Wushu Watch: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wing Chun

I have had a couple of forays into the darker side of martial arts—the cults and the vital point strikes—so I scoffed when I was handed a VHS a few weeks ago and told that I had seen nothing yet. What awaited me was one of the most breath-taking instructional tapes on fighting that I have ever witnessed. The so-called 'Anti-Vale Tudo' tape promises an answer to all your grappling worries… through Wing Chun.

Now as a general rule you can tell how practical an instructional's material is by how much unanswered offence the demonstrating party is allowed to perform. 'Anti-Vale Tudo' is fifty-five glorious minutes long and at least half of that is men freaking out and throwing fifty strike c-c-c-combos on foetal dummies. But that's the way I like it. I don't much care for Ryan Hall or Demian Maia spending minutes explaining a method of opening the opponent's elbow or off balancing him and forcing him to post when Sifu Gutierrez guarantees that the guy will overcommit and be easily rolled over every single time. Due to this one hundred percent rate of success much of the sifu's focus is on slapping his students dozens of times while they grunt. He even performs a few stomps to the head which are clearly intended to stop a few inches before they actually do.

Here is the good sifu's answer to side control.

But it must be noted that one should always look avoid being put in a consolidated side control to begin with. Best to start double slapping as soon as your opponent passes your guard, there's a good chance he'll just roll off you.

Sifu Gutierrez is not a fan of being clinched, and wants to use those Wing Chun flurries whenever possible. Following the philosophy of quickly overwhelming opponents his answer to most attacks is simply to hit the square and triangle buttons in rapid succession. So when someone comes in to headlock you, as no one with any experience has done since the late nineties, you just start hitting them in the face.

If they get a hold of you and try to throw you it's okay, you just step around their leg and hit them in the body. They'll fall, apparently.

And if anyone does shoot a takedown on you, you just roll with it and end up in top position. People used to think this wouldn't work but I see Luke Rockhold do it all the time. Of course, Luke Rockhold is training with Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier, and they are aware of his intentions. Guttierez's students split off to practice their techniques against takedown attempts like this one:

If you had to boil the sifu's teachings down to one lesson it would be that you can always roll through on everything. Here he demonstrates what happens if you make an awful attempt at a cross buttock or osoto-gari, and end up being thrown instead.

Of course the area in which you will be really wanting to hear Gutierrez's thoughts is in the handfight. That's what Wing Chun is famous for after all. And with Chris Weidman, Jon Jones and so many others going to the double hand trap more and more, it's important to have some answers.

Hold on… I've seen that one before. I believe it was Giant Silva in his fight against top five heavyweight Heath Herring back in PRIDE FC.

And while I remind myself that this tape is proudly one hundred percent Wing Chun, I find myself noticing amazing similarities like this everywhere. For instance this student's traditional Chun-oplata into stomping bears incredible similarities to movements found in a Native American ground fighting form.

Like many traditional martial arts versus modern martial arts instructionals this one makes some time for the nut grab and the eye poke. Unlike many others though, Gutierrez doesn't assume that he will be the only monkey trying to steal a peach. He's got answers. When he's in guard, he's all in favor of the nut shot:

But when on the bottom, Gutierrez has innovated a new method which I think we should call Chun Guard. By opening his guard and exposing his groin, he convinces his opponent's to grab at it. But like Marcelo Garcia or Caio Terra baiting the opponent to grab their pant legs, Gutierrez has an answer.

The backfist! Always the backfist. So short, so simple, so unproven. And the same could be said for this instructional. In just fifty-five minutes Sifu Gutierrez manages to lay out a brutally to-the-point approach to MMA for people who have only trained Wing Chun. To parrot the blurb of every Victory Belt martial arts book, no stone is left unturned! No unnecessary seven DVD set, no marketing spiel, and with a surprising depth; Gutierrez even prepares his charges for situations as obscure as the wrong side Americana.