All levels train together and everyone learns from each other

All levels train together, and everyone learns from each other.Bernardo also tours Europe, teaching wing chun seminars and giving workshops in the network of schools that have been set up by his own students, including centres in London, Oxford and Reading. He comes across as far removed from the stereotype of the martial artist as humourless and remote. He cracks jokes, utters profanities, teases students and goes off on tangents as he urges newcomers and old hands alike to study the system for its own sake.Bernardo begins each training session by looking at a single technique. He makes all the students, whether beginners or advanced practitioners, study it in pains-taking detail until all of them can perform the action with great precision He then shows different applications of the technique. He emerged from these no-rules fights as the undefeated and undisputed champion.

After retiring from challenge matches, Wong continued to teach wing chun in Hong Kong until his death in 1997.Bernardo was one of a handful of students to learn from Wong before moving to London in the late 1970s. He set up an underground, word-of-mouth kung fu school called The Basement in 1984, and then moved to Ibiza in 2000.Bernardo’s latest project is an alternative wing chun school called the Ibiza Kwoon, which he describes as “the latest stage in my evolution”. Wong made his reputation in countless full-contact challenge fights on the rooftops of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s. Wong was able to develop his fighting skills to a remarkable level through wing chun, and always marketed the system as a counterattacking fighting art, as other practitioners still do.

This has been especially true of other musicians, actors, comedians, sportsmen and martial artists from other styles. Bernardo says that this seems to be due to practitioners’ “attitude to learning” improving as they struggle to get to grips with the system. It isn’t magic,” he says, adding that it only seems to work if a practitioner already has a high level of skill in another area.Bernardo says that this process was also true of his own teacher, Wong, whom he describes as “a naturally gifted fighter”. This insight first came to Bernardo in the early 1970s when he trained with Wong Shun Leung, a legendary Hong Kong street fighter and Bruce Lee’s principal kung fu instructor. However, Bernardo calls this a side effect of learning the system, and not even the most important one at that.