If my WingChun doesn’t work, do I use a different style or what??
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Answer: You don’t have to. Besides style versus style may be a losing argument in my opinion.

I’ll touch on three things in this response: Train, Wing Chun is a concept-based martial art, and destroy targets.

1) Train more, and train in the areas that give you trouble. For example, one student I train with had a lot of trouble against kicks. So we spent a whole night working on kicks. I basically kicked him all night. We started with the basics, and started slow at first. Then we sped it up and I made the kicks more real (real power). He got a lot better by the end of that night.

2) Many sifus say that Wing Chun is a principle or concept based martial art. I believe that means that our principles are just as important as the moves we learn.

In other words, we should focus on improving our understanding (and execution) of things like dominating the centerline, or covering, or affecting the balance, as we do improving our punches and kicks.

3) I’ve been blending in many concepts and skills from outside the main Wing Chun world, lately. They come from the perspective of combat survival – true life and death, not competition and not the typical bar fight scenario.

There’s a lot of cross-over, which I like. They’re probably more efficient than Wing Chun in many respects.

For instance, here’s one concept that could answer your question about changing styles: ‘Destroy the target; it doesn’t matter how.’

Again, this is from the point of view of survival, not dealing with a drunk dinner guest. But this is what it means…

If in order to survive you decide your best available target are the ribs (destroying the ribs), it doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you get it done.

You can use your fists, elbow, heel of your boot, knee, a crowbar, the corner of a sturdy table, a rock. The goal is a bunch of broken ribs, that’s what you focus on. Get it done; the ribs don’t know the difference.

To repeat once more:

The goal is to destroy targets.

If the target/goal is to break ribs it doesn’t matter if you use a karate reverse punch, a Wing Chun straight punch, a boxing hook… Focus on destroying the target and get it done.

If you’re interested, you can learn a bit more about these survival combat concepts here.

Improve your Wing Chun and destroy targets.