I first encountered Grandmaster Kan when I was a boy of 13. Little did I know at that time the enormous impact his teaching and training methods would have upon me. Having trained in the normal methods of Tae Kwon Do, Karate and Thai Boxing, I read an article in Combat magazine entitled ‘Five Star Ving Tsun Master’ concerning Victor Kan and was so impressed by what I read that I wrote to him there and then asking about training in Watford. A school was promptly opened, and I began training in this most powerful system of Chinese Boxing. The training was hard, strict, and demanding – very different to the atmospheres in normal martial art classes! Sifu Kan was, is and always has been insistent on the very highest standards with no compromise at all on the dedication and sacrifice it takes to achieve real ‘Kung Fu’ – skill acquired after a long period of intensive effort. No quick fix, no magic techniques, just prolonged hard work with no deviation from the principles of Classical Ving Tsun.

As is so often with life, circumstances and study took me away from being able to train with Sifu Kan on a regular basis and I had the opportunity to see not only other styles of Martial Arts but many other Ving Tsun schools and reflect on what I had been taught. What immediately became apparent is that Martial Arts is big business and the student is treated as a customer that continually needs to be pandered to in order to stop them from spending money with another instructor at another school. The result of this is students are fast tracked to techniques they are not yet ready for or worse taught impractical techniques that bear no relation to actual combat.

Genuine Kung Fu cannot be purchased but must be earned through the student’s own blood, sweat and tears. It takes a long time to develop the unique force that makes Ving Tsun so effective and I have not seen any other teacher that has developed this force to the pinnacle Grandmaster Kan has – anyone who has met him will attest to his fierce, compelling presence and straight-talking attitude. Even as he approaches the venerable age of eighty, he is in better shape than a man 20 years his junior! I am immeasurably proud of the lineage I belong to and it gives me great honour to represent Victor Kan in Watford teaching classical Chinese Martial Arts.