Theoretical basis

Ip Man

• Master of martial arts.
• Popularized Wing Chun in Hong Kong, having trained nearly 1,000 people.
• Refined wooden dummy to the level of being a movable mounted structure.
• The legendary disciple - Bruce Lee.

The technique of Wing Chun was passed on to only a few, carefully selected students. One of them was Ip Man. From a young age he began to study the system of Wing Chun, and in consequence he became a master of martial arts. Ip Man - one of the few to have learned the authentic system of Wing Chun. He became an outstanding master of this style, a genius in the world of martial arts. In addition to the creation of Chinese Kung Fu and promotion of its development in many countries of the world, he has trained many students. In old age, a few years before his death, when Master Ip Man "closed his doors" (stopped training students), he decided to film the whole series of wooden dummy techniques to show the correct way to its execution. A series of photographs of wooden dummy technique was not complete, as Master Ip Man intended them for a narrow circle of followers of the style.

In his youth, the techniques of Ip Man with a dummy contained 140 movements, divided into 10 parts for practical purposes. Later, Master Ip Man moved to Hong Kong, opened a school and began to teach the students (before that Wing Chun kung fu was a secret style of kung-fu). He decided that the wooden dummy techniques are too cumbersome and complex, that’s why he reduced it to 108 movements, and in the end, experimenting for years, redesigned the set of techniques into 116 movements.

The photos of the wooden dummy techniques have spread out all over the world and it is no longer a secret.

The daily practice of Bruce Lee included work on a wooden dummy. Who taught Bruce Lee to work on a wooden dummy? Ip Man did not disclose the technique, Yip Chun neither. In the photo, the wooden dummy of Bruce Lee was not executed correctly, however the dummy was in working order - which means that Bruce Lee had worked a lot on it. The answer to the question is there "Jeet Kune Do" in the book published by John Little - : "Bruce learned how to work on a dummy all by himself, developing his technique relying on basic skills." Simply said, Bruce Lee expressed himself through the wooden dummy. Theoretically, we can state that there is a no particular theory of operation of a wooden dummy. Confirmation of this - Sil Lim (Shaolin Monastery - founded in 495 by an Indian Buddhist monk Bhadra), where a wooden dummy appeared long before the founding of Wing Chun as an independent style.