| Dear Students,
We had yet another very good tournament. There we no injuries to speak of even with a high number of bouts. The standard had again improved on the whole, with students showing a greater variety of techniques, higher skill levels and better tactical applications. The most outstanding team this year was the Wellingtonians who came in numbers and won many medals. We can be sure that future tournaments will have even more entries as everyone can see that it is a safe, enjoyable event which is a great experience for application. The Chans Tournament Team had two outings this year, with only two fighters on each occasion. Cameron Woods and Victor McCarthy both won gold and silver medals. Anton Stevens, our fighter from Melbourne got silver in the Heavy Weight Division in Korean Open TKD Tournament amongst other titles recently. I am sure we will have even more success in the near future.
The Annual Camp at Rolleston is upon us very soon. It should be a great camp again as we already have a good number of applications. Camp is a good opportunity to immerse yourselves fully into kung fu for a few days. Total immersion often enable you to focus better and make break-throughs that may be elusive even with years of normal training. It is also a time for comaradeship and fun. You can compare notes and check your ideas and techniques with fellow students from other centres. It is also a time when new material or focus is put into our training programme. Candidates for Black Belt this year will be announced after the camp as potential candidates will be put through their paces there. As I have been talking about self-defence it is interesting to read about claims that traditional martial arts do not work in self-defence. They talk about 'new' ideas about adrenaline dumping etc that make fine techniques unworkable in real situations. What made them think that traditional martial arts have not discovered adrenal effects in combat after all those thousands of years of fighting for life and death? It had to take these 'geniuses' a few years to discover what the most talented and skilled of their day over time immemorial did not! The claims that fine grained skills do not work under stress is not supported by facts. It had been proven that fine grain skills were what made the Michael Schumaker, Lewis Hamilton, Donald Bradman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Wally Jay and Bruce Lee great under stress. The ex-military type of instructors can only teach crude skills as the military do not have time to teach fine skills to the troops quickly as they have other more important skills to learn. Therefore, we can conclude that for a beginner, crude, basic self-defence techniques is the way to go, but the serious student should always aspire to much finer and more efficient skills. Happy training and see you at camp. S C Chan | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||