Transcript for:
Interview with Wing Chun Teacher Alan Orr

okay guys this is fight commentary breakdowns here this is probably going on fight commentary chats and this is probably the most requested wing chun teacher out of all the people i've ever heard of or featured this is the most requested wing chun teacher so this is alan orr we can just call him alan so alan orr from new zealand welcome thank you thank you for having me it's a pleasure to to talk to you and to be able to to meet everybody in your channel absolutely now alan let's start from the beginning when did you get involved with wing chun and kung fu oh probably probably early age would be watching bruce lee films and watching late night kung fu films probably from 12 years 14 years old yeah that's probably yeah maybe 12 years old and i was fascinated with kung fu films fascinating bruce lee and then i started to learn different martial arts from that age and wing chun was always my dream but it was very hard to find at that time it was very fine find it you know to find good teacher was difficult so you know to buy every book they were you could find there wasn't the internet back then so you know finding resources of course quite hard so i started off with karate for a while in aikido and then i found different styles of kung fu and then eventually then i found bing chung i was probably 16 my family show i've been doing winter for 35 years now started martial arts quite late compared to how people start down i mean because start jutsu at six years old or four years old you know people start very very young but when i started martial arts there wasn't really kids martial arts the way it is now so yeah you see guys now they're 21 and they've got 10 years training you know so that didn't really exist when i was young i see and i think a common question that a lot of viewers are asking is you did catch wrestling too if i'm not mistaken yeah yeah i'm a blackboard brazilian jitsu um but i started with wrestling my first thing was well what happened was my guys learning the true silence that i teach realized how effective it was in in terms of uh combat and the way we train was very competitive the way we trained and a lot of my guys said you know mma was just evolving and a lot of my guys were like you know can we can we fight can we try out and i said sure i said but you know if we're going to fight mma then you need to have some groundwork you need a ground game and i've done some wrestling already so i had some wrestling skills but then um i sort of thought well you know really we need to prepare ourselves and the jitsu was very very limited in uk that time there wasn't any black box in the country juicy wasn't really around so um you know i sort of felt back on my wrestling as the main thing so i got in contact with mount shuri and got my priorities to come to uk and here's train with carl gotch and i trained with him and he spent a couple weeks straining with us and i i corresponded with him for maybe a couple of years and then i um got in contact with eddie millis eddie melissa used to run the shark tank and shark tank was on the pioneer and made him single sergeant is sort of like the partner gym to the lion's den so eddie's construct tank guys there was a documentary called life in the cage i saw and he was teaching that documentary in his gym and i watched i thought well that looks like the most scariest place in the world to train so far we need to go there and get some fight experience and train with the best you know fight coaches in the world so we got in contact with eddie how did he come to uk and then we took a group to the shark tank you know train star train ready i've had a relationship with him now for 20 years as well and eddie trained in he's a black one jutsu but also he had shiuto training without polson and a lot of stuff he did was very catchy on tape as well and he had freestyle wrestling and greco wrestling so so i kind of learned a lot of greco some freestyle a lot of catch from matt fury from eddie um then over the years i've met other cats i've met tony um johnny husky various catch guys and so cross check the things they've shown me and also my teacher and liam negow he's from carlson gracie lineage and their style jitsu actually has a lot of wrestling in the jutsu and um a lot of the submissions that he used when i look at them i think oh they're very because they're very much from catchphrasing style submissions rather than the judo style so yeah so there's a quite a big mix of grappling going on there as well and that really helped my guys for mma because even when we had limited jitsu school back then that was wasn't jiu jitsu when he first died the catch racing was so powerful and more aggressive and that was sort of surprising people because we had a good standard with wincheon and we had a good clinch of our wrestling and our ground game was pretty strong so just for that early days that you know 20 years ago that it was in good stead so that was sort of the start point wow so um it sounds like you were always a mixed martial artist so to speak right you always kind of were thinking about how to how to be a full all-out kind of uh full package type of fighter yeah it was kind of i would say more by mistake than design uh maybe maybe self-conscious influence of bruce lee because bruce lee was always my main idol when i first started martial arts and and obviously you know when you read his books you know the tales you can know the whole format of that book is really a mixed martial arts book so there was that kind of subconscious kind of influence already i suppose and i was only mentioning in the uk for about you know 10 years i got bit disillusioned if you've been shown because no one will really teach you anything and that holds you back a lot and i was a bit disillusioned and because i really loved martial arts i started to train more wrestling more jiu jitsu more screamer so i'm also a black owner screamer so i'm going to other martial arts just because i was wanting to be doing martial arts and wing chun was very stagnant for me and then when i found my teacher in l.a what was you um there's nearly 20 years ago that 120 years ago now 21 years ago that that basically was a big turning point for my windshield development because once i learned his system um his system went is much more dynamic and the body structure and how you control momentum was much more in tune with what we needed for our development and and it married with the way you trained injury in the way training arrested in the way training screamer there was a lot more of the same generic skills being taught that his insurance had a rich language to explain it so in some ways what he talked was a missing link that wing chun didn't have from you know i was learning it but in other ways he also also was deeper than that because the language he had to explain it gave us more layers and it made me understand wrestling much easier made me understand too much easier so a lot of people say to me oh you know alan has jiu-jitsu he's been chewing and wrestling now i don't have anything it's their way around i'm trying as tall madras wing i'm a blah chun blah but you know there's there's a thousand black boxes to me i'm just you know a normal black girl in me i feel i've reached a you know good level being shown so my winston is my main art that feeds my other arts so you know i'll go around to what people say really wow that's interesting um just to get the timeline clear so you were in the uk then you went to la and now you're in new zealand yes yeah yeah so i'm from the uk and i came to new zealand about seven years ago wow so i still still travel back to uk every year to see all my guys and teach seminars and i've got students all in the world so i do yearly tours teaching everybody and i have my online platform which has like three five courses on that everybody community we have a community that we've built this all global community unfortunately obviously with what's happening in the moment we haven't been able to travel and see each other but um that platform has been really useful because everybody's had a community to lean on which has been really good so in some ways it's been a bit hard for everybody but in other ways we've been lucky that i've been doing that for the last five or six years which has helped prepare us for this situation in some ways in a weird way because when i started online training i thought it was a stupid idea when my guys were asking me to do stuff but when i come to new zealand my london guys are saying oh you know i can't remember this how do we do this and what do we do here and so i said i can't film some stuff for you and it became a big thing you know it became like that really helped and now so we kind of started this online platform and then after a while i realized all the things i've been teaching the guys because i'm always there they get a little bit mentally lazy and they don't retain it enough and there's obviously a lot to learn so and for me as a personal journey it's been a good way to benchmark things i know things that i'm doing things i've done so it's kind of like a personal growth and it's also helped my guys grow but in some ways it's been a bit of a gossip because it's it means that now we have this big platform everybody can use to to keep themselves motivated and to have lots of content to train from so that's really good yeah how many fighters do you train right now that actively participate in let's say ring or cage sports combat yeah right now we've got about four guys at the moment in new zealand we we did have more um some of the guys you know obviously with asian work commitments things change a bit i've got um and i've got a few other guys as well at fight but they fight more for kind of like for fun um more like an amateur level um we've got one guy who's very good very good mma fighter a couple good wrestlers we've got some good boxers and kickboxers so here we have we have a a mix of advice but depend the situation obviously this last year has been difficult for people that consistency and and there's been no shows so the shows just sort of start up again so we we should have some guys fine just before the end of the year hopefully one in kickboxing one never made and then next year we'll try and plan to push that forward a bit more but i i tend to i tend to like spend a lot of time with my fighters so i don't like to have a lot of fires i like to have people i'm really mentor and kind of um grow so in the uk i had a few good i had you know a big team in the uk maybe 20 guys fine but we had three or four professional guys that we were doing well that you know i spent a lot of time with but that for me that's the way it works you know because it's a very hands-on skill and i've always trained hands-on i've always been kind of like the main spine hunchback from my guys it means because they feel my movement even though they're younger stronger and more aggressive when you're training you obviously bring it down to sixty percent and then i can outskirt everywhere easily but then they can gain more skill so the clever way to train is not to try to prove yourself better than your guys is to train a level where you can train with each other and they can gain your skill and then when they go to combat they can go 100 you know and then they can they can use it so tell me about let's say a student's first class with you what would you be teaching the student that first class or even that first week so first class we work on balance so we work on opening up the joints so they can understand how all the bows of the body work we couldn't like always like springs like the wrist the elbow the shoulder the hip the knee the ankle the foot and understand where your center of gravity is so we're pushing poor people around and get them to use the reaction force understand how the body moves and then um we'll show them the basic ideas about how we punch you know how we have a vertical fist rather than a boxing style face and why and why it's different and not to say one's been the other just to say why we do it that way and just explain the system in terms of how the forms help you learn the the structure of the movement and then how chisel is a way to to kind of use live movement with a controlled environment to develop some skill and then we even put the first lesson i mostly put people to put some boxing gloves on and do some body sparring so you can understand how to how to defend the body how to take a little bit of pressure how to punch a little bit more so so they get like a bit of a sweaty workout and an intellectual workout at once because for me it has to be functional it has to work it's not good me just saying this will work you know my analogy is i say to a lot of my guys if if i was a car salesman and i told you this this this car is a v8 and it's really hard you know it's really powerful because you could hear the engine roaring and i said to you okay it might take a while to get used to driving it because it's a powerful car you can physically see that and you can hear that and you can you can feel the power of the car so that makes sense if i show you an old banger that's falling apart and takes you in 10 years time this car is going to be awesome this is like what people do in trunk you know they say oh you know if you just practice this and do this 10 years and 10 years time it's going to work that's not buying a clapton car and someone tells you it's going to work it doesn't it doesn't prove itself to you i mean you know you sort of look at everything doesn't make sense what they're doing they told me it'll work so you sort of copy it and i did it for a long time but i feel like you have to feel there's there's a certain element of of uh more power in the system and you realize you just need to tame it you know so you're the weak link you're all a big thing because your job to tame that skill and to control that skill but the skill should seem obvious it should be like okay that makes sense it seems like a common sense approach i see so one thing i'm really learning from you is that your students start adding a little pressure to what they're learning that first week you know they're not they're not getting brain damage of course but they're at least seeing the functionality of the practicality yeah yeah so i'm very high in safety you know we don't even my guys that train for fights most of the time we just we just touch contact to the head hit hard to the body condition the heart to the body and in two weeks two weeks of hard sparring you know to get conditioned but most of the time you don't need to go crazy i mean you know it doesn't it's not productive you know you need to improve your skills and also some fires when they train too hard and get punched too hard they get a little bit gun shy from getting hit and it reflects in their technique because of that confidence so my job is to teach people how to get hit and then how not to get hit so they understand that but expect to get hit you know you will get hit that's basically you know you can't paint without getting paint on your clothes it's going to be that's the way it is but you know you have to get people used to that uncomfortable environment becoming comfortable you know so it takes time and i always say marshall is like a circle you know doesn't matter where you start you might start with the forms you might start with stance training you might start with spiraling you might start with movement you might start with ability you might start building your strength you might need to build flexibility in the end we all come that full circle you we all need all of that so it doesn't matter where you start in the end you walk that whole circle so for me a guy can come in with good attributes and be athletic and my my my my goal is to try to teach him to be more skillful a guy might come in he's too weak so i have to make him stronger the guy might come in and he's very analytical i'm very intelligent i might need to make him a little more robust you know so everybody's different you know your goal is to get everybody to walk that circle yeah exactly i'm definitely the overthinker and my coach has to just tell me okay stop overthinking just try the move do the move yeah just spar you know when you spar you'll stop overthinking him because it's oh let's survive yeah my judiciary teacher he's a very intelligent guy he speaks about five languages but he sometimes he he reverts back into broken english and his out like do the work boy do the work i mean just do the work you know we ask any questions just do the work you know so you just gotta do it you know basically it's a cliche but it's true if you just you don't do it and try you don't you don't have anything to to calibrate it to you so that's why it's important to have functionality and have to have conflict in your movement because if you don't have that robustness then you don't really have anything to judge it off you just you just you just sort of theorizing the idea of what might happen but unless you've actually been in that parade and you don't know so it's important to be tested at that level yeah exactly when you do jiu jitsu with your fighters the people you train do you add trapping and wing chunk into the ground stuff um not the way people think juicy is full of trapping anyway in jiu jitsu you know when you've got cross body you're trapping someone's you know your body weights on them you're pinning them you're controlling the elbow you know you're you're confirming the grip you're controlling the collar you're controlling the neck you're controlling the turn you're controlling the hip so that's all tracking already um people think you're going to lapse out past our drills but i don't believe in laptop backside drawers as part of the application wintering i think a lot of drills that we're insuring are designed for you to learn the angle of attack and to learn the momentum handling how to control movement uh it's like if i throw abortion you catch it you automatically catch it because you recognize that as a tennis ball and it's not very heavy i don't tell you what it is you just know right so you just go i'll just catch it but if it's a a cricket ball you'll catch it a little bit differently if it's a american football you'll catch it differently if it's a kettlebell you'll catch it differently so your brain already calculates the amount of weight that's coming to you the speed the angle your brain makes a lot of assumptions so martial arts what we're trying to do is master assumption we're trying to master the way of feeling and reacting to negate people's pressure understand where the weight is understand their power so injustice is very obvious because you've got your weight on somebody they're trying to move you can feel them so you can trap and control them and there is there is generic principles that we insurance that do crossover seduce you so much is improved but obviously my hand finds skill my understanding weight and grip has improved my windshield but arwin chung is the equivalent of a stand-up style of jiu-jitsu arresting because we deal with weight control body control position control how we pressure on someone how we link and delete the body and the joints so our wing chun is already like that already so when put into jitsu seems to be obvious to me it seems to be very obvious in terms of what the gold is you know it's not it's not a technique piece of technique because the technique has a counter as a counter as a counter and then you can either be a quick a quick draw for until you just try to do the technique faster but the real skill is actually knowing the timing of the position of the skill and knowing when when the technique um is starting to finish because most techniques have about five components to make them complete so you know someone's gone past component three they're getting close to completing their submission if you can if you can hold them off at two you know they you've got three components before they can finish you know you're still safe right but if you're on number four then you're in trouble right if you have a five then you need to tap right so people get into issues where they won't tap when they get hurt it's because they didn't stop the first five components so to me it's like well just tap and carry on and go again because you need to stop it earlier you're too late i mean and martial arts is often like that people often focus on the wrong the wrong objective you know the objective is to try to improve and deconstruct things to work out how to improve things so for me the trampoline when showing yeah it does help my producer and it is there but it's not there in a way that people think it's not like a we don't do wing chun techniques on the floor we we have awareness of our movement whereas if your elbow position wears awareness of your weight and that's improved from the windshield yeah i love it man um so i just lost my train i thought i had a i was looking at i was looking at people's questions good thing this is recorded beforehand um yeah okay so were you kind of watching all those crazy wing chun vs mma fights when they first came out from china yeah that's terrible yeah that's the case where people learn a form and they and they learn the drill and they try to do the drill as a fight so when like for instance in which you learn to chain punch right and the chain punch and then you get guys running along chain punching and the person just over overhand and just knock them out or just take them down because they learned how to do a drill which is a chain punch and they try to apply the fight to me a chain punch is a chain of punches it's a way to link your body together learn some rhythm and timing it's it's not a way to punch somebody as an attack i mean you know if you had a like an energy i was taking my guys like boxing you see boxing they use the speedboarder they're hitting the speedboat that's developing your time in your rhythm you don't go into a ring and go to someone and go you don't speedboard him in the face i mean you don't bring this people with you i mean you know you don't carry your heavy bag to training i mean you know these are training tools so winstring has a lot of really good techniques that teach you the line of attack so you know you can feel the line goes this way so you can spread you can sink your weight you can you can expand but most people do it like a technique with just the arm and it becomes your own beats the arm and that's very contrived but when you use the body you understand the body momentum how to get your body power and your ebb and flowing you're sort of surfing with that person riding a wave you know so to me that the drill teaches is that that's the drill is not the application you know if you're going to fight someone you just have your hands up you need to protect your head and you don't understand the range it worked close like we'd like to be i might have my hands on you i don't need to control my head position as much in terms of cover because my hands on your on your arms or in your body but when i'm in long range i need to cover my head because that's what's going to get hit right so it's common sense in some ways but you see a lot when strong guys are just running with their hands forward and get hit it's to me it's kind of crazy it's just like they don't understand how to take the art from training to reality because maybe they've only done the forms and drills and cheese out and then obviously tuesday for me she said it's not about staying in range and rolling and hitting each other it's about crossing the bridge and getting close so i'll do so we start in this neutral range where you can hit me and i can hit you we have bridge contact and our job is to try to break that bridge across that bridge and get close to you when i get close to you i can suffocate and control you so you can't hit me and when you want to get away then i can hit you as you as you try to move away from me when you're on back off balance so which one we're trying to cause some chaos and try to crush the person trying to upset their balance to cause a reaction we just stand there just trading each other it's inefficient really because in a real fight someone's gonna swing a heavy punch at you if they're heavier than you they're gonna hurt you so getting close to somebody like you're doing jiu jitsu getting close to someone doing wrestling getting close to someone like doing judo you know these are all close bridge you know you break the bridge and get close because when you're close you can take someone's body weight and control them windshield is basically the ultimate clinch strike in martial art for me because our job is to control the bridge and get close and get their power and then we can hit with short range power to hurt them and to to chew them up and as they get away from us we can we can blast heavy power but that's when their bridge is kind of broken because they're getting away trying to lean away and then you can hit them hard with a good with a good distance punch but i don't think many people understand it which one they think being showing is this sort of martial art where you're just gonna do like a kung fu film you know we're going to do all these concrete shapes and they're like like the tan sound when showing to spread doesn't mean you put your hand down stop something it means you have contact and when it presses you use that as a as a as a conductor to conduct the movement to try to bring off balance so you know investing you have arm drags you have collar tight you have underhooks overlooks and when showing it's exactly the same it's just different names it's the same thing so investing you have an underhook which is underneath underneath your armpit in close so when shown you can set us to tan cell and when we lift is the top cell lifting the hand and when we sink as it's a gum cell so we have the same movement but we have three or four words to explain how we're going to move it so in some ways the wing chun language is quite rich but the application of most people's wings is limited because i don't understand how to take it from from the training to the reality into the actual combat and from your kind of experience how many schools of winter really pressure test from the schools that you've seen not many i've taught loads of seminars and i said to people okay get your mouth guys and you and your gloves and then we'll go oh we don't have mouth guards we don't have bugs i'm like what do you mean you know we're doing martial arts you need to have you can't train without that right so of course you know we do cheese down when we're showing yourself it's hard it's our benchmark thing to start with but sparring is is how you work to to control a bridge so i've done those seminars when i always had gloves and i've been like well what do you want to do and now i see obviously more people are training with gloves and and trying to do it but then you see all this hokey stuff where they're running in just punching each other getting hit and they don't really understand how to block and how to i mean in which we don't like the term blocking but you have to cover you have to cover you have to move you have to receive you have to understand how to take a punch you need to do all these things and then they're not alien to being shown they're in the art itself and there's very good ways to do that and that's a lot of things i've been teaching people for a long time now but um and i think we have some really good skills that some martial arts do in a different way and our way i really like so there's a lot to offer but then yeah a lot of schools just don't spawn the ones that do spar unfortunately they spar so badly that it just becomes really bad kickboxing and that's why people laugh when they see it because they say well that looks like a rubbish kickboxing and say well yeah it does and then people look at what i do because they can't understand the level of depth of what we're doing in the art they say to us that doesn't look like wing chun and then kickboxers will say well that doesn't look like kung fu and that doesn't look like kickboxing so we kind of like no one likes us because we're not the the sort of like shape i mean because we're not doing kung fu film stuff and we're not doing kind of traditional murray time right so it doesn't like thai boxing doesn't like kung fu so what is it i mean well we have our own system we have our own style the way we move the way we defend the way we control the bridge it's very specific we have a lot of um we have a plan for everything so we have a system so that system is very much a very focused system and we've been very successful my guys have always been very successful we've had about 400 mma fights 145 skip boxing fights and our win rate is is probably over 70 percent so it's it's very high you know and we've had some really good success so obviously it works it does it does well but yeah i think to answer your question yeah a lot of the wind turning scores don't spawn when they do inspire it's a bit disappointing so the good thing is a lot a lot of them are trying to work it out and i'm getting more people coming to me asking because i've obviously we've been doing this for 20 years and we've got a lot of experience a lot of fighting experience so if they're smart enough and humble enough then they would ask you know and then the information is there i mean on my online site i've got a course on chinese boxing which is applying the wintering in in a boxing environment in a kickboxing environment and when i first put that platform up it was designed that i could always add stuff and change stuff and if i want because i knew that sometimes i want to change something or add something or work out that i was wrong i'll change something or work out something better i'll change or add something so let's start started as four modules and now it's a level module so over the two years it just grows and grows and then we've done one on a clinch one of sandar and everything just keeps adding and growing because i might have a weekend where i have some fires come down and we do some sparring and i'll just add firing up as a new module and answer all their questions and add that up so people get to see real time training this real gorilla style you know you get to see what we're doing day to day so that way it's a bit more visceral a bit more real to people so there's a technical aspect where we teach that but there's also that's where we sort of share our training and i think that's the best way i mean if you go to a wrestling you know every lesson is different because every lesson you roll different people you have different experiences if you just go to listening just do your form and you just do your drills you're just repeating either the same mistakes or you could be practicing self self perfection but perfection to yourself is the start engine start point of martial arts you have to understand your movement and then you have to take someone else's movement so you have to you have to apply against a real person who's going to resist you so you do need self perfection but then you need to actually calibrate it and you calibrate it through through context and through robust chi sao and through sparring and sparring doesn't aspire's not fighting i think that's a mistake a lot of people make especially when trunk circles when they start sparring they put headguard headguards on with visors which is crazy because they're dangerous but also advisors you punch on the face i could be talking to you i should punch in the face and nothing happens there's no reaction because you're getting hit in the vine but getting punched in the face is what causes reaction and you have to deal with that reaction so to me you should get punched in the face not with a visor but then a lot of times they're doing that kind of training and it's not and they're going too hard they just run in and kill each other and smash each other elbows over the head and it's kind of it might work against someone you can't fight because mostly you get the tougher guy in the class will beat everybody up but you get two good fires or you get you put against a good fire and you're gonna get handled i mean it's not gonna work so yeah i think there's a very big confusion because they haven't got traditional sparring so that's why i originally went to america and trained many minutes because he was a k1 champion k1 trainer trained mighty mo trained lots of k1 fires and he was taking fights to japan and therefore and he was you know teaching guys for mma back in the day when it wasn't mma gyms i thought well i need to go and train that because if i don't train now i can't really say that i've put myself in a situation why i've had to deal with a stressful environment and and get some experience from these guys which we did it was really valuable yeah and something you mentioned earlier which i totally want to emphasize too it's it's so interesting because what you described i think silala is dealing with that dude is a wing chun fighter in taiwan that i feature in my channel a lot and the kickboxers the mma people are just would say well dude he's just trying to copy and copy it badly and then the wing chun quote unquote purists are like no he's not really doing wing chun so like what you're describing me is exactly what he has to deal with every day and he's always testing himself in the ring and his win rate's at least 50 percent man so he's like really being a pioneer like you and i i actually tried to introduce him to you i don't know if he ever contacted you but it's so it's really interesting that you two are like like he's a person in the east you're a person the western you guys are dealing with some of the same type of like both sides pushing back yeah yeah so for the thing you know people just don't really uh people don't listen you know they they tell you stuff but they don't listen so like people often say that i'm very arrogant because they say that you think you know it or you i said well i've been some 35 years i've i've seen most of the styles of windshield i've trained most times of intro my friend my teacher over at who's an encyclopedia of wing on jutsu i've chun wrestling for 20 years i've been doing screaming for 15 20 years so unless i know everything but i have a good base knowledge of what i'm doing and i do understand where i'm coming from so when i'm when people who've been trained in a few years tried to tell me that know they've been doing the form for two years and now they know it no i'm doing it wrong or that's not when showing of course i'm i'm quite flippant with them because it's just it's moronic i mean you know it's like you wouldn't go to a university and tell a professor that he doesn't know what he's talking about if you haven't done your degree training you know because you basically you need to have done the same training to be able to be able to talk on the same level right you need to have at least some of these some experiences so my peers are my my guys my fighters or other fighters i train with that they're good at their styles you know best of my peers you know like you know we have a thai boxer that came to our gym and he had 150 fights and all the gyms in the area he wanted to train with us because he lost following me because he was learning stuff in the clinch and and i was fun to supply with and we're having a great time you know and i really like spying with him i was learning things about distance and control and things to be careful of so you know we really shared a lot with each other and we both had no ego about training so you can really develop you know that's what's about that's what my chance is about for me yeah and i wanted to definitely follow up on the escrima training now how did you get into a screamer originally like i said at the beginning i was a bit bored while we insurance because i was being held back a lot so i started training screaming because they didn't scream the training the guys never helped out they just taught you and you just trained and it was and also back then um the guys i trained with it was pretty hardcore this is a lot of spine with no armor and um i kind of like that i like weird enough because i started martial arts from the point of being bullied and stuff and needing to learn to fight but then i started to enjoy um being scared like if i was worried about something that was an indication to me that i needed to try to overcome it so when i first went to a scream i thought you know people come in with sticks like 80 miles an hour and i was thinking oh my god this is terrifying i better have a go hit me so you know so i go into it and then um it just sort of snowboard a bit from there i just did it because it was something to do and i liked it it was fun um and then there was a seminar with mark wiley um and mark white is a very good friend of mine congratulations robert shu and my teacher said to me oh well mark comes can you go and help him with the seminar because the style he teaches is a style that i was really interested in i was learning um so i kind of knew the style but i thought i thought i was okay you know what i was doing was good and when i met mark i realized mark was like a genius you know he's he's a real encyclopedia of the filipino martial arts he's like it's like the the version of my corn food teacher my company teacher knows every style and and those audience announcer and it makes it seem so easy to me i want to make mark have the same feeling you know he's trained with like 14 masters in the philippines he's been there 18 times he's written 20 books so when we talked and when he showed me stuff he he's very logical he's a very logical guy everything's very systematic he's very similar to my concrete teacher and because they were good friends and because the styles really had the same um systemic way of understanding and teaching it kind of made sense to me so i started training with mark and i haven't looked back you know he's he's a genius so i'll be very fortunate to train with him do you do weapons stuff and i guess a follow-up question with that is do you do self-defense related training in your school too um it depends what you mean by self-defense i mean i've learned obviously the wing chun weapons the power knives i'm really fond of train with that and with the screamer we do obviously single stick uh knife and blade and with it with this screamer um integrated screaming which is what mark wise taught me is based on the electricity system and the extrinsic system is based upon the blade so it's very different than some of the other screamers because everything they do has to work with a light with a blade rather than just a stick some screamer systems have gone off in a bit of a tangent where they became very stick orientated so just a different different way of doing it so we've always i've always had that laid awareness on where we train but in and we obviously have a we have a knife system inside that system but to me self defense is a weird word because whenever anybody asks me about self defense i just say well do 10 years of martial arts training i mean it's like nothing prepares you for stressful situations more than being good at martial arts you can't really learn five moves and defend yourself i mean it could be like a super lucky that you know someone teaches you okay if someone grabs you you know you hit them in the throat or hit them in the groin that's what you do and you might do that it could work right it's not saying it couldn't work but most people if they're not trained when they get into a stressful situation they're going to go into their limbic brain and they're going to freeze so it doesn't matter what they know it's not going gonna work because they're not gonna have that confidence or if they don't freeze if they're a tough guy they just go berserk and they start throwing punches and they just get themselves into more trouble or they just you know might win might lose so for me to stay in your cortex and to stay focused and to have really good level of kind of um confidence in yourself i just think you have to be good at martial arts you have to learn more shots i mean otherwise it's still a coin flip you know you could do self-defense training and it might he might pull off you know you might learn to take a penis to get someone's arm or something it might work for you it might not i mean i don't know i mean to me i rather just i love martial arts and i think if you really want to have self mastery in yourself you need to put the timing i mean there's no quick fix so i don't like the idea often people ask me to see self defense courses and stuff not just saying just come to the class and we'll see where you are in a few years i mean you know because if unless you have that confidence mostly it's not going to work you know if you're if you're a female and a big guy grabs you and you haven't got good skills you want me to deal with the leverage and power it doesn't matter what you've got i mean if you if you also if you if you try to poke someone in the eye or grab their groin or grab their throat and you and you don't you're not successful you might most likely made up as a very angry and to escalate even more so you know you can make things worse i've seen guys been young guys doing demos and the demo is super bad and they're doing a street demo of how they do a street fight and they think it's going to work i watch and i think you guys are just getting killed and then um later i hear them talking i want to go when a guy says the other guy i saw a fight the other day and i thought maybe i should go over and help him to sort out because i was the only person that was skilled i thought you're not scared did you get killed you know i mean but the idea of seeing a fight and thinking that you should go and just sort of sort it all out means that you must think you're really really good but that means you're super deluded because anybody who's got martial skill and can fight when they see a fight they realize straight away this is this is dangerous right i just tried to get away stop the fight yeah you know fights are dangerous especially on the street but um you know when people sort of think they can engage things like that so easily and sort things out and i always know that they have no clue about what they're talking about yeah yeah so self-defense for me is a weird one i i kind of to me the simple answer is is the martial arts you know you're good at martial arts that's the best self defense and you mentioned this which i definitely want to elaborate on with the people who do like the really not so good demos a lot of times you see like the wing chun vs boxing right and then you'll see maybe the boxer doesn't even punch writer does a very slow punch and then the reject guy's like oh this is what i'll do or you know it's you can tell it's choreographed maybe he's even throwing fast but then you know you you know the witcher guy knows what he's gonna do right so let me check out my elbow or do whatever and you're just like oh come on yeah so my raw thumb is like um if you can't block a fast one too then is it relevant right if you can't block a fast jab if you can't if you can't deal with me comedy like like coming fast at you then it's irrelevant i mean you have to deal with that so wind strong is a clinch chart so if someone comes at you and you clinch up with them and you suffocate them then you've got control of them so that there's a good part when children to actually deal with that but most people think you can do these techniques in the air and you can control them it's just it's just not gonna work that way the windchill is a shortbridge system in terms of when you get close to a short bridge that shortbridge means you conduct your body and can control someone so we want to get closer as we can same jiu jitsu you could say is a short bridge system you need to get close to someone to put pressure on them right you can't arm bar someone from a distance right you have to get close i mean eventually you have to be chest assessed at some point if you're not if you're not that close it's not going to work so your whole goal is to get to close is to get to push to someone and drag them down in wrestling you know you want to get your hands locked around someone around the leg when their hips and pick them up put them down you know so all these are about getting close and taking control of people if you're not doing that then really you're you're you're a long bridge system which means you have to be very good at kickboxing and windchill guys are not very good at wing chun sometimes so when it comes to kickboxing they just look like very poor kickboxers so like you said that some of the demos are just laughable so i mean i i mean whenever i do something i always do it live you know so i'll demonstrate a technique you just choose our sparring or whatever it is it's always life so we always do it in live movement the guy will try to do it for real and i'm always doing it in real time i don't do demos where i'm going to do when i teach things i'll show something as a technique and i'll show but then i'll do it live and say okay let's do it now you have to show it it has to be like working in function otherwise it's just an idea and all ideas are just it's just ideas you know it has to be has to be realized i mean yeah um one of the one of the moments where i saw exactly what he said was dur when the lockdown first happened my roommate and i rob who was on my channel a lot we were looking at some of these wing and in the chun section we just had wing chun after wing chun artist write essays about how to use this move you know there's one move you do this and you're supposed to like you know open the person up or something so like we had people write essays and essays and essays and i'm like i don't think that's the point of it you know if you need to write an essay to explain to me how to use this maybe that move is not how you're interpreting it it's crazy i mean tens of people use it as a blog which is really inefficient and you're putting your hand out and it's just as crazy for us tanzanite it means to to spread spread someone's weight so when you have bridge contact you spread to take their balance and then you can attack so there's a functionality to it um but then we just whenever i do something as i said it's always in real time it's always like okay just go live and just do it i mean so i suck at a winjong facebook group called wintron trinity which was based upon the idea that uh i'm gonna set up some events and there's gonna be three parts of it which is why i call it trinity which is going to be like uh there'll be workshops open type of environment environment where people can have have exchange and just chat and train and then there will be a competition and the competition will be a chase our platform because when some people do chi sao and it would be full contact touch contact to the head full contact to the body and basically for me that's the that's the acid test i mean some people were saying well which one she says not not for combat it's not it's not a fighting what is it it's a bridge it's a bridge it is a contrived environment where you're learning something but you have to still test it it's like saying judo is not real because you don't have a jacket on in a fight or you know it's like saying wrestling is not real because i can punch you every time you come in well yeah this mma you know so wrestling you you know there's there's constrictions on rules but it means that your takedown is obviously much better you know let's say what we did youtube obviously when i train with the judo guys i was training with the judo team sometime and then their throws are much better than us and our ground belt our ground game is better than this we do the same sort of art but we have different emphasis right so they come and do jiu-jitsu with us then we go and do some throws to them when i train wrestling obviously it's all about the takedown opinion and the funny thing is my opinion is very good because i have a wrestling background and and and i like to be on top and then cross-border in jitsu so when i wrestle with the wrestling guys if i get them in pinned them they can't get out because my opinion is very good but to get people down or do you also start taking you down is very tough so when you hear wing chun guys saying oh i can't get taken down because i've got i've got i'm going to just strike people in the head and they they can never take me down i was thinking you must be deluded i mean i've never been i've never been in the wrestling lesson well i've never been put down you know you always get taken down you know never ever ever not spent one time on the map where no one's put me down you know you always get put down at some point and yeah you could argue and say if i'm striking people it'll be less it would be less but obviously then they'd be more aggressive as well so when you get put down you might end up hurt so there's there's always there's always a trade-off right yeah it's just it's about being realistic to what you're trying to develop and understanding that everything has limitations everything has its parameters and you don't make the negative part of it the reason you don't do it you know so my idea is to start setting up some events where we make tune more accountable by having g style competitions the competitions do have rules and regulations but you know everything everything does and it's on the same playing field right so if you can't stick and control and hit somebody without getting hit or you can't stand up and you can't keep your base then obviously your winching sucks so that's a good asset test and then from that you might realize that you some of the techniques you're using could be good it could be bad and you go back and you evolve i mean so to me that's what you're doing do wrestling everybody has the same techniques but everybody has different techniques because people have different body types they have different favorite movements they have your nuances and this is how people learn things because people start to see you know what's in vogue and then that they learn to defend there then it doesn't work anymore then the other person would then the next thing up so you you get another layer of skill so the only way to keep up skilling yourself is is through pressure you know the pressure doesn't have to pressure that's going to kill anybody it's just pressure that that's there so i mean so when we say onto the body we say that's it's the guys we can say full contact of body touch content to the head but when it's full content of the body it has to be done in a way that people are not just flashing and throwing full power punches they're using a short bridge you have to stick to people and that's going to limit some of the power you can develop from that position um and that makes it less dangerous but that makes it more applicable to what we do in show right so if you can't step up to do that then really that's the minimum like requirement i always think for insurance because a lot of guys and when trunks say i don't want to test my insurance inspiring because spyro is not being true i don't want to kick boxing or i don't get hurt which is you know which is a fair comment some people don't do my shots to get being up every week but chi sound is like one injury so everybody induces roles right because no one does resistances are they wrong there's no one who does wrestling so don't wrestle because these are all the basic components of the system and it's all very safe so we should be able to cheese out a little bit more robustly and hit each other a little bit harder to the body it's not going to kill anybody and um that should be a very satisfying platform to work with so that's why i'm going to try and develop i was in the midst of developing it just before obviously this covered thing happened so lucky and i finished dinner but we're kind of back to normal here so i'm going to try and set something up for the new year to start to try and kickstart it and get all the insulin clubs around the country to get together and maybe you know to showcase that well um besides these sort of inter style events do you have a lot of students that also cross train and do you also bring in people to kind of like you know you said you train with judo people do you bring them into your class sometimes kind of as guests and stuff like that yeah yeah for sure if i've got a guy trying for a fight and the guy is fighting is a judo black bomb then i'll get the judo team rise they're the national team i'll get their head coach to come in and just check what we're doing you know for counter-attacks and and and ask them you know what do you think they would want to be doing or go for and then they help us out and if we're training someone who's a good wrestler then obviously i i mean i train with the wrestling club so i actually go to the wrestling class myself anyway so mike i bring my guys with me so we go to wrestling anyway so we wrestle every week anyway um yeah i mean i'm of course train's very important i mean i mean obviously all my guys who fight or train with me mostly they cross train with me because i'm teaching them uh wind showing jiu-jitsu wrestling and weapons if they want some guys do one some guys do all some guys do some if they do mma obviously they focus on wrestling and they focus on their focus on the winter and clinch because the clinch that we have the chinese boxing skills that we have is just different to what people do so it's good to have something which is a bit of a only difference because they can give you a mental edge to give you a physical edge sometimes because you're unpredictable and you're not doing the standard movement that everybody is expecting so so yeah so yeah to answer your question yeah we always bring people when we need them and we always have people come and do seminars for us like um one of my my fighters in england poe when he was a you know very good mma phone england and a juicy black girl very good wrestler very good striker and um you know he comes in every year and does seminars for us and his jiu-jitsu is better than he's a very good black guy and um my guys really like to see him and i like to have him come because he gives him a different perspective it gives him a different insight skill he has a very good skill he has some things that he does really well um it's just good to have extra input you know all that stuff really helps yeah exactly wow this is a lot of great things to think about and again i i really thank you for talking to me um that's my pleasure it's nice to yeah nice to get to talk to everybody definitely man um what's the next time you think you're to come to l.a i was actually bought book to come in january that was what i was planning this year to come in january but i had to obviously cancel that now for a time being so i'm basically i'm on the edge waiting for the world to change so i can come because that's really i really want to get out and see my teacher and see my friends in la and um yeah it's a really important trip for me so as soon as possible basically as soon as this is all resolved yeah again yeah and and you know to all viewers watching it could take another year so just hey again i mean i'm i'm thinking it would probably be 2022 i'm aiming for 2022 january i think hopefully by then if it will be cleared up so you know if we have a good year or vaccine runs for this next year and then by the following january i think we can bring some guys out and have a training camp a training company and get to meet lots of people every great exactly exactly um the other question because i i was looking at um the coach you talk about robert chu right and he taught he teaches multi multiple different types of lineage and i think inevitable we gotta get into the question of lineage and all that because you know it seems like wing chun especially there's so much like intra lineage like smack talking and tribalism that i don't see as much of you know jiu-jitsu schools will smack talk to each other but then they'll respect black belts right a jiu-jitsu black belt under whoever is still a black belt right but for some reason it seems to me in wing chun the lineage is just like they're always just like so at conflict with each other i think i think it's more the students than the actual original teachers i think the original teachers in hong kong you know you look at the original top five or six teachers like hawkins chung wan sean long choi sing all them guys you know they're all very good friends they they're classmates they were just all in the same club basically right but when they were spread around the world teach then they all decided obviously you need to market yourself and say well i'm the king of cinta i'm the king of uh corsair i'm the king of chiefs i'm looking at this everybody saw and that's fine because smoking but we didn't have the internet and then to be fair some of them probably didn't have a complete set of skills for a new man so they added stuff or you know change stuff or made their own uh curriculum of what they're doing and then students get very long and polarized to what they're doing and they they sometimes you know watching kung fu films you end up hearing worship in your teacher you know more more than maybe you should and then when the internet came and people started cross-checking things and realized that someone does it everybody's doing a bit differently and why you know why is everything differently and then people would be confused and people would argue about who's done what who's doing this and why they're doing that and and there's a lot of reasons for all these things when there's a young man is said to have taught people differently at different times and different ways much to say when you teach jiu-jitsu if you've got someone who's heavy someone's light someone's long someone's sure you might teach them differently so you probably did the same thing but then people really polarize these these teaching ideas into us into their own styles and then people get um kind of a little bit uh comp driven about their style must be the best i mean and because we lack the testing in winter you know people don't have a friendly competitive environment to test it the only time they test it is when they do chisel and it's usually unfriendly and if one person wins then they think they're obviously better but as we know in jitsu you know if majitsu's four you know your score might have a good start to it so it might win or lose doesn't mean it's not going to be on end or i mean doesn't mean your style is rubbish you know because you know you have other people in your team that could be willing to listen so it's very subjective to lots of things but i think the lack of testing has obviously stagnated that situation i think is that situation is improving people are starting to look outside their windows a bit more and i think because they're getting stuck because they're realizing they go to train with mma guy they go to the local mma gym with the average guy and they get their ass handed to him and they realize actually if this guy who's just doing some basic mma he can take me on i've been doing 15 20 years of insurance then i'm doing something wrong so all my guys you know basically you know used to replace training so you know they can go anywhere they want and train and hold their own you don't always win in training and such you know you might you want to you might have a day on the mat even in sometimes when you wrestle you so you have a good day and a bad day i mean same windshield you know you have good days and bad days but for me you know training is always a good day so it doesn't matter if you're gonna lose and you're always learning and progressing you know sometimes you just feel a bit tired sometimes you feel gain you know sometimes you think you're on game you turn up and you're terrible you mean you just you know this is the way life is right and i think when you accept that you have a more open mindset more humble mindset everything's fine but if you've learned in a way that you polarized the idea that you know by doing this technique right it's invincible because that goes back to the energy of the car you know you brought an old banger and someone told you if you keep doing it it's going to be invincible and then you've committed to that so you know it's like in if you've been sold something that's not right and you realize later it might not be right you don't tell anybody because you're idiot so you just you just keep going along with it and so i think for me martial arts i've always classed myself as the idiot anyway so i've always just thought well just just i like to be a student i like to learn things i like to i like to be um mentally pliable i mean so it's a place where i think you should feel safe to get things wrong and then that that environment is a very good environment to grow so people that meet me always native and who's really nice really humble he trains really hard he pushes you hard but he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't push you too hard he doesn't hurt anybody you know he you know they're really surprised and i said why are you surprised it's oh because you know people say that you're you're tough and you're arrogant i said these people never met me you know they never met me what it is is they're scared of the persona that i train for real and they have to they have to do that and they don't like that you know and they don't like to be tested i'm not saying you have to train for real like it's going to be really hard and you're going to be throwing it in the deep end and get chewed up it's the opposite we're just going to give you enough pressure that you can do it and just push you a little bit you know and as you get better we push a bit more so we never push anybody from zero to ten we push them from zero to one and then from one to two then two to three you know so no one's ever out no one's ever too far away from their comfort zone you know you're always just enough where you can you know if you're swimming it's like you can always grab the edge i mean you always know you're okay i mean but you are swimming you know you are in you're in there you're in the deep end but you can't get out it's not like it's not like you're you'll be left to your own devices and you march around so i think um a lot of that lineage stuff is just because of people's insecurities people idolizing people people sometimes because they don't test it themselves and don't progress it themselves they basically it's easier to fall back and say well my master was the best and that's that's that's the reason why we're good you know well the reason you're good should be it should be cause of you not because of them because you need to be good yourself because when you're in a situation where you need it you know you're the person doing it so it's irrelevant who your teacher is at that point do i mean yeah i think that's such an important thing for everyone to remember ultimately it's you right so you better be good yeah yeah um alan you have quite a few schools right so tell me about that process of sort of having all these students all these schools etc well i don't franchise and i don't i don't i'm not a commercial teacher in that way i just teach people i really like people that want to learn um people are drawn to me because they've been usually training for 10-15 years and they feel very stagnated so they come and check me out and then when they meet me they realize you know i really want to help people and i really want to develop people personally you know on a mental physical level so the guys that are on the journey to find stuff and usually find me and then they really want to learn and that's i mean because of that people come from more of it whilst training me and then we develop a good friendship and then we continue that relationship and then because i like to travel around and see everybody and they'd like to come and meet and i do i always have a yearly summer camp like we used to have a camp in thailand but this year we had it in hong kong so every january tries to do a camp somewhere where we come together so central you know maybe sort of thailand is is a good base that we've been doing and this year is hong kong um and then we usually i do a uk tour in june when i go into uk and i go to singapore so i try to get out and see everybody and be in a place where i'm i can be accessible and then we had a la plan for january um and we've tried to build a community because we all have been shown all of martial arts and um you know we all value the stuff that my teacher of issues taught us and um from that point of view i think i've just got like-minded people people that are just on the same sort of journey every i mean it's quite nice i broke it up the other day and some of the people were talking about it and it was nice because some of the people saying ah you know they looking forward to where we can get back to training and i can visit the uk because it's always so much fun to see alan and he's also helpful so it was quite nice stuff they said i really it was it was touching it was nice to hear it but um the important part what they were saying was that it's a really good environment to learn they really enjoy the learning process because it's live but it's not dangerous it's live but doing stuff alive i'm always in control what i'm doing so to me that's good it's like i thought that's what it's about it's about exchanging having good good atmosphere i used to train back when i first started training to always feel scared come to class because it was always like the toughest person was going to win and be everybody out and i was just to think i did my faster to film myself and now i'm more scared when i go training and then you know i never want my guys to feel like i want my guys to feel like the training is exciting and we're all like on a pack running together and we're gonna we're gonna achieve something together so it was kind of i wanted more of a team feeling so the team feeling was how we started our sort of team environment because i wanted everybody to work together and so that the weakest person could help the strongest person because the weakest person could be more intelligent about a technique a stronger person could teach them a person how to do a pressure so everybody can help each other so i always say to my guys doesn't matter how skilled you are or how good you are you should be able to train with a with the least skilled person or a merciful person and both give you some each other something because the art should be able to express that you can take one technique like a jab you can play a game trying to catch a jab move your hair trying to hit it doesn't matter because you can you can control the power so you both can train together so everybody can train together it doesn't matter who you are so i have people all ages all all ages all levels trained together and i think because of a really good environment and people that like that environment are kind of drawn to it and the guys that are drawn to it usually they're in the for the long haul because it becomes a very good place for them that everybody's looking for something they feel comfortable with that they want to be involved with that will push them make them grow but it's productive and and i think we have a nice productive environment so i've attracted some really nice skies around the world it's funny the guys that i attracted that come to me to train at a guys i'm just really going well it's not very often one now again you get one person that comes and you don't really you know gel and you both can see that so that's fine that's what's going to happen but yeah i'm very lucky i'm very fortunate to have a really really good group of guys really good mentality and they all help each other so it's really nice i think a good question to ask you alan is if someone's thinking about starting martial arts what do you advise them to do you know before they decide to pay money or pay someone why should someone who's thinking about beginning the martial arts doomy journey do yeah that's a real hard question that's a really interesting question yeah it's really hard to think i mean for me i mean the way i did it is i went when i first did martial arts i tried most martial arts to see which one i kind of jogged with i mean so i went i did karate aikido kendo jiu-jitsu did the japanese martial arts i really liked the discipline i liked the culture but i felt there was there was a bit of stagnation in some of the ideas of application i tried thai boxing unboxing and i just felt it was for me at the time was was a bit too much for what i wanted to try to get more skill and i felt they were a bit bit too aggressive to start with so you have to find what fits for you winter and just fit for me because i think subconsciously because bruce lee had done wing chun that was already kind of in my brain i think the other thing was that there was emphasis of of a skill that if you if you mastered a skill you can improve and you could you could have a higher level of skill through learning these these movements so that's what attracted me so um i i didn't really have that as a game plan it just seemed to sort of happen i just i just um i just sort of found my way back to winter in the end and that was the one that that i really really was drawn to and then i was also drawn to jiu jitsu because um i felt like i didn't understand it so when i don't understand something i wanna i want to learn more about it and i keep read it read it most mentioned people would say that the jitsu guys couldn't beat them anyway because they couldn't take them down so i thought well okay let's go check that out so after my first youtube lesson we've been strangled by 60 kilo girl i thought maybe this is not i'm not as good as i thought right you know maybe that wasn't true so i would suggest anybody who started martial arts uh i think a good mantra to start with is to do something tactile right like wrestling or jutsu because you'll learn to feel someone's weight and feel someone's body weight and you'll learn to become a little bit more athletic a bit stronger and if you do have a good wing chun score around you then obviously i would recommend i just i just find that what most when chung is not really what i think is good windshield which is why people think i'm american but you know we do have a style that i think is it's a good system so yeah so i i usually when people message me and say what should i do i usually say to go to a good school because it's more consistent you know jujitsu and wrestling the levels like you said the black box of blackboard you don't have many black parts that you think are not that good all that also are good i mean you know so they have gone through 10 years of hard training to get to that and they've achieved something which is hard to achieve so you know so i think you've got consistency with other arts you don't always have the consistency in the level of instruction i would say so yeah so i think jiu jitsu is a good base art to start for especially for kids because it's very technical so you know some of the guys that i know the black parts are 22 years old and they've been jinjit systems they're four or five you know so they've been jiu jitsu forever so i mean you know for them to add other martial arts at that point is quite easy because they've got a good base you know so yes you don't need to do you just need to do one martial art really well and that will pay you good dividends i mean and then you can add things as you go on you know you can find out what's interesting but i must just say like sports i mean i think i read that michael jordan tried every sport there was before he found basketball because his dad wanted to be good at sport and michael really likes uh baseball which he did go back to at one point uh as a sort of homage to his dad as well and something that he won't do for himself so yeah he was good to sports and um before he excelled it was particular and and obviously guys that play basketball usually are tall usually have a good athletic ability and good skills so it makes sense you you you do a martial art you know based upon sometimes your body type sometimes your things you're interested in you know what interest is your mind i mean so some martial arts some people like to do you know things like tai chi and see that different things because they're more interested in their in the movement than the applications of fighting it depends what your goal is really so i think yeah write down what your goals are and then i think and check out the the pedigree of the schools around you and really do some research and check things out don't just take things as given so if someone says they're a black girl in xyz do some research on them and see what's on the internet and see because nowadays like we type my name in the intel there's 50 000 things come up i mean people if they're good and they're putting put stuff out there and they're you know expressing the right then you've got to track down some information on them if you can't find any information on them then usually it's probably a little bit of a problem yeah yeah absolutely i think one thing that i talked to adam chan about that um you said too that i want to emphasize is really think about what you want to get out of whatever you're doing and re-examine it always you know two months down the line two years down the line think about your goals at whatever you're doing and think about if you they're still the same or have they changed because that will help you kind of navigate your martial arts journey yeah like i i didn't set out to teach martial arts i ended up teaching martial arts but just because guys kept asking me to show them stuff and it became something that happened so it wasn't wasn't my god i just wanted i just wanted to train martial arts and as i got older now um i still teach obviously because i've got guys that don't want to learn and all that sort of stuff but i kind of more focus on doing martial arts just because i like doing it i don't need them to fight and i'm doing it for for the the original reasons i did it forced to learn to defend myself but that's what we saw that was that was solved many moves ago you know now i'm just doing it for self-discipline self-development i enjoy helping other people achieve their goals you know like having a guy who wants to fight and has potential and it's great to be involved in that is it's a fun rollercoaster and if you have someone who wants something to defend themselves that you need to help then it's great to see them more confidence if you see someone who's um you know has a mental gift on learning and you can help focus that and that's that's a great thing to have to do so my goal is now a little bit different than when they were starting my first time because obviously i cheated my my original goal learned to fight on she was a long time ago and i kind of forgot about that and even the goal to be a black belt when i first did martial arts so to look at people magazines i think wow you know this guy is amazing as a black belt and then i end up finding the magazine i used to read i ended up writing for that magazine and then later i ended up being an editor for their system magazine so it's kind of funny how you know from a 15 year old kid looking at some of the magazine want to be a black girl then eventually you're a black girl you're writing for that magazine and then you run the magazine so it's kind of weird it's kind of things just have a natural progression of sometimes with how they work you know and i mean when i did sort of black belt levels i was never really um excited about it because i was i'd always felt that i don't earned it by them because i've been doing this so long you know so you know it was just kind of like okay you know it's just yeah you need that you want to teach you need to have your belt now so you know you're ready well yeah you know you're ready i mean so you should you should get that process where it's not that big of an event anymore you know it's a good it's a good drive for some people when you first start you know you want to be a master of martial arts or black part but but you know by the time you get there you don't really care about that you know it's not really a big thing anymore you know you really feel like you've achieved a lot of things that you want to achieve so it's just sort of part of the journey i mean yeah and you also know when you get to blackboard it's really the start point you know start quite being responsible yeah you realize when you're when you're a white belt in martial arts and with a beginner at a certain level no one really cares if what you do because you're just a beginner but when you're at a good level everything you say everything you do is kind of seen and critiqued so you feel responsible to make sure that you're you're being true to that so your responsibility level rises you know so this is good in some ways it makes you realize that there's there is consequences in life and you have to step up to be part of that yeah you know it's interesting because you're a black belt in jiu jitsu did you ever think about opening a jiu jitsu gym i just always wonder that yeah well i do i do i do run a youtube class i mean i've been teaching in new zealand for seven years now so i teach i teach basically winter on monday so engineering class on mondays we do win showing and we do box chinese boxing together in one class tuesdays we do wrestling so i go to the wrestling club bring my guys to wrestling and we we work with the wrestlers and i help teach the wrestling for my guys and we work with the wrestling team and on the thursdays we just usually i teach on thursday so and then we have the other meetups and i teach a lot of privates so yeah that's awesome so it really sounds like when people train at the allen or wing chun academy they're really getting a full package man they're really getting a full package and you know i'm i'm i've i've seen many for example jiu jitsu schools who they might added striking as an afterthought but you know their jiu-jitsu school right or even certain mma schools you know they're like a certain focus maybe they're focused on striking they're focusing jiu-jitsu but it's like you're not really going there for like the whole package right but it seems like people can really come to your academy and they can really get a whole like striking grappling clinching package yeah and if someone's trying for a fight and obviously we put extra training together for their training camp and obviously i'm a personal trainer as well so my main job is personal training that's what i do day to day so i'm a personal trainer so obviously physical conditioning and training is very important um and then because i my personal training it gives you more time in the day to do private lessons so a lot of guys will meet up with we'll do prime lessons or weekend lessons so yeah it's quite a wide variety of things to do there's a lot of avenues to get good at different martial arts yeah and what are your students like like what is the demographic what are the you know i know you have some like fighter students but what is the average student like who trains under eleanor oh for more ages i mean we've got kids of 14 and we've got guys of 58 57 60 we've got guys of you know 20s in the 30s 40s all ages i mean all ages you know we've got girls we train everybody everybody's welcome everybody trains i mean i said i was i've always emphasized that everybody needs to help each other so if i get someone who's who's skilled and doesn't want to help people then i don't help them because their skill doesn't mean anything unless they want to share it with each other and help each other because you can't get you're only as good as the people around you so if you're not helping them you're actually holding yourself back yeah then you're not giving back to the arts so you know if you get someone who's a white part but they're really strong it's still hard to sweep them sometimes it can still be hard to to control them so you teach that person to use use skill but then you you you also say don't lose your strength just but just use at the right time and eventually when that person gets more skillful they're even hard to deal with so you're basically training that person to be your worst nightmare which is great because that's what you want you want you want the guy you guys have long legs to have good guards you want the guys with strong grips to have good across bodies right because if they do you have to deal with that so the more skilled your trampoline has become the better you become so i've always tried to have notion there's no secrets no no holdbacks you know if you can do it do it you know so you know i just if people ask me a question and if i can answer our answer i don't hold things back because knowing the answer isn't the skill the skill is in doing it so the more people can do the skill the better so i have an environment where everybody is really helpful everybody enjoys that environment because people are always eager to help each other yeah exactly and i think this is a really good stopping point for all of us and um for those of you watching please leave your comments etc because i'm sure there's going to be lots of comments and lots of questions for alan so ellen um when you come to la hopefully it's not in two years but if it isn't two years i would love to meet with you in person until then love to bring you back um love to have chats like this yeah that'd be awesome yeah it'd be nice to get people's feedback and get more questions and we could discuss them and yeah i'm always happy to to talk and um to share my experiences i think that's that's something i like to give back into the martial arts because as i said when i first started we didn't have the internet and we didn't have people to talk to we didn't have any any real guidance that's buying you know martial magazines and buying books and you know we're watching people from afar all the time so it's quite nice now to be able to get into contact with people that you that you see that you think oh i want to learn that skill that inspires me so it's nice to to help people you know because it's the kind of help we didn't have when we started so yeah i'm i'm really yeah happy to do that so yeah the more questions people give you and we can maybe do this again and do a regular theme sometimes that'd be great yeah and i think i should connect you with victor too um the wing chun guy in taiwan is fighting in victor's league right now so i'm sure victor once i talked to victor i'm i can't guarantee this but i'm sure he he he will be happy if you analyze matches in kod and stuff like that so yeah i'll i'll pass that along cool yeah so lots of great collabs and lots of great follow-ups to come so for viewers to fight commentary breakdown to fight commentary chats this is eleanor i'm sure it's if you just do a search you'll find this stuff on youtube on google et cetera yeah yeah thank you very much for having me i really appreciate it and um yeah if you have any questions obviously reach out to jerry and we'll be back and we'll answer some more questions for you so we can share some information for you definitely thank you