Description:

It has been the repeated experience of Green Dragon’s Sifu Allen to observe the approach to Mook Joong work that many Wing Chun stylists employ. At best, it could be characterized as a ‘soft style’ form of technique, no doubt negatively influenced like so many other facets of the kung fu arts by the trend(s) of the past several decades in which the overall training emphasis has increasingly been toward the ‘internal’ notwithstanding the fact that probably less than 5% of the totality of the material produced in over 4,000 years of development in classical kung fu has so-called ‘hard style’ orientation.

This obvious appeal associated with the mysterious (in the west) ‘ch’i’ force - a simple concept acknowledge in a pragmatic sense in the Orient - had a fascination for western students who quickly and incorrectly regarded it as tantamount to acquiring a power exceeding that produced by muscular expansion and contraction; and, moreover, a power that could be developed in the short haul & with a minimum of effort - the same ridiculous commercial theme used to hawk every piece of exercise equipment or program on the market - i.e., it is convenient, fun, easy to do, and takes no time! In a word, bullcrap!! If it’s so simple and effortless to do that your grandmother could do it, then you had best be satisfied with being only as strong and agile as your grandmother! Nothing more. World class champions in any sport, but especially whose involving hard contact where the generation of power & force is paramount to success, have to undertake a rigorous if not grueling workout schedule. Trite or not, the ‘no pain, no gain’ sweat index methods are absolutely indispensable to advancement. You can (will) only do what you’ve been trained to be able to do, you’ll only generate the raw physical power & strength you’ve built up through hard work & unremitting effort. When you do work on the dummy, you attack with controlled violence, you hit and block hard, you initiate and respond with the same intensity and focus as you would in an actual combat situation. Your training should always be as realistic as possible, subject only to safety factors & common sense; otherwise, when confronted by a serious, determined attacker the fury of the encounter will be so destabilizing you’ll be both psycho-emotionally and physically unable to deal with it!

Much of what is going on in the public who’ve affiliated with a  martial arts program today is an amalgamation of pipe dreams, self-delusion, and a warped imagination that entertains the ludicrous prospect of inhaling the tao behind the yin & yang during 10 minutes of questionable hypogastric breathing. You've as much chance of engendering internal power from this as the fortuitous expectation that your opponent facing your indomitable Wu Shu technique will still be there while you run the length of the room to build up sufficient momentum for your aerial acrobatics! The 3 cardinal principles of empty hand combat are inviolable and not one is available through the medium of either of the two foregoing procedures, whereas all 3 are inherent in the eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe encounter that typifies most self-defense situations. For the latter, stringent work on the mook joong closely approximates the man-to-man faceoff most fights commence with and all of the qualities essential to what ensues - i.e., form, power, speed, hardness, correct execution, stamina, etc., are developed when diligent time, attention, & energy is regularly devoted to it.