Why should “they” provide evidence when you won’t??
You ask people to support their view but you don’t? And at the same time you expect us to blindly follow?
James
I hope no one blindly follows anyone.
However there’s some evidence of WC people doing badly on the ground (see the “WT in the UFC thread”) and not so much of WC people doing well on the ground.
Nevertheless the “asking for evidence” approach is getting tiring…
Let’s just take a different approach and poll people on the forum to find out how much time/energy they devote regularly to groundfighting vs standup.
Good poll, Edmund.
I currently spend about 1/3 of my training time doing some aspect of wrestling/grappling - be it standing or on the ground.
But my approach is not simply a Wing Chun anti-grappling theme.
Yes…the first line of defense against someone coming in for a grab and takedown is simultaneous blocking, striking, footwork - but it doesn’t end there. The second line is where a standing fight in the clinch and the use of elbow or knee strikes might come into play - or a takedown of my own…and if he was coming in to take out one or both of my legs - then a sprawl, for example, might come into play…and the final line of defense is when they are past the sprawl range and other types of wrestling defenses and counters are being used - which will always lead to the ground - and ideally to an immediate advantage for myself.
Finally, I would say that about 70% of the time I do alot to wrestling is actually spent on the ground - and about 90% of that time is actually spent wrestling (ie.- controls, positioning, reversals, escapes, submissions)…the other 10% using what we call in Catch wrestling “ripping techniques” (elbow strikes, knee strikes, punches, gouges, fish hooks, etc.)
James,
Just how do you think someone can prove WCK won’t work on the ground? You can’t prove a negative (you can’t, for example, prove bigfoot doesn’t exist, though you can point out how flimsy the evidence is for that proposition; but it’s simple to prove it does – just provide one that we can see, i.e., evidence). I could put clips of me and other WCK guys getting pounded/submitted on the ground but that wouldn’t prove that someone somewhere couldn’t make it work (which is exactly what the theoreticians would say: “sure, you can’t do it but we can!”). All these folks saying WCK works on the ground need to do is provide evidence of it (we can argue until the cows come home) – and not against their WCK brothers but against skilled groundfighters. The mere fact no one will produce a bigfoot says it all.
Edmund,
You raise an excellent point IMO – the other factor (besides that we just don’t have the necessary tools) is that good groundfighters have spent hundreds or thousands (in some cases tens of thousands) of hours fighting on the ground, honing their skills, etc. How much time have the “WCK groundfighters” spent fighting on the ground with good people? It’s sort of like saying “WCK concepts” can be applied to foil fencing. That sounds great but even if we have the tools to fence with the foil (which I submit we don’t) you won’t have a chance against someone that has spent hundred/thousands of hours actually foil fencing and with an evolved fencing method.
Hi Terence
I don’t know what it means to the folks that use it for me, the notion is not useful. IMO lots of these sorts of terms are used by theoreticians (to describe their theoretical POV) but are essentially meaningless. For examples, boxers, BJJers, MMAists, etc., i.e., folks that really fight, don’t “talk” like that because they don’t think like that. It’s just not important to them.
—when you say “really fight,” are you talking about real fighting, broken bones, ripped skin, serious injury etc, a winner and a loser?
My experience is that fighters (boxers, BJJists, MMAists, etc. - persons actually using their method) are always looking for better ways of doing things; it’s the “conceptual theoreticians” that aren’t.
—by “persons actually using their method,” are you talking about real fighting?
Actually, I think more of these advances are based on experience (performance) – encountering a problem and trying to figure out a way to solve it, stumbling on something you hadn’t considered, etc. Many people think the principle or concept precedes the application; IME it’s just the opposite. It’s from the application that we come to realize the concept.
—I don’t think many people would disagree with this, it has been bashed about for years in these forums, and once ego (or arrogance) is put aside, most agree, experience is a great teacher, and given enough the talent can be used by a good instructor in teaching. The system is not the hindrance to development, arrogance and fear is.
This too comes from experience. For one example, WCK won’t provide the technical basis for fighting on the ground.
—no it does not, but there are certainly shared principle enough that can allow the wc man to hit the mat, and after much time be able to prepare there. And where there is not (sufficient technical basis) then one must be humble enough to take what is offered.
—To your question, is wc outdated? It would seem yes, if one is not prepared to take a risk and test what they “know”. For those testing and adapting, no. So, I don’t know about what you have thus far practised but it is sounding like it was/is (outdated), you must be excited for the change.
Regards Andrew W.
“My experience is that fighters (boxers, BJJists, MMAists, etc. - persons actually using their method) are always looking for better ways of doing things; it’s the “conceptual theoreticians” that aren’t…To your question, is wc outdated? It would seem yes, if one is not prepared to take a risk and test what they “know”. For those testing and adapting, no.” (Andrew W)
THIS POST SAYS IT ALL.
Don’t know who you are, Andrew W…but welcome!
“Rolling around on cememt” is a huge disadvantage to the person who doesn’t know what to do there. Most trained groundfighters know that there are a variety of scenarios where it is quite advisable to take the fight to the ground.
Why are you assuming that traditional arts were empty hand. Ever think that what most of us traditional people practice is only part of weapons based arts? So it could be a non-argument.
That is an excellent point and probably true, which would explain why so many traditional arts are not very good when it comes to empty hand fighting.
Just for clarity and credit where credit is due …
"My experience is that fighters (boxers, BJJists, MMAists, etc. - persons actually using their method) are always looking for better ways of doing things; it’s the “conceptual theoreticians” that aren’t…
Terence wrote that, not Andrew.
To your question, is wc outdated? It would seem yes, if one is not prepared to take a risk and test what they “know”. For those testing and adapting, no." (Andrew W)
Andrew did indeed write this latter part.
Indeed, great to “see” you and your voice of reason again, Andrew. 
Regards,
- Kathy Jo
What you would be “inventing” would be MMA/NHB with dirty street tactics.
Back in those days or the days when WC was created, wasn’t there a revolution going on? Warfare can make one very skilled in their respective Mar
tial Art
Warfare has always been fought with weapons. Anyone who tried to fight without weapons would have been quickly wiped out.
It’s based on the same faulty premise as those who hark back to the golden days of flying and energy blasts. There have always been good and bad fighters. People who had to use martial arts on the battlefield five hundred years ago and who survived probably got **** good. In antiquity some of the good fighters systematized what worked for them into styles. Within those styles there are still good and bad fighters. That is no fault of the system. Only a system which is incapable of producing good fighters is a “bad system” WC is definately not one of those.
Or in short tell your friends their position is no more tenable to the history of martial arts than Ka Me Ha Me Ha. 
EDIT: Martial arts is all about weapons. Spears are weapons, swords are weapons, knives are weapons, empty hands are weapons. Therefore while I don’t at all disagree that people make weapons for warfare, I still would assert that in pre-firearms warfare martial arts had to be top-notch.
Also there is nothing wrong with dirty street tactics. And WC got there before MMA so they get rights to the name. You could say that NHB/MMA is WC only cleaned up for sportmanly conduct. 
Or is my sifu the only one who teaches Chin’na applications from WC material?
SimonM wrote:
It’s based on the same faulty premise as those who hark back to the golden days of flying and energy blasts. There have always been good and bad fighters.
**Agreed. But the point is that these things are relative – a good boxer from 100 years ago wouldn’t be as good by today’s standards.
People who had to use martial arts on the battlefield five hundred years ago and who survived probably got **** good.
**They just got good relative to those folks they were fighting (same as the boxers). When the peasant class was finally permitted to own and practice sword fighitng in Japan, they didn’t have the “knowledge” or experience of the samurai but they trained competively by “sparring” with bamboo swords. At the first tournament where the peasants were permitted to compete (with the samurai), they destroyed the samurai.
In antiquity some of the good fighters systematized what worked for them into styles. Within those styles there are still good and bad fighters. That is no fault of the system.
**You seem to miss the point that “good” and “bad” are relative to the times. This is true of all physical or athletic endeavors. Cornish wrestling may have been “da bomb” in 18th century Cornwall, just as tai ji may have been “da bomb” in 18th century Chen village but that doesn’t mean those arts are effective today since training methods and knowledge and skills have evolved.
Only a system which is incapable of producing good fighters is a “bad system” WC is definately not one of those.
**Here’s where you and I agree – the only way to know if a fighting method is effective by results: does it produce good fighters. You seem to think it does. My friends would say the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. For example, to avoid any unpleasantness I’ll avoid using WCK and talk instead about tai ji. Chen Xaio Wang is the standard-bearer of Chen tai ji; he’s considered the “best” in that method. So who has he fought? No one. Now, shouldn’t the “best” or a “grandmaster” of a fighting method either be or have been a world-class fighter? The only way to determine that is, of course, by fighting world-class fighters. So what tai ji “grandmaster” has ever fought anyone known to have high level fighting skills? See why I don’t want to talk about WCK and its “grandmasters”? 
And back then there were no satellite tracking systems and infrared technologies, laser guided missiles, nor planes, trains and automobiles. Guerilla warfare, with weapons (like the one’s developed over the years in the oriental MA), where of course used but the empty hands were also there to supplement them.
James
No I don’t “miss the point” I just disagree. I have never seen any evidence to suggest that the hypothetical “best fighter” from 500 years ago would have been any worse at hand to hand combat than the hypothetical “best fighter” from today. Nor do I think that any such evidence could ever be found since there is no way to observe a 500 year old fighter in action.
So I work from the assumption that the human genome has not changed in the last couple years and therefore the ability to develop humans that are able to fight will likely have remained constant. All that has changed is the sophistication of our supplimentary tools (weapons, vehicles, etc.).
“I have never seen any evidence to suggest that the hypothetical “best fighter” from 500 years ago would have been any worse at hand to hand combat than the hypothetical “best fighter” from today.” (SimonM)
TOTALLY ABSURD LOGIC…
By the same thinking one could argue that medicine was just as advanced as today…the means of transportation…military weaponry…farming and agriculture…political and human rights…and a thousand other things.
This line of thinking is an attempt to deny evolution and progress.
Ridiculous.
No it is not. Evolution takes much longer than 500 years to work. Genetically modern humans have existed for somewere around 50000 years at least if I remember correctly from first year anthro. As for nutrition; in Europe and North America we had lower obesity rates and better nutrition 50 years ago than we do today. That is hardly progress. I simply don’t agree that more complicated technology equals better people. That is your line of logic and it is HIGHLY flawed.
Morphogenetic Fields
Hi Simon,
there is some evidence that suggests “evolution” can work much more quickly… Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogentic fields offers an explanation of how this might work.
Sheldrake’s work is hotly debated, but quite interesting. Here’s the nutshell explanation of morphogentic fields from Wikipedia:
[B]Rupert Sheldrake trained as a plant physiologist, and became interested in the way that plants, and all living things, took on their form. What starts as a single cell splitting into identical copies eventually changes, with some cells taking on specific characteristics, some become leaves, some stem. Once these changes have taken place, the reverse is no longer possible; for example, leaves cannot be changed back into stems.
At the time of his research in the late 1960s and 1970s, the reasons for this sort of development were unclear. In the 1920s, embryo regeneration and the capacity for willow shoots to grow whole new trees, were thought to imply such fields or knowledge or memory in the environment. The later discovery of DNA appeared at first to offer an explanation, but since the DNA remains largely identical throughout an organism, it was not, of its own, able to explain form. It explained that a cell was from a plant, but not that it was stem or leaf. Most scientists believed there was an unknown mechanism in the DNA that provided form as well, but there was no direct evidence that it existed.
Sheldrake instead developed a completely new theory to explain this problem, one based on a universal field encoding the “basic pattern” of an object. In Sheldrake’s view, the existence of a form is itself sufficient to make it easier for that form to come to exist somewhere else. He first published his ideas in 1973, referring to the concept as the morphogenetic field.
This morphogenetic field would provide a force that guided the development of an organism as it grew, making it take on a form similar to that of others in its species. The term morphogenesis came from the Greek morphe which means form, and genesis which means coming-into-being. A feedback mechanism, morphic resonance, would lead to changes in this pattern, as well as explain why humans didn’t “pick up” the pattern of plants during development. As evidence, Sheldrake offered a selection of seemingly disconnected bits of evidence.
One was the research of Harvard University researcher William McDougall, who, in the 1920s, studied the abilities of rats to correctly solve mazes. He found that children of rats that had learned the maze were able to run it faster – at first the rats would get it wrong 165 times before being able to run it perfectly each time, but after a few generations it was down to 20. McDougall felt this was due to some sort of Lamarckian evolutionary process. Sheldrake felt that this was instead evidence of a morphogenetic field. The rats running the maze the first times built their pattern of learning into the “rat field”, and later rats were able to draw on this patterning. Several examples of this sort of “universal learning” were offered.
The other major piece of evidence came from pure chemistry, where another unexplained “learning behaviour” takes place during the formation of crystals. When a new chemical compound is first created it will crystallize slowly, but when other researchers repeat the experiment they find it occurs more quickly. Chemists generally attribute this to better experiments, the mistakes of the first are documented and not repeated. Sheldrake instead felt this was yet another example of a morphogenetic field, that the crystals being formed for the first time were creating a field that later experiments were able to draw on.
Since then a number of other examples have been added – the behaviour of monkeys in Japan cleaning their food (the Hundredth Monkey effect), and birds in Europe learning to open milk bottles have all been offered as examples of a “nonlocal” force in behaviour and learning.[/B]
Fascinating as punctuated equilibrium theories are there is nothing to suggest that anything of this sort has happened to humanity in the last several thousand years. Let’s face it, genetically modern human beings predate all current civilizations.
Simon,
Evolution and Progress are two different animals. Sure, in some opinions, WC might not have progressed any and in others it has, but the truth is it has evolved (whether anyone likes it or not). The question is, has it evolved into something better or something worse?
Both, IMHO.