Introduction by Alan Orr

It is a great reward for me to see others grow and develop on their path in life. The other side to the coin is that when you’re part of the growth you grow as well. David Lawrence has been a friend and student of mine for some time now and he is an excellent example of a good student. So when he offered to write
about his experiences of learning martial arts with myself, I thought he would offer some interesting food for thought.

Article by David Lawrence

For just over three years I have been training in the Chu Sau Lei system of Wing Chun under the guidance of my sifu and friend, Alan Orr. In that time I have taken steps along a path that I know winds a very long way ahead of me but, with his expert tuition and his wise mentorship, I feel that I have, in some significant way moved forward. I have felt for some time that I would like to reflect on some of my experience as a novice in the world of martial arts, not I would stress from the outset, to preach to those with vastly more experience than myself or indeed to set myself up as something more than I am, but to offer solidarity and support to any of you who, like me, have seen the path stretching almost to infinity and what seems at times an impossibly far horizon and to show how steps taken at the start can set you on your way.

To anyone entering the world of Wing Chun it will become apparent almost immediately that one is not simply taking up a hobby or involving oneself in a sport. Whilst the physical and mental challenges of sports, the sense of comradeship of the team and the rewards of becoming more adept are clearly there, there is something more that it has to offer. I know that it is hard to define but, to me at least, it is a sense of a holistic coming together of physical and mental potential and a different way to understand ourselves and the world around us. Put more simply, it is a way of finding control over the body and the mind and understanding the relationship between them. It is these, body and mind, that will form the framework for my reflection on my experience and help to define a positive way forward.

The Body
When I first joined Alan Orr’s school I was a complete newcomer to martial arts, in my mid-thirties, a secondary school teacher with a background in distance running. I had moved away from marathon running to develop a more all round core strength and fitness. I was very fortunate that my trainer was Alan Orr who helped build that fitness from one that was very much endurance based with relatively low body mass and muscle bulk to a more conditioned one. This has been of great help to me in starting to learn Wing Chun. Clearly muscles are not a substitute for trained skills but it seems to me that being physically fit and conditioned have very substantial benefits to the novice as to the expert.

Developing the core strength and physical stamina of the body allowed me to train hard without exhaustion being an extra barrier to learning some of the skills. What is more, although it may seem almost absurd to say it, learning a martial art is a process that will
necessarily involve some degree of physical contact. In the case of our school, this means a progression as a beginner through paired drills and exercises, Chi Sao and, ultimately, sparring, in a cycle of increasing intensity. If you come away from training in agony because your body is a tender mass of bruises (as, let’s face it, we all have), the desire to find excuses not to train or, heaven forbid, to give up completely may gain a foothold. I have found that making myself a bit more physically robust makes the process of learning all the more fun and enjoyable.

Conditioning does not mean becoming a superman; we are all of us presented with natural limitations on our physical size and shape – I am 1.70m and 74kgs – naturally many of my peers are taller, smaller, lighter, or heavier but all possess the motivation to reach a level of conditioning that will allow them to train hard. Personally I have found the Warrior Fighting Fitness system a really practical and effective way of building and sustaining conditioning. Having a programme to work to that promotes all round core strength and physical fitness is a real boost because it helps you witness tangible benefits (you feel healthy and stronger) from the outset of your martial arts career. Simply having a strong (or developing) physical framework is, of course, incidental to the process of learning the system itself. One of the tremendous benefits of the Chu Sau Lei system is that it allows the novice to begin grappling with the fundamental and integral question of body structure right from the first class. Developing body structure is an ever-evolving process but I found it helped me that biomechanical principles were explained right from the outset rather than more esoteric ones. Even a most elementary grasp of how and why body structure is effective was really useful and motivating when acquiring basic skills. I felt that I was building on a sound foundation despite not having the experience of some of my fellow beginners who had already learned other martial arts disciplines.

As Alan Orr has already explained, the Forms in Wing Chun are the essential materials for learning the system and my experience has really brought home to me the truth of this. Siu Nim Tao is like an ever open book whose pages need to be read and re-read. Watching the Form demonstrated by Alan Orr was very inspiring but led to a problem, how was I going to begin to remember the sequence of intricate movements, let alone ‘perfect’ them? Whilst I wouldn’t claim to have ‘perfected’ anything I have managed to develop the fluency of the Form largely as a result of the realisation that it is an intensely practical thing and not in anyway a showy set-piece performance. The art of the master lies in taking the pragmatic and turning it into something graceful. For beginners like me the temptation was to merely ape the movements and cobble them together as sequences without understanding what it is they teach. All the core elements of the system are there to learn; they find their application and expression outside of the Form. I stopped trying to remember ‘the moves’ and started to feel what the positions were, something I have been trying to do ever since.

It is confusing learning a physical system and it is really important to practise regularly. Not being very co-ordinated, I found that it was quite a struggle to be fluent in putting myself through a succession of quite simple exercises – tan sao to pak sao and so forth. Repetitive practice in the mirror at home together with more relaxed ‘shadow boxing’ have helped. I find that I practise throughout the day when at work or at home as well as in more formal class or training sessions. It can be really useful to practise small sections of the form or a particular position as a habit – although I try to avoid drawing too much attention to myself and haven’t been either sectioned or arrested yet! I can see that there is a clear correlation between the amount of time you practise and the rate and quality of your progress. There is no getting something for nothing in Wing Chun, clearly.

The Mind
If anything the challenges facing the mind when embarking upon a martial art were, in my experience at least, as great as those facing the body. The desire to make progress and to be a good and successful student, are important but do not alone provide a framework for success. I have found that it has been helpful to charter the mental territory a bit to explore what it is I am trying to achieve and how best to do so. This simple map covers four areas: expectations, goals, mental attitude and learning style.

I think that I was lucky to avoid the temptation to be unrealistic in my expectations when I started learning Wing Chun. It is all too tempting to be carried away by images of oneself as a latter day Bruce Lee when in fact the reality is clearly going to be very different. I am not saying for a moment that one shouldn’t be ambitious and that one shouldn’t have role models, of course one should, but the danger is that the fantasy replaces the reality. In our society we are used to a quick fix solution to our every need or problem and it may not prepare us very well for the intensive and dedicated training required to acquire martial arts skills.

It was my good fortune that for me, reality was embodied in the form of my teacher, Sifu Alan Orr, a man who has dedicated his life to learning and teaching Wing Chun and whose skills and attitude provide the perfect role model for a beginner like me. My expectations then were fashioned out of his expectations; not that I would suddenly transform myself into something quite unlike my former self but that with hard work and dedication I would see myself gradually acquiring skills that were formerly beyond me. With this positive channelling of one’s expectations into a realistic model you won’t become disillusioned with your failure to live up to impossible standards of miraculous transformation.

Having said all that about unrealistic expectations, how do we then acquire a set of realistic ones? I have found that for me this process is made much more manageable by setting myself goals to aspire to. These may vary from the small and specific - I will practise my circle step to make sure that I move more fluently – to more longer-term bigger picture goals – by this time next year I will present myself for grading and give it my best shot! The advantage for me of mixing the small and specific goals with the large ones is that I am always setting myself relevant challenges and adding impetus to my learning whilst at the same time giving myself tangible evidence of progress. If you like it is trying to boost my confidence by breaking down a very big and daunting thing -how to get good at Wing Chun - into some achievable steps. So far, and I would stress it is very much a case of so far, I feel that it is working for me and that I am making steady progress.

Quite honestly I found it rather a daunting experience joining Alan Orr’s Wing Chun class. This was, I hasten to add, no reflection on its members; the body of instructors and my fellow students are as inspiring and friendly a group as anyone could wish for – the best. Nor, of course, was it a reflection on Alan Orr himself but on my own mental attitude. There is something in us that, as we get older particularly, finds the experience of being a beginner at something an uncomfortable one. The most persistent and dangerous adversary we face is our own ego when it takes on a negative manifestation. I found that a determination to succeed and a desire to be deferential to my seniors, whilst in themselves wholly appropriate, could be twisted by the ego into obstacles to progress. You see, a determination to succeed that sees every set back as abject failure and is too impatient for progress leads to unnecessary frustration and bars learning. Likewise, the desire to hide behind ones lack of skill and experience as an excuse for failing to progress saps the confidence and is actually de-motivating. Alan Orr has helped me to address these problems and to see that if the mind is frantically berating itself for mistakes then the inevitable outcome is a cycle of failure. A negative mental attitude begets negative outcomes.

A positive mental attitude, however, frees the mind and the body to relax and to learn effectively as well as being one which generally encourages you to keep going and to enjoy what you are doing. I set myself high standards of course but I try to focus the mind on positive images of what I am hoping to achieve and to avoid my training being simply a catalogue of errors. The process is a gradual one; I don’t claim to have achieved a Zen state of calm or anything like it but it is helping me to get a better perspective on my training and progress. A practical example of this has been my experience of Chi Sao. I found that I was rather stuck in a rut where I was still very tense when rolling and tended to freeze up and to be rather robotic generally, lacking an all round fluency and confidence that I saw in others around me. Alan Orr supplied me with two insights, guiding principles really, that have helped me to regain the momentum of my progress. The first was that I should ‘invest in loss’, that is, that I should not simply stop my Chi Sao partner from attacking at all costs with the net result that one becomes caught in a kind of deadlock. Of course I found it was much more helpful to be alive to the feedback presented by the success of an opponent’s technique against my structure. The result is a greater sense of both physical and mental flow. The second was to be relaxed so that I could feel the opponent and respond more naturally without having too much focus on particular techniques as the be all and end all. The fact is that I now find that Chi Sao is a much more valuable learning experience because I am more relaxed and more receptive to the lessons it teaches.

In terms of learning style I think that it was quite a challenge for me to begin to learn the physical skills of Wing Chun partly because my accustomed learning styles tended to be more visually and auditory based. The challenge to develop the kinaesthetic side (getting the ‘feel’ of things and learning by physical experience) to the way in which we pick up techniques is a significant one. I think that there are some techniques that certainly aid this process (and some that hinder it). Watching the demonstrations of an expert like Alan Orr allows the beginner to engage in that crucial phase of modelling (copying movements and techniques) as a means to becoming more familiar with movements and body position. I found that I was able to take the model home with me in my head and use it as a guide to my own training. I haven’t found that it is useful for me to take notes during a seminar or class because I need the maximum amount of time to learn through experience and practice and writing serves as a distraction. Writing a training journal or diary is more helpful as it allows you to reflect on progress and to record questions and queries for the next class. Over time this process of modelling has become more refined as I have gained more experience into something I think of as patterning. To explain in simple terms this means that before my training I try to visualise the technique or skill. I then practise with as little interruption to the flow of what I am doing as possible. It has been difficult to avoid the temptation to stop, analyse and minutely correct all the time but it comes with determined practice. The final phase involves replay; that is going over what I have been doing mentally and physically to check its integrity and to test it for possible improvement. I have found that this process (although it may sound a bit laborious) brings results to the beginner because you avoid the pitfalls of poor training – not getting into a relaxed rhythm of technique and not checking the quality of what it is you are trying to practise.

The experience that I have had so far of learning Wing Chun under the tuition of Alan Orr has been a fantastically rewarding and enjoyable one. I look forward to continuing my journey on the path and I know that with him as my guide it’s going to be an amazing one. I hope that something in my experience resonates with you, particularly if you are just starting out. Keep training, keep learning and keep walking the path!

David Lawrence

Alan Orr is a disciple of Robert Chu Sifu and the European representative of the Chu Sau Lei Wing Chun system.

He is also the UK representative for Guro Mark Wiley in the Filipino martial arts and Sensei Eddy Millis of Shark Tank in NHB/Grappling.

Web: www.alanorr.com

For further information Tel: 07958 908 196 or email: info@alanorr.co.uk