WingTsun™ (pronounced 'wing-chun') is a complete system of self-defense which works for everyone
regardless of size, strength, gender or athleticism.
The goal of WingTsun™ is to teach practical self-defense in the shortest amount of time possible.
Its techniques are based on positioning, leverage and simple physics, allowing the student to borrow the opponent's strength and turn it against them.

Ranges of Unarmed Combat

Wing Tsun training teaches the student to prevail in all possible ranges and phases of unarmed combat. This is very important from the standpoint of real-life self-defence, as one never knows where one will be attacked or what the pre-fight situation will be.

The five ranges are:

1. Long Range - employs feet
2. Middle Range - employs hands
3. Close Range - employs elbows and knees
4. Standing Anti-Grappling Range - employs and counters holds, locks, and throws
5. Ground fighting
    

The Wing Tsun system is unique in that its ingenious concept allows the student to move according to the same principle in every range. This greatly simplifies the demands on the student during a confrontation, as she does not need to change his/her strategy, mind set, or way of moving as the range of a confrontation changes (as it nearly always does, quickly and unpredictably).

Student Syllabus


The WingTsun student programme is divided into 12 modules, each of which takes 3-4 months tocomplete training twice weekly. Students are examined on each module before moving onto the next one and this ensures consistency and quality in the training. Within the student syllabus the following areas are covered.

Forms: These are sequences of movements containing the key techniques and underlying principles of WingTsun. They also prepare the student physically for the practise of Wing Tsun due to the stretching and alignment of the muscles.

Applications: Individual movements are taken from the forms and used as techniques for self-defence. Students are taught how to defend themselves against kicks, punches, strangles, locks together with ground fighting techniques, defences against weapons, multiple attackers and how to apply non-violent restraint.

Lat-Sau: While the forms and the applications will give the student the knowledge of how to defend oneself, this is not enough. The student must have the“ability” to apply the techniques in a moving situation against random attacks. This is achieved through the Lat-Sau exercise, a cycle of movements which allows techniques to be practised with high repetition.

Chi-Sau: Also known as sticky hands, this tactile exercise gives the trainee the ability to “instinctively “ place themselves in a superior position to that of their opponent once contact with the hands has been made. From this position an attack can be launched while placing themselves out of harms way.
Chi-Sau has been described as the soul of WingTsun which glues together all the movements in a synergistic way so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is practiced in a relaxed manner and facilitates the ultimate goal of WingTsun, to apply the correct techniques without conscious thought.

Wing Tsun (WT) originated some 400 years ago, founded by a Chinese nun named Ng Mui and her first student, Yim Wing Tsun. Ng Mui was one of the few people to escape the sacking and burning of the Shaolin Temples by the Manchurian government in their effort to bring about an end to the Shaolin's power. Ng Mui and a few of the monks managed to escape and seek refuge throughout China, avoiding capture by the government. While trained in the Shaolin Kung Fu system, Ng Mui knew that she needed something better to overcome the highly skilled monks who had betrayed her Shaolin brethren to the Manchurians. She thought, however, that the existing martial art systems were too complex and placed too much reliance on power techniques and strong stances. Ng Mui was determined to design a fighting system to take advantage of the weak points of the Shaolin Kung Fu system and work as a direct antithesis to the theories it set forth. As a result, instead of using brute force to overcome an attacker, her new system would 'borrow' the force of the enemy, or 'give way' to it.

Creating Her Own Style

With the concept of borrowing the force of the enemy, Ng Mui set about redeveloping everything from basic posture to the fighting stance, the punching and kicking techniques, and the footwork techniques. The legend is that Ng Mui observed a fight between a crane and a fox and noticed how the crane, though weaker than its opponent, dominated the fox. It is said that this fight was the birth of her new fighting system, one that allows the anyone to use an opponent's force to defeat him.
Ng Mui spent the following years perfecting her new system. During this time, she witnessed a young and beautiful woman, Yim Wing Tsun, continuously being harassed by a bully in her village. One day Ng Mui asked her if she would like to learn Ng Mui's new system of self-defense, and Yim Wing Tsun gladly agreed. After a period of training, Yim Wing Tsun was ready to face her harasser; the fight was very short and devastating to the bully who, humiliated and degraded in public, left the village and was never heard of again.
Yim Wing Tsun, however, realized that she had learned a truly unique and superior self defense system. A new martial art, named after Ng Mui's first student, was born. Thanks to their highly developed martial art techniques, they could win fights against the strongest men of their time.
Since then, WT had been taught only within Chinese families and clans. The late GREAT GRANDMASTER YIP MAN was the last WT teacher who taught Chinese students exclusively. The WT art form was first introduced to the public when GGM Yip Man left the Chinese Mainland during the communist takeover to live in Hong Kong.
As a direct student of GGM Yip Man, the late Bruce Lee added to the popularity of WT because Lee looked to it as the "style without a style." Even though Bruce Lee only learned the basics of the WT system, he continued his training and used his limited knowledge to form the nucleus of his own style, the Jeet Kune-Do. Wing Tsun appealed to Lee because compared with many of the other Chinese arts, it had already been stripped of many inefficient movements. After GGM Yip Man passed away his students could not decide who the next Grandmaster would be. Therefore they "split" and created their own families, which is why we have many different spellings of the WT style today. Only very few students of GGM Yip Man were able to bring the system to the next level. In fact, most lineages teach Wing Chun, a very, very light version of the complete system.