Harinder Singh
Wing Chun Illustrated|Issue No. 48, 2019

Building peace through strength.

Jason Korol
Harinder Singh

SIFU HARINDER SINGH DEFIES our expectations. He isn’t a traditionalist, nor is he a sport martial artist or reality-based martial artist either. He’s all three. And he thinks you should be too.

You’ve actually learned both Jeet Kune Do and Wing Chun. What’s the biggest misconception about Wing Chun on the JKD side?

It’s that people think they can do what Bruce Lee did without the structure. They think they can just be alive, but they don’t have the structure, the hardware, to make it alive as he did. So, they separate the two and think Wing Chun is dead but JKD is alive. That’s not true. Wing Chun is very much alive. The forms give us the structure, the hardware, and we’re supposed to use that structure. But to think we can do what

Lee did without the Wing Chun structure is missing the point. We want to understand the journey he took, and that’s got to run through Wing Chun. If we start at the destination, we will miss how he got there.

How do you make the structure alive? How do we avoid being trapped in the forms?

By understanding that it’s all about T.A.D.—Timing, Angle and Distance. I mean, if we just do the forms and don’t seek to apply them, that’s not going to work. I want to take the structure and try it against a boxer, a grappler, and an MMA guy. I want to see how it works. If I do the Bui Jee perfectly in the form, but I don’t see how it interacts with other methods, then I’m missing the point. But I’ve got to have that structure first. That’s where it starts.

Do you think we limit ourselves by not getting outside of our system?

This story is from the Issue No. 48, 2019 edition of Wing Chun Illustrated.

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This story is from the Issue No. 48, 2019 edition of Wing Chun Illustrated.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.