"Practice makes..."

As I've mentioned before, the practice of Wing Tsun is not a destination but a journey, so the old saying, "practice makes perfect" can't apply to what we do because there's always room for improvement, no matter how long you've been training.

WT is as much an internal art as it is external, maybe even more so. If you look at video of me from ten years ago going through the Siu Nim Tao form, you might think, well that looks pretty good, how much better can it get? And from an external perspective, maybe so, but what was going on internally?

Was my weight properly sunk into my lower abdomen. Were my knees properly adducted? What about my triceps...too much tension or not enough? Were my shoulders truly relaxed down in their sockets, was my breathing deep and rhythmic? Was my mind even focused on what I was doing or was I thinking about what toppings I wanted on my pizza after practice?

Those are all internal things. And while you may be able to quantify an external component, such as the proper angle of tan sao, the internal components are much harder to pin down. So the practice of WT is very much Yin and Yang. You have the external aspects that can be seen and brought to an almost flawless perfection, and you have the internal aspects that cannot be seen and never perfected.

Each training session then is not just another day where you've strung out yet more repetitions of a particular form or technique, or how many punches you've thrown on the wall bag yet again...

Remember, Wing Tsun means "springtime"...so it's not dead movements that we're practicing, the movements should be alive and fresh, always changing, growing and developing. They have to be, because we're not quite the same as we were the day before.

We may have a stiffness in our shoulder that wasn't there last time. A distraction from work may be on our mind, our breathing may even be different than yesterday because of a change in humidity.

So while practice will never make perfect, good focused practice will always bring progress and take us a little further down the path.