At Havant Wing Chun we focus most of our training on our Wing Chun skills, however, when it comes to using our skills to protect ourselves and our loved ones, we take it very seriously. Self-defense or to use its modern term, Self-Protection is, in my opinion, one of the most misunderstood subjects in Martial Arts in the modern era.

When they want to learn self-defense, most people believe the best thing they can do is join a Martial Arts club and/or learn to fight. This is simply wrong. A Martial Arts class, unless it has good knowledge of Reality-Based Self-Defence (RBSD) or combatives will not provide you with the correct methods you need. That is not to say that this is true for all Martial Arts classes as there are clearly specialist classes out there. This is a mistake I made when wanting to learn Self-Defence skills. But it is a mistake I corrected by seeking out the best RBSD and combatives coaches in the country and training hard for many years to understand what skills (if any) are needed to survive a violent encounter. This lesson was a hard-earned one but one that has stayed with me and will be given to you when you join our classes.

Good self-defence has almost nothing to do with Martial Arts or even fighting itself. Its main focus should be on avoidance at all costs and only a simple set of brutal physical techniques to be deployed in a totally last-resort situation.

Simply put, if things become physical then it will always end badly. Either through injury, monetary or legal issues, or even worse.

In my opinion, some Martial Arts classes do more harm than good when teaching what they call “self-defence” giving people a false sense of security rather than a way of seeing danger before it happens and being taught a limited but effective skillset to deal with the worse case scenarios when they happen.

In our RBSD sessions, you will mainly be learning that small set of physical skills, with the soft-skills being taught via specialist Zoom or in-person classes. All as part of our Wing Chun syllabus.