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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

I finally decided that I've had enough of half-heartedly working through dead patterns on chairs and doing footwork drills in the living room, so I decided to take it back and do it Old School. (If you're wondering, I fell out of contact with the local FMA guy, but I'll pick it up again as soon as the paychecks start rolling in.)

I forget which of the Old Masters--I want to say Punong Guro Edgar Sulite (Datu_B, check me on my facts if I'm wrong)--was trained like this: His father would hang a single stick, held in the middle by a piece of string, off of a tree. The object was to hit the stick, and just have to deal with all the different ways it would bounce and spin around. Not necessarily the safest thing to do.

Needless to say, I said "Screw it."

old school

I worked that for about twenty minutes before I realized that I was just hanging out on the outside. I played around with it, and came up with this configuration:

more old school

Now, I worked this facing the tree (my "opponent") as my frame of reference, the idea being to have to stay inside those boundaries, which I could modify as I saw fit. Then, things started getting fun for the next fifty minutes.

Now, I realize that all I've done is reinvented the wheel (one of my biggest pet peeves), but since this is the first time I've actually tried this, I learned quite a few things right away. (And, no rolling your eyes and going "Duh!")
  • Somehow I managed to figure out that how much more effective it is to keep hitting, as opposed to hitting and waiting for a "counterstrike" to deflect and attacking again. I suppose this means I've finally made the connection that deflection isn't necessarily a "passive" act, so to speak.
  • When in doubt, "candlestick."
  • If you keep the angle of the stick to your wrist at 90° it's easier to do that.
  • When I could pull them off, gunting movements with the double stick are nice.
  • The strangest thing, I managed to work in every deflection (depending on how high or low I hung the stick) except my favorite, the reverse umbrella. And, I tried, believe me. Oh well, guess I'll always suck at that move ;).
Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I gotta go do some chores... can't train and blog all day ;).

4 comments:

B said...

Hang it at different heights too. I'm a hand and head hunter.

Reverse umbrella: is your left forward? Try to think of it not as a deflection but as a punyo strike jam for a back hand attack.

Don said...

Most of the time, my left was forward. My problem was finding a situation where I could place my left forward in order to use the reverse umbrella, but it never seemed practical. I always defaulted to the outside deflection.

B said...

OK it sounds like you were farther out. I feel the outside deflection is the strongest of the two by far, BTW.

B said...

You know I'm kinda disturbed by your comments. Not what's in them, but the growing little army of me with big assed kukris. Kinda like the windmill scene of "Army of Darkeness"