Combat: How did you first become involved in Martial arts?

Frode Strøm: Through the usual channels - Bruce Lee films, karate and then taekwondo. These are all fairly well represented in Norway but at the time there were practically no Chinese styles being practised. Then one of Wai Po Tang's students from Sweden (Which have no shortage of Wing Chun Schools) opened his own school, 20 minutes down the road from me. I liked Wing Chun's direct approach to short range combat, the centre-line theory, the use of speed and the simultaneous blocking/striking techniques.

Combat: What was the first Wing Chun School in Norway like?

F.S: The standard of instruction was not that high and I later discovered that we had been taught techniques incorrectly. The final straw came when I attained higher marks than my own teacher! As I could not learn directly from Master Tang himself I decided to leave. Many students left with me and though our collective standard was poor, mine was the highest, so the others asked me to open a School where we could all train together. I knew this wasn't the answer and that we needed direct access to a proper Sifu. Then I got hold of a copy of Combat and through it, contacted Austin Goh.
He invited me to London, we trained for a week and I was accepted as his student. I trained with Austin for just over a year and finished off by learning the third form and the pole. At last, after several years of training I felt I had received proper instruction in the Wing Chun system. With that knowledge came a number of problems. I realised that I had no practical understanding and couldn't apply what I knew, so I became disillusioned with Wing Chun. My disillusionment communicated itself to my students and they too came to feel that they had trained through several years of seminars and gradings, they had no real understanding of technique application. All we seemed to have was formal Wing Chun knowledge.

Combat: So what happened then?

F.S: I saw an interview in Combat with Garry McKenzie in which he was (inadvertently) pointing out where we in Norway were going wrong. Garry stressed the need for practical application outside of the Wing Chun environment - whereas I'd found that our techniques only seemed to work against other Wing Chun practitioners. After doing some homework on the Wing Chun underground, I decided that Garry's street-oriented Wing Chun was what I needed. So I phoned him up and asked him to put on a two day course, here in Norway. We just clicked straight away! I felt enthusiastic and this communicated itself to my students, until we were all eager to meet the man himself.
As soon as Garry arrived, I knew things would be fine. But I felt like a complete novice again because I just couldn't cope with the man's basics, energy, speed and positions. He was world apart from my previous teachers. Garry told me that my standard wasn't bad, though I had no practical knowledge of what I was doing!