All quotations taken from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"

Combat, as with anything, must follow a specific path from beginning to end. The proper course of action leading to victory, both physical and otherwise, consists of seven essential steps. Unsuccessful combat is a direct result of neglecting, skipping, or otherwise omitting part of this seven-step structure of combat. According to Sun Tzu, only “those who understand how to fight in accordance with principle will be victorious. Those skilled in war cultivate their policies and strictly adhere to the regulations. Thus, it is in their power to control success.”

1) First, one must recognize the conflict. While this seems obvious, it is one of the primary reasons why people fail at combat. Recognizing the danger allows you to control it. While this recognition is sometimes obvious, often it is not. Those who hold malice against you will attempt to ambush you. Recognizing the need for combat “is a matter of formations and signals.”

Eye contact is the first signal, and warns of imminent danger. Making eye contact before a conflict can give insight as to the nature of combat. However, should imminent combat be sensed, eye contact must be broken immediately and never reestablished. You must not fight the emotions of your opponent. That is an entirely different type of fight, which must be ignored for successful physical combat.

If the conflict is not recognized before it begins, the result will most likely be you receiving the first blow. This results in disorientation, loss of stance, structure, and positioning, and can lead immediately to sensory overload, giving your opponent the upper hand. This is a position from which it is very difficult to recover. Even in such a desperate situation, there are still those who will not recognize this as combat, will fail to fight back, and will surely lose.

2) The second step is maneuvering. Fight or flight? Will you enter or exit? This decision must be instantaneous; else you will discover the same results as if you had not even recognized the conflict.

The later the danger is recognized, the more often one is forced to enter, rather than being permitted to exit. Before the conflict has escalated to physical force, tactful words and actions can allow a clean exit. Sun Tzu tells us that “to subdue and enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.” However, knowing for certain physical combat will occur, the choice must be to enter the fight. If given the opportunity, you should choose to strike first, as this leads to the highest probability of victory. This is not to say wing chun is not a defensive art. The opponent is always the one who strikes first, whether it is with physical force (the more traditional sense of “attack”) or by choosing to strike in his mind, although it is not physically manifest yet (the more actual sense of “attack”).

3) The third step is choosing a strategic position. A skillful fighter “takes up a position in which he cannot be defeated and misses no opportunity to overcome his enemy.” A strategic position empowers you to dominate your opponent and control the fight. This means using footwork to gain access to the most powerful angles of attack, while maintaining a solid defense and optimum maneuverability. Positioning an opponent against a wall, or in a corner are good examples of how to position his body.

In the strictest sense, this dictates that you must face your opponent’s center with your weapons in front of you. You should face him at an angle, such that he and none of his weapons are facing you. If you control the fight in this manner, you create the rules and control the rhythm. However, Sun Tzu warns us: “nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuvering for advantageous position.”

If you face multiple attackers, this involves positioning yourself for optimum maneuverability among them, such that their positions may be used to inhibit each other while providing you the best access to an escape route should it be needed. If you are one of the multiple attackers, you must position yourself such that you can properly coordinate with the simultaneous actions of your allies. Fighting multiple attackers is the exception to the rule of always following a fight to completion. When you face numerous opponents the odds are overwhelmingly against you. The goal is now to maneuver about them until you can create a method of escape.

4) Fourth, a bridge must be established. A bridge is loosely defined as any physical contact with the opponent. However, more applicably, a proper bridge makes optimum uses of the previously obtained strategic positioning, and conveniently leads to trapping (step five). A bridge is primarily a tool of sensitivity. Contact with the opponent allows you to feel this motion, his direction of force, and reveals to you the power structures available to you both. By sticking to him, or more appropriately, sticking to the line of optimum force, you will be able to exploit his every move.

Any contact constitutes a bridge, not merely defensive movements. An attack is a bridge, whether it is intercepted or not, eye contact is a bridge (albeit a bridge of intent rather than physical contact), kicks and steps are bridges, and if you get hit, that too is a bridge. There are only two options when faced with a bridge, either cross it or destroy it. Crossing the bridge is the more familiar chi sau sort of thing to do, taking advantage of lines and opportunities to trap; destroying the bridge is more aggressive, leading to locks and powerful attacks.

It is possible to bridge successfully or poorly. To ensure victory, you must dominate the bridge at all times. By maintaining key structures, applying proper chi sau principles, and not allowing your opponent to gain a strategic position you may “determine the enemy’s disposition while, at the same time, [you] conceal [your] own.”

5) Dominating the bridge is fundamental to trapping the opponent, which is the fifth step of the combat process. Without bridge dominance, it is very difficult to trap an opponent. This is also the most neglected step of combat, and is often the reason why skilled martial artists who neglect this step are subdued by less skilled opponents. Those who gain bridge dominance “ are capable both of protecting themselves and of gaining a complete victory.”

In combat, your opponent must have as few options as possible. By trapping, you eliminate some, or all, of his weapons against you. If he is not accustomed to dealing with this, he may succumb to frustration and impatience, making him even easier to control. However, if he is not trapped you have gained nothing. Assuming you did have bridge dominance, if you were to attack, it would be defended with ease, and it would be nearly impossible to disrupt your opponents’ balance or stance.

There are two basic forms of trapping, physical traps and positioning traps. Physical traps are the most obvious. These are movements the tie up the opponent physically, thus negating his weaponry. Positioning traps are more difficult to obtain on a trained individual. These involve negating the opponent’s weapons by forcing a position in which he cannot use them. The most desirable of these positions is to be behind your opponent. When behind your opponent, you have the maximum advantage, as he has the minimum number of weapons with which to fight you. Thus, his weapons are trapped in a direction where they are of no use. This is “to be certain to take what you attack to be a place the enemy cannot protect.”

Once the opponent is trapped, however; it is often difficult to maintain the trap. This is especially true if your intent is to attack after forcing the trap. To attack, you may be required to release the trap, which allows your opponent an opportunity to defend. To solve this problem, something else must ensure that the trap leads to a successful attack.

6) The goal of trapping is to access and disrupt the opponent’s balance, step six. This is not difficult if you have a good trap to begin with. Once your opponent’s balance has been stolen from him, you truly control the fight. The idea is simple: move your opponents center of mass beyond the support of his stance, while maintaining your own balance within your own stance. This can be done by pushing, pulling, sometimes even by letting the opponent fall off balance on his own (as is often the case when trapping high kicks). This is also the time when the Wing Chun practitioner assures himself that his own balance is secure, before continuing.

When the body loses its balance, the mind devotes all of its primary resources to regaining it before the fall is complete. An off-balanced opponent will have great difficulty attacking, defending, even paying attention to what is going on around him. He is completely lost, with his only thought to regain his stolen balance. Unskilled fighters will flail their arms wildly, footwork will go out the window, and they will be prime targets for attack, while skilled fighters, still having difficulty, will likely be able to stay moderately defensive as they try to quickly regain their balance. Either way, your opponent is now in the most vulnerable state possible. You have now gained the full advantage over your opponent. This is the trait of a skillful warrior, as Sun Tzu states, who “first makes themselves invincible and then awaits the enemy’s moment of vulnerability.”

7) The seventh step of combat is the easiest; finish your off-balanced opponent with technique. Choose any convenient movement, apply some power, and end the fight. At this point, attacking such a vulnerable opponent should allow you to finish him easily with a few successive techniques. This must be done quickly, before the opponent regains balance. “When moving, fall like a thunderbolt.”

As I have stated, technique is only a small part of the fight. While it is important, certainly the six steps before it are equally, if not more, important. Unfortunately, technique is often the most over trained aspect of martial arts. Many martial artists can exhibit a very high proficiency in technique, and still have no idea how to fight. This is because they do not understand the proper course of combat. Because technique, your punch or your kick, is often the actual “thing” that causes physical damage to the opponent, many practitioners lose sight of the overall structure of combat, focusing only on techniques which deliver harm. However, techniques are worthless if you are not in a strategic position to use them, or if the opponent can easily defend your technique because he was not trapped or off balance. Many unskilled fighters try to skip from step one directly to step seven, neglecting all of the foundation material in between. It is no surprise at all that such an impatient fighter will always lose to someone who understands and practices the proper structure of combat. “A victorious [fighter] always seeks battle after his plans indicate that victory is possible under them, whereas a [fighter] destined for defeat fights in hope of winning but without any planning.”

Of course, this seven step path is not linear, but cyclic, especially when both fighters are highly skilled. Only the most perfect fight follows this path only once, ending in a devastating technique. More often, the fight consists of a series of both combatants trapping and escaping, stealing balance and recovering it, and both always trying to out maneuver the other for strategic positioning and bridge dominance. For each step of combat you are forced back to, you must begin anew from that step onward. “The resources of those skilled in the use of extraordinary forces [are] cyclical, as are the movements of the sun and moon. It is like moving in an endless circle.” Only when your opponent is in such a state as he is not physically able to fight back (i.e. dead, unconscious, etc), then you may cease attacking and consider that you may have won.