, cutting down with a palm strike or hammer punch into the opponent’s face.
4. GRAB-AND-CHOP TECHNIQUE
The grab-and-chop technique is an excellent skill that can be devastating in combat. The idea of this technique is to grab the opponent’s hand under the bridge (forearm) of your bong sao and launch a chop to the throat. This chop is usually blocked by the opponent with a taun sao. However, you can then grab the taun sao and pull and chop above it, pulling the opponent down at a 45-degree angle. This second chop will be successful because the opponent’s balance is destroyed as he is forced to trip over himself. This skill is used extensively in Wing Chun’s chin-na, which is discussed below.
5. PULLING AND PUSHING FORCES
Wing Chun’s sticky-hand fighting makes extensive use of pulling and pushing actions to clear away defenses and to render defenses ineffective. The simplest way in which this can be done is by lifting the opponent’s arms up and attacking under the bridge. Another technique involves parrying the opponent’s taun sao from your bong sao, and slipping an uppercut (lifting punch) under the bridge and through the guard to the head. A subtle use of pushing force is the tracing-the-shape palm, found in the Bil Jee form of some forms of Wing Chun, which I discussed previously in the Bil Jee chapter in volume one. This technique is used to control the upper arms of the opponent, clinging to them and forcing them onto the opponent’s own body so that his arms are momentarily trapped and you are free to strike his face.
Pushing force is a neglected aspect of contemporary martial-arts training, only being adequately developed by the Japanese in sumo wrestling and surprisingly enough by the Americans in American football, and by the Australians in “Aussie Rules” football. The push, however, is an excellent balance-destroying technique. In Wing Chun training, students train both shoulders and hips in pushing techniques that illustrate a broader principle, namely that students should aim to mold their entire bodies into weapons—not merely their hands and legs.
An example of the use of pulling force comes from the Bil Jee form (previously mentioned). Another method of clearing a guard is to pull at the opponent’s defensive hand, not to disrupt his balance, but to alter the angle of the defensive hand so that the way is cleared for a punch. For example, against your straight punch, the opponent defends with a bong sao. You grasp the opponent’s hand with your free hand, and pull so that the bong sao straightens out and your punch sails right over the top of the bong sao.
I have summarized here some of the fundamental sticky-hand techniques. While many of the more complex techniques have not been discussed or illustrated here, the above outline does, I believe, give the reader a useful guide to sticky-hand fighting. But that is not all there is to Wing Chun combat. As well as sticky-hand fighting, there is also sticky-leg fighting and chin-na. These skills must be added to the foundation that has already been constructed.
STICKY-HAND FIGHTING TECHNIQUES
1. This illustrates the start position of the single sticky-hands training drill. The larger fighter on the left delivers a left-hand taun sao, which is locked up by the smaller fighter’s right fook sao. Notice that the elbows, and not merely the wrists, are aligned along the center-line.
2. The larger fighter delivers a palm-strike from the taun sao position toward his opponent’s groin. The smaller fighter deflects this attack with a jut sao or downward-deflecting palm-strike. Because the hands are in contact, the attack is felt and the hands stick to each other, or follow each other’s force.
3. From this previous position the smaller fighter has a strategic advantage, because his hand is on top of his opponent’s hand, effectively controlling it. Therefore he punches toward the larger fighter’s head. However, the larger fighter again feels this attack coming because of the upward release of pressure and rises up, sticking to the punch to deflect it with a bong sao. The larger fighter then drops his left arm from the bong sao to the taun sao position, while the smaller fighter sticks on all the time locking up the arm. The sequence is completed by returning to the taun sao/fook sao position. The sequence is then repeated.