| rev:text
| - The Good:
*Clean studio, plenty of parking.
*A really great group of students and peers that want to help develop and challenge you to become better at the martial art.
*Located in the center of Las Vegas.
*You will, albeit slowly, learn to defend yourself against the average, bare-handed street thug.
The Bad:
*A lot of politics here. A LOT. Bradley Temple, the head instructor / owner, definitely plays favorites.
*No belt system. No recording of your attendance. Bradley moves you up regardless of how much you attend or how hard you work. I was one of his most consistent students yet another student, who had a six-month absence, got moved up on the same day I did.
*No emphasis on physical fitness, which is really a bad choice when it comes to any physical activity, let alone self-defense.
*Bradley can be a really friendly, charismatic guy or very impatient and tense. He angrily reprimanded me once, in front of the entire class, because I was unsure of where I was in the curriculum (see the "no belt system" objection above). This embarrassed me to say the least, but casts some serious doubts on his level of mastery in a style that has "relaxation" as its core value.
*No sparring. Ever. I never saw nor was invited to put on boxing gloves or protective gear, and I'm left wondering how effective the training program here is as a result.
*Doing forms is, I feel, ambiguous as to their benefit since you'll only ever be threatened by another person rather than by thin air. We could have been using the first half hour of the class to instead do some light sparring or other exercise; instead, it's a half hour of forms.
*It's based on art, rather than hard science, so nobody wants to acknowledge that there may be a better way of training or updating the curriculum. Nobody wants to think that there may be better styles out there or what would happen if they hosted a friendly competition among schools to discover, through experimentation, which techniques work better. But why would anyone want to do this? It's bad for business.
I don't want this review to be entirely bad but put into context, I could have had much better results in another school or style. Wing Chun can work, as all martial arts can work, if you put the time into developing it. But it takes a lot of time, and since this school doesn't develop you physically, you may have better long-term results elsewhere.
As stated, the majority of other students are the reason to come. Their positive attitudes encourage you to really develop, and you get a mixed bag of all shapes and sizes, which is a really good thing since practice in this setting will make you very well-rounded. But there are also a minority of students not worth your time and are people I tended to avoid. I don't want to name off any names as these students may not be training here any longer, but Marcus acts like he's God's gift to Wing Chun, and Allen acts like he owns the school. A good student that did stand out, however, was James Chan. He was easily the best martial artist who ever set foot in that school, including better than Sifu Brad himself.
But overall, it can be OK if you're willing to overlook these shortfalls.
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