The recent Ip Man’s movies have generated a lot of interests in Wing Chun kung fu which to me is a very good thing. A friend who taught Wing Chun told me there is a surge of enquiry to learn Wing Chun over the past few months. A close friend who is learning Tai Chi Chuan got so excited after watching the movie that he went to sought out a friend who is practising Wing Chun to spar. Some of the Wing Chun attacks breached through his defence using ward-off (peng), but he was able to push the Wing Chun guy a few times too. I believe both of them had a lot of fun exploring. Of course as usual he will try the same Wing Chun techniques on me to see how I would fare and I guess he is convinced ward-off is quite a strong defence and attack in one if used correctly. The Wing Chun hype also led to another question “can Tai Chi deliver the same power of the popular 1 inch punch in Wing Chun?”
1 inch punch is made popular by Bruce Lee and is a technique used in Wing Chun for close-range fighting. It is not unique to Wing Chun though. Tai Chi Chuan also has inch jin and according to the writing of Yang Ban Hou, a Tai Chi student should further refine the 1 inch jin into 10th of an inch and 100th of an inch. In order to convince my students that Tai Chi inch jin is equally as powerful I decided to test the same. Frankly, this is my first time trying to break a wooden board using Tai Chi inch jin. Imaging where would I put my face if I fail in front of my students ha ha... luckily and to a great degree expectedly the board broke easily. We then tried two 1 inch boards and succeeded too. We wanted to try using 3 boards but couldn’t do that because we didn’t have enough board left to break. Will try that and update the next time. It is a relief to myself at least that Tai Chi Chuan’s inch jin is equally as powerful.
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