WT is soft but not weak, as they say in Hong Kong. Your training becomes what you make it, no matter if you train soccer or studying maths, or in this case WT or WC. Of course if your teacher isn’t teaching you WT then you won’t learn WT and if he only is teaching the art of WT and not the fighting aspect of WT, it will often take a lot longer to become a good WT fighter.
I’m not sure what you mean with balance. If you mean it’s too soft, and not have any real applications, then you are very wrong or you have been taught wrong. WC is soft, yes but it’s called soft because we don’t fight force with force. For example a tan sau should be able to withhold almost any amount of force in a vector. We don’t try to fight this force with another vector straight to it, instead we use another vector with another direction and therefore nullifying the incoming force. It’s like a big ball filled with air on water, you can’t press it down because it will only rotate and lead the downward force in another direction.
About the burglars 4 years ago, no matter what martial art you train it’s never a good idea to fight unknown burglars. The first thing you should do in self defence is to run, if you can’t, it shouldn’t be your first priority to go into hand to hand combat since the burglars maybe have hidden weapons which could be lethal. Risking your life for things that can be replaced is never a good idea. It might be a better idea to train FMA or something if you are after self-defence in my own opinion, since the weapon part of WC and fighting multiple opponents, comes in the end of the system.
I agree with you that some schools give their students a kind of ego boost and instead of helping them; it will only get them in more trouble. Since WC basically a hand to hand combat system designed to be used in China when weapons weren’t legal it’s not suitable to use it against burglars. However if you were forced to engage in hand to hand combat with them, it doesn’t matter what you train because they outnumbered you. Although if you take them one by one like in movies, there is a very high possibility to take them down assuming they don’t have any weapons and that they don’t pick up any object or for that matter not skilled in any martial art. Or that you establish contact with their arms directly and control them with chi sau to open them up and finish them.
Also I believe that you could easily knock them down with a vertical fist followed up with some elbows or using the first part of chum kiu to grab their head and eye gouge, followed by twisting their head and attack from behind by stomping behind their knees. Just a few examples that’s required to know according to the WT syllabus after the 5th SG, if I remember correctly.
Anyways the psychology of self defence is a lot more important than what you train. You need to be aggressive on the outside etc.
WT is a lot more theory than other martial arts, as you said, but if you don’t train the theories there is no point in learning them no matter what MA you train. Everything I know about WT works and if they don’t work for you, you shouldn’t keep training them unless you find out why they don’t work for you and train them until they work before learning something new.
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