I coach men and women for combat sports. One of my colleagues, Arturo Gabriel, who has fought, coached, cornered, and refereed at a high level, teaches Wing Chun Gung Fu on Sunday mornings before my stick-fighters and boxers arrive. I clean the seating area and listen to his class for about an hour before hitting my warm-ups.

Wing Chun is the martial art that Bruce Lee practiced as a young man, and formed the basis for his remarkable teaching and film career. Lee was famous for hybridizing martial arts. His root art, Wing Chun, is still, even in the age of Krav Maga and MMA, considered a viable combative art form. Practitioners can be seen on YouTube testing themselves against proponents of rival fighting arts. For this reason Wing Chun classes are usually well attended, and usually by brawny men, who want to be able to defeat other brawny men. Gabriel, a former paratrooper, who grew up as a member of a Chicago gang, and spent two decades as one of the premier bouncers in the Baltimore area, attracts men to his class who want to be able to fight.

At 12:15, on the last Sunday of November 2013, he blew up, and began chewing out his students. He was not in a rage, or he would have devolved into Spanish. But his voice carried an angry tone, “Enough of this macho bullshit! You all want to be able to fight, but you have no sensitivity. You go out there on the street with no sensitivity and flex those big arms and come with that power then some little wetback is gonna slide a knife between your ribs! You big? You think you bad ‘cause you big hommie—without sensitivity you are dead! Dead!”

He then turns to me as his men stand embarrassed, “Sifu James why do people who come to Wing Chun always seem to have this big-boy macho mentality?”

I responded, “It’s seems like mostly stocky guys interested in a countermeasure method for dealing with taller guys.”

He then softened his tone and turned to his men, “Yin and yang; male and female. One is not complete without the other. Wing Chun means beautiful springtime. It was an art developed by a Chinese nun to combat men. It works, but not if you ignore the feminine element; the sensitivity. Sensitivity—the feminine—is your early warning system, your radar and your poison hand! I teach the gangster fist application of the art. The poison hand [I gather this has to do with spearing the eyes with the fingertips and slapping the groin based on his hand motions while speaking.]is crucial to that. I’m not here to dance with muscled-up meatheads but to develop warriors—and a woman can be a warrior.”

Gabriel is not some kind of armchair martial artist teaching from the safety of a cloistered school, but a man who has been involved in the widest variety of physical insanity with a rogues’ gallery of macho maniacs on the streets of Baltimore and Chicago. He knows of what he speaks.

There are a lot of nuances to training men and women. People of both genders have psychological blocks concerning progress in adapting to combat. I do not want to get too far off of Gabriel’s point. Suffice it to say, that it has also been my experience that men who are caught up in their masculine self-image are hard to coach and easy to fight.