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Wing Chun is a wonderfully fluid martial art with practices and techniques that flow nicely from form to form, with locks, throws and strikes. However, they all take practice, and if you go to a martial arts school, you'll find that school time is best devoted to lessons with hands on help and sparring, so you can see how those techniques match up when faced against a real person. Wooden dummy techniques are a good way to practice them when you're not in class.

So there's a premium spent on practicing the forms outside of the school, so that you're ready for the next lesson ' just like going to class in high school takes homework, so does martial arts practice. Now, you can get a lot of benefit from a wooden dummy ' the bits that extend out make a good brace point for practicing grapples and throws, and give you practice in slamming your forearms into something hard so that you won't flinch when you do your blocks.

One of the best techniques I've found is to follow along with a DVD. DVD players are cheap, you can pause the action and repeat the motion on the screen a couple of times before you run your hands into the practice dummy, and you can analyze what you're doing. Some of the Wing Chun dummy techniques I've learned are strokes, throws, feints and combinations of them ' and, when I'd injured my feet earlier, I could practice at home without gimping around the martial arts school.

Now, I know ' this is Yoshi telling you about yet another form of "sit on the couch and learn martial arts". No amount of watching a video will give you the techniques if you don't actually work out with a wooden dummy. Most of the dummies you can get will be just fine; you might want to ask your wife first before setting one up in the living room. (My wife makes me do my martial arts practice downstairs in the basement. In her words, "If it's going to smell like a gym, I want it some place where I don't have to look at it."). So, be sure to go through the techniques slowly and carefully at first. One step at a time, so you don't injure yourself, and so you understand everything you're seeing. Then, pick up the pace and work through the drills.

So, I can absolutely recommend these. While a dummy won't teach you how to throw a block against an incoming strike, it absolutely will let you practice your forms so that everything you do is fluid, and on the level of muscle memory, rather than something you think about, step by step by step.