ike lots of people, I've long thought martial arts were very cool. Sure, they can be misused by cinema (any film by Steven Segal, for instance) but the concept is a lot of fun, and even if you doubt the functional use of 99% of it in actual physical conflict, it's a way to get some exercise, improve your flexibility, and gain deeper understanding into the fight scenes you see in action movies.  Unfortunately, also like lots of people, I've always admired martial arts from a distance and never actually gotten involved in any discipline. The strip mall black belt mills in which you always see two dozen 8 year olds standing in rows and punching at the air have never appealed to me, and my knees couldn't take high impact leaping stuff, but I like Tai Chi, and I really love martial arts weapons; swords, staves, etc.

Since Malaya feels much the same as me, and one of her best female friends is a Gura (teacher) at "Kali," a form that originated largely in the Philippines, we've been giving more and more serious thought to getting into some sort of martial arts training ever since I moved up here, in July of 2003. By August of 2004 we were still thinking about it, but getting closer to doing it, and by September 2004 we were both taking classes weekly, Malaya more often than I.

Disclaimer:

Don't take my comments on Kali literally, unless you're able to attend class in the San Francisco area from my Gura or the Tuhan (master) of our school. You can learn elsewhere, of course, but don't show up at a local Kali or Escrima or Arnis class and expect them to do anything like what I talk about in these entries. Lots of the moves would look somewhat similar, and lots of styles use many of the same weapons, but the school I'm working in is much modernized over the traditional forms, and really stresses improvisation and adaptation, along with very different forms of movement. We hardly do any rote memorization of moves, we do a lot more footwork and circling and sideways and backwards attacks, and those are things that other types of martial arts, even other types of Filipino martial arts, don't do much, if at all.

If you are interested in learning a martial art, I'd strongly recommend it; I wish I'd started when I was about 10, even though I'd think most of what I learned over the past 2 decades was bullshit, now that I'm doing this type of Kali. I wouldn't recommend one of the strip mall karate/TKD/Kung Fu/etc mills, though. What I would recommend is that you look around on the Internet in your area, find something that sounds interesting, and then go watch a class one time and talk to the instructor and see what you think of the vibe. It's not like a math class you're learning from some book; you'll be constantly interacting in a physical way with the other students and the instructor, and if you don't like the people or the teaching style, don't start taking classes there.

You can expect quick results, but don't expect quick mastery, or even competence. As of June 2006 I've been taking Kali classes for nearly two years, and my greatest awareness is of just how much more I've got to learn. My Gura has been doing it for more than a decade and she's still learning things all the time. Her Tuhan has been doing martial arts for 45 years, Kali for more than 20, and he's progressing and making new breakthroughs and discoveries all the time as well. (Which immediately trickle down to us students.)  A real martial art isn't something you master in a month, or a year, and if you don't enjoy the form you're training in and the people you're learning it with, don't bother getting started.

More recent updates to this page are added on the bottom.

August 7, 2003

I mentioned a few days ago that Malaya and I drove up to Sonoma State to view a female martial arts demonstration. I thought I might blog about it at some length, and I still might, but I'm not going to do so today.  I took about 30 photos while there, mostly of the various demonstrations, but looking over them tonight, I'm pretty disappointed.  Only about half a dozen of them are in decent enough focus to bother posting, and only a few of those show anything interesting enough to post.  Most of the time I tried to take a picture of the people sparring or whatever, and by the time my digital camera clicked, the action was over.  Or the people are all blurry.  Sports photography is harder than it looks, and it's impossible with a slow to click digicam like mine.

The fact that most of the women doing their cute little prancing routines could use those same moves at higher speed to beat the crap out of me is irrelevant, and I'll thank you for not bringing that up.  You should also not mention how much I want to learn to do that sort of thing and how much I enjoy doing my own utterly amateurish and improvised Tai Chi moves now, when the mood takes me.

And here is a shot of a nice demonstration by two masters at their discipline. Both women were at least 50 years old, and they were frighteningly fast with the sword and staff, landing numerous nasty hits to each other's heads an shins.  There were at least half a dozen demonstrations from groups who used sparring weapons and pads and sparred no contact; you could very clearly hear wooden staves cracking into pads and helmets from 20 feet away.  It looked like a lot of fun.

Malaya and I are still debating what discipline we want to get into, and she's been looking online for classes in the area.

August 8, 2003

Yesterday night Malaya and I stopped by a friend's Kali class, hoping to get a look at what was going on there.  Kali is a form of martial arts popular in the Philippines, and while I don't know enough about various forms of martial arts to explain it clearly in comparison to other forms, it's pretty likely none of you know enough about them to benefit much from such a comparison, if I were even capable of making it. Basically Kali is a weapon-oriented form, one with very smooth and flowing movements, and not much foo foo flim flam type posing or rules or ceremony.  People in the classes don't wear those cute little Karate Kid type uniforms, and you don't all stand in rows and punch imaginary objects while shouting in Japanese or Chinese.  It's a much more practical and flowing form, and Malaya's friend is very young for an instructor, but she's very skilled in it, and she makes it fun. I had fun, anyway.

I haven't observed her class before, but she only teaches a few people, and on this night they were in a new location and the turnout was smaller than usual.  As a result Malaya and I participated in the class and got to see just how it would go for new students.  One of the regular students had brought three sticks, so we all used those for some basic drills and techniques, and went from learning to just twirl them around in our hands while moving our arms in the correct way to applying the techniques we'd been using to learn to strike powerfully, as well as adapt some defensive techniques for bare-handed fighting.

We're not under any illusions that we could not kick ass in a street brawl or anything like that, but it was some exercise and interesting and a reasonable way to spend a couple of hours.  The teacher spent a lot of time talking about theory and concepts, in terms of defending, allowing the other person to pick the target and then evading their strike, turning an attack aside, but we were also spending a lot of time just working on the physical techniques with the sticks and then with bare hands, combining it with footwork, etc.

It was sort of an impromptu session, since we'd just dropped by to watch and only joined in since we were invited and the class was very small that night, so it wasn't like "Introduction to Kali 101" or anything like that, but I found it informative enough.  I have no idea what a full on beginning Kali class would be like, and what sort of thing we'd start off doing, but the teacher is not hung up on rules and slow learning curves, so it's not at all unusual for brand new students to be handling live knives or sticks or engaging in careful sparring their very first class.

That sort of thing is what Malaya and I like, since we both want to just jump into something, and don't have patience for endless regimented drills and training practices.  We just need to find an art and a teacher that we like enough to stick with, in a discipline that uses a lot of weapons and tools, since we're really attracted to that aspect of things, rather than just hand to hand combat.  Malaya's friend yesterday night would be a good option, but since she's been Malaya's close friend for so many years it wouldn't work real well, with the whole master/student relationship not meshing with the friend/friend dynamic.

But I feel better able to figure that sort of thing I want to train in, having spent a session checking out Kali.  Kali isn't a very popular/well-known style, so it's not like I'm/we're going to try out everything once and then pick one, but previously it was like trying to pick a car when never having actually been to an auto dealer.  We know what sort of martial art we like, and several of the better-known ones are already ruled out for various reasons (Judo and Karate are way too chop chop and non-flowing and regimented and repetitive for our tastes), so we'll be looking to find something we're comfortable spending some years learning more about.

September 13, 2004

Sunday morning I went to Kali class with Malaya, my 2nd real martial arts class as a full participant (the one we attended together last year was more of a visitor type thing). It's a good class with a real master teaching it, but it's also held at 9am over in Oakland, and that's a fair distance at an unfair time, by my standards at least. The parents went along, but they were going to hit the local Unitarian Church for the service and out of curiosity. Of course class went long, well past 12:30, so they were back before it ended, and the weather was quite chilly Sunday morning, like 65 and windy, so they bundled up on the cement bench and watched for a bit, before retreating to their rental convertible (with the roof very much up) and waiting for us to finish.

It wasn't a real great class for spectating, at least not until the end when the noobs (like Malaya and I) sit down and watch the gurus spar with interesting weapons and techniques, assisted and coached by the master. We learn a lot just by watching people who actually know what they're doing, and it's like a good kung fu movie, for free, in person. Though you're much more likely to see someone actually get hit during these sparring sessions than you are in most martial arts movies.  It's damn entertaining too; the master going with double sticks against a very good guy with a long staff and then a spear was damn impressive.  Certainly motivated me to want to get better with the stick, so I can work up to using two of them. That's a years-long project though.

I'll write more about the Kali classes soon, since Malaya's been going twice a week for a couple of months, and I'm going to be going (at least) once a week now that I've tried it and enjoyed it. I also seem to pick the movements up pretty quickly, though there's nothing like sparring with someone who's been doing it for 4 or 5 or 8 years to immediately humble me. As I struggle to master the 4 or 5 rapid hand/arm movements to successfully block a slow motion punch and deliver a good counter-strike, my more experienced fellow students effortlessly catch my punch, pull me sideways, and delivery 3 or 4 killing blows in literally 2 seconds.  We've got to practice everything in slow motion several times, and I think I'm doing good when I can do that, and maybe deal with them at half-speed. And then I see them working with each other, or they go full speed once in a while as we're sparring, pulling their punches short of hitting me, of course, and it's just... yeah.

The master at Sunday's class has been practicing and teaching Kali for upwards of 40 years, and while he looks like a dumpy little Filipino guy in street clothes; when you see him move it's scary. So fluid, so quick, and he's like iron under his skin and slight pot belly. He shows you the movements and hits you with about 10% of his power, and you stagger back. Literally; he does little slaps just for fun to show you where he would have hit, and your arm goes numb. He was showing me a little block to chest bump thing, and while leaning against my sternum he did the bump at about 1/5 power, and I went "whoof" and staggered back two steps.  And he was just leaning on me; zero distance to build up speed or power, and he was far from trying to knock me.

I was always very skeptical of that focused force and power stuff, like how they say Bruce Lee could knock someone ten feet with a one inch-punch, but when you feel it pushing into your sternum hard enough to empty your lungs, or feel a short little guy slap your arm casually and it feels like you just got hit by the door of a truck, it's sort of hard to remain a non-believer.

I don't know what my long-term goals are with studying Kali, but I enjoy the classes, enjoy doing the exercises, and since Malaya is into it as well (meaning we've always got a sparring partner/move memory aid) I'll going to keep at it for a while. It's not real cardiovascular, but it's fun to learn new techniques, it's definitely a good way to build up some muscle in odd places (lots of work on the wrists, my triceps were aching from all the punching the first class, and both my forearms and thighs are sore today from stick and footwork), I've gained some coordination, and on the off-chance I need to defend myself against a non-gun wielding opponent, it might come in handy.

It's also very informative when we see the good people duel, since it shows just how absurd the fights in movies are. Any one with any skill in Kali would counter and put away 98% of the people I've ever seen in a movie within 2 or 3 moves. Literally, movie character would take a big, slow, telegraphed swipe with their sword, Kali expert would sidestep, slap the opponent's weapon hand down effortlessly, and then strike hard to the head or other vulnerable areas, and that would be that.  True, fights of those type wouldn't make much of a movie, but reality seldom does.

Anyway, more on Kali soon, perhaps Friday after I attend class Thursday night and have more to say and more perspective on the whole thing.

October 1, 2004

Kali is the discipline I'm training in (if once a week mostly for fun can really be considered "training") and it's a Filipino style honed over the centuries. It's performed largely bare-handed, but also includes a lot of work with short sticks, knives, swords, and staves, though it's very adaptable; you can really use anything as an effective weapon, once you know what you're doing. The local master (one of the very few masters anywhere in this discipline) has advanced classes at his home in which he regularly turns out very odd tools. Shovels, rolled up newspapers, garden tools, etc.

What I enjoy most about the art is that it's not all pretentious or regimented. It's the antithesis of those strip mall karate classes where you see a dozen 8 y/o's dressed in their cute little Karate outfits, standing in lines and punching the air while shouting in unison, like very young Tae Bo students who lack music. Kali is also not high impact on your body (unless you get hit, I suppose); it's not jiu jitsu or some other art were you're doing cartwheels and spinning kicks and need padded mats, lots of leaping ability, and knee surgery to compete proficiently.

Kali is all about practicality. You don't wear a special outfit to class, and you don't spend a great deal of time practicing forms, learning how to bow correctly, memorizing foreign names for complicated moves, etc. Your first class you are right in there, learning practical things like how to block and hit, how to keep your balance, move with your correct feet, counter attacks, and more. You get to use weapons immediately also; dulled knives and staves right from the start, and it's fun. There are all sorts of spinning techniques that look like showing off at first, but that you soon find out are essential to the art. You could just hit and hit and hit with your stick from different angles, but if you know how to spin the stick some in between strikes it's a great rhythm breaker, throwing off your opponent, confusing them about the direction from which you are coming, and setting your timing for your next strike.

Almost all of the techniques are learned in twos; the teacher shows you something new, and then everyone pairs up to practice it, taking turns. Thursday night we were working (for part of the class) with a drop punch sort of technique that's hard to describe in words, but which was executed after the basic check/block technique (with which you turn aside/dodge a punch and then counterattack). Basically you move like you're doing a normal punch, but with your fist just a few inches from the target you fall downwards a bit, letting your legs go loose, and use the momentum from that to turn your short little punch into a hammer. It seems absurd, but after we tried it a few times (and I felt the gura hit me with it) I realized how useful it was. Not that that's the first thing I'd do in some hypothetical/mythical street fight, but it's a way to hit someone ten times harder than you could otherwise, in that sort of situation, and it's applicable to many other types of maneuver.  With the punch (which we were all taking turns hitting each other with, pulling them short of course) we then learned to add a sidearmed shove/hit sort of thing that looks like it couldn't bruise fresh bread, but when done properly will shove you several feet sideways. Literally; I "hurfed" and staggered when the gura demonstrated one into my low back, and she wasn't even trying.

The trick of it is to use the momentum you gain by dropping down several inches and put that force/mass into motion with a punch or shove. So it's not just whatever your arm can muster, it's the weight of your entire body dropping six inches as you flex your knees, channeled into your fist. It's incredibly deceptive to watch and to execute; I didn't feel like I was doing anything, and the much more advanced student I was practicing with was taking two steps back from the momentum. (Not that he couldn't have sent me across the room if he'd wanted to, or that I was shoving him as hard as I could; the point is that by doing something seemingly simple a little maneuver was made enormously more effective.)

And no, that little trick isn't the basis of the entire art or anything like that, it's just what we worked on Thursday night. I am not experienced enough with Kali to comment on it at any depth; I can only talk about what I've done personally and how effective it seems to me.

The footwork was another thing we worked on a lot; when the experts move it's just amazing to watch them; they seem to be gliding, hardly moving their feet when they move, and yet they're always behind you, always moving around you faster than you can react, and always coming at you with the correct foot for their strike. The gura will show us something and it looks easy, and then we try it and it's thirty seconds of stubbed toes and missteps until we're like... "Okay, which foot did you step with first?" She doesn't even need to think about it, since after many years of training it's just instinct. Beginning dancers need charts of "left, right, right, left, right" type instructions; experts just go with the flow of the music and their partner, and everything builds on everything else; as we learn simple tricks and techniques and movements we see them included in the more advanced stuff the more experienced students are doing.

But for the footwork on Thursday, we were learning to do these sort of slide steps, keeping our knees bent quite a bit, keeping our weight centered and back on our heels, and keeping our heads still. Watching someone expert at Kali move is amazing, since they really look like they're on wheels, or ice. They just flow and slide, and they're almost silent doing it. No slapping of heels or toes or scratching of feet; it's like they're on cotton and the rest of us are wearing iron boots.  And they're always in the right place, always moving to counter or react before I can even begin to turn. So Gura was teaching us something about that last night, how to walk, how to move, and how it should feel. And when I got just a little bit of it right, it felt so different. Stumbling turned to gliding for just a moment, and I felt light and smooth. It's the same with other techniques; the proper way to swing the stick around (letting centrifugal force almost pull it, so you swing faster with far less effort), or spin it, or whatever, and when you do it right you can really feel it. It moves straighter, faster, and more smoothly.

I harbor no illusions that I could actually turn any of the theoretical combat knowledge and sparring experience into actual street survival skills, at least not yet, but since I'm not in junior high or drunk in the cheap seats at a Raiders' game, I hardly need to worry about getting into any brawls. For now it's fun to learn, challenging, and excellent exercise. Every class I come home with something sore, and as another guy in the class said, "Kali works weird muscles."  Thursday night with all of the footwork it was the thighs; Malaya was limping out to the car afterwards, and she does squats and presses and elliptical and such at the gym every day. Other times I've come home with the muscles on the outside of my shoulders so sore I could hardly lift them, or the backs of my arms, or my knees. Tonight Malaya and me both have bandaids on the inside of our right thumbs where we got healthy blisters from all of the stick work we were doing.  It's surprising just how many muscles you use doing punching, or blocking, or stick work that are different from the ones you develop in a normal workout.

I'm enjoying the class though, and it's not too expensive (I'd go more often if I felt like I could afford it.) and I learn a lot every time, so I'm glad we're doing it. Malaya is even more into it than I am, and goes to 2 or 3 classes a week, and yes, it's useful to have each other to practice with, spar with, remind each other of proper footwork and technique, and so on. I'd recommend Kali to anyone who thinks it sounds interesting, but it's not very well-known around the country or world and I have no idea where you could get qualified training in it other than in the Bay Area, so just look into some other martial art you think you might enjoy. As long as they don't remind you of the Cobra Kai or force new students to do a bunch of Kill Bill style "punch your fists to a bloody pulp" bullshit they're probably pretty okay. I just wish I'd started something ten years ago, since I'd be expert in at least one form, and could easily apply that to the Kali work I'm doing now.

October 6, 2004

After Kali class on Tuesday night, Malaya and me were talking to the teacher (AKA Gura) and Malaya asked why there weren't more women there lately. Men mostly work on bare hand and stick stuff, while women do bare hand and knives. Not exclusively of course, everyone learns everything eventually, but when there are sufficient students to break us up into different tasks, that's usually how it goes. And since there haven't been many other women at class for the past month, Malaya's been missing out on knife play.

Classes are very small in the first place; 4-8 or so usually with 6 (including Malaya and me) on Tuesday night, plus the instructor. Even numbers are better, since then everyone gets a partner for the sparring and learning process, since most everything is learned one on one, taking turns giving and receiving the technique. You've got to feel what it's like to have it done to you to do it to others, and when you and another student are learning it at the same time, you learn from each other as well as the teacher.

Anyway, while we were talking after class, the gura (female teacher) told us that she doesn't get many female students who stick with it. Most students don't stick with it at all in the first place, and women less than men. I don't know how the retention % compares to that of other forms of martial arts, but the gura's theory is that since Kali is such a deadly serious form, with killing techniques being taught right from the start and a learning curve of many years (at least five years to consider being expert enough to graduate to guru quality yourself, which just means that you might be competent to teach classes) that it scares off people who aren't serious about learning the form, and about planning for their lives in general.

She told us that few men under the age of 30ish and few women without children stick with it. I didn't see any logical connection between those groups, but in her experience teaching for many years, most women aren't comfortable with the techniques; that the stuff we're learning is too potentially deadly, and obviously so. She said she'd talked to female experts in other forms, women who had been doing Karate or whatever for a decade or more, who saw her do a demonstration with a live (sharp) sword and were freaked out. They were like, "But that's dangerous! You could kill someone!" and gura was like, "Well duh. What do you think a spinning roundhouse kick to the jaw would do? Or an eye gouge?" Not that she said it in quite those words, but it was like the women who were big on other forms never really considered what all that punching and kicking they were working at was for, ultimately. Whereas in Kali, some of the first lessons you learn with knives are diverting an attack with your empty hand, then pushing it aside with your knife hand, slicing your blade along their arm the whole way, and then finishing them with a stab to the throat.

Tuesday night in class we were all working with short sticks, and learning to block with one hand in the middle of the stick, redirecting it sort of like shooting a pool cue. I can't describe the whole thing in words and you don't care anyway, but the point was to block that way and then slide behind them and use your staff for a choking device. It was quite cool, all the different arm placements, the footwork required, the potential counters and counters to counters, throws possible from that position, pressure points on the neck and throat, etc.

Imagine you're holding your stick in your right hand, making a fist, and the other end of your stick is tucked into the crook of your left elbow. Almost like playing a violin with a very long bow. Now your left arm is bent upwards, and you use that hand to wrap around their head, neck, side of their face... whatever, in order to move their head to the proper angle to crush their windpipe, or hit a pressure point and drop them into submission. Techniques include finding the correct pressure points quickly, finding ones that you can't hit without rolling the stick down at an angle, cocking the stick under their jaw to turn their heads and break the neck, and more.  We're working on this with other people, and using hard wooden sticks (Malaya and me just got a lovely pair of dark mahogany sticks that are about as hard as stone.) and yes, you could easily severely injure someone practicing like that, and yes, you could very easily kill a person that way, or at least knock them unconscious, or put them on the ground helplessly gasping for breath.  Then kill or cripple them in any number of ways.

To me, that's what makes it worth doing. Not that I'm going to murder people with the technique, but that it's immediately and obviously applicable to real life combat, and it's very effective. And according to gura, that's what turns off lots of other people to it.

Her theory is that people who are still young or haven't really given much thought to what they want to do with their lives don't like that. They have to think about life and death and how easily they could die or kill, and it unsettles them.

Young men, teens and twenties, usually think they're immortal and nothing could go wrong too badly. That's why they drive 120MPH on the freeway, binge drink, get into stupid fights, and engage in all the other reckless behaviors men are so well-known for. You'd think those habits would make Kali attractive to young guys, but they apparently lack the discipline to stick with it long enough to get any good. Also, it's hard for a lot of people, young men especially, to admit they aren't good at something. And when you're in a class with half a dozen other people all of whom could cripple you without even really trying, especially when they're older, or not in very good shape, or women, or whatever, it's humbling, and a lot of young men don't have a strong enough ego to take that. Apparently.

As for women not sticking with it, I don't have as much insight into their condition, but as gura said and Malaya agreed, most women don't have that old cliché, the killer instinct. The sort of potentially deadly thing we were working on Tuesday night is a prime example, as gura said lots of women just aren't comfortable with that sort of power. To learn something that they could use not just to fight back or escape an attacker, but to go on the offensive with and even kill with, unsettles them. And, oddly enough, women with children are much more able to deal with it, probably because their protective she-bear instincts come to life once they've got young to protect. Like they can't imagine fighting or killing for themselves, but they can do it for their children.  Men who have families are turned onto Kali more as well, since while they might have always had the aggressive impulses, they've now got a family to protect, to stay alive to provide for, and they're accustomed to making hard choices, sacrificing immediate pleasure for long term improvement, and other such adult issues.

Gura also said that there is often a drop off after two years or so, when people sort of plateau in their skills and start to get tired of the regular practice, when advancing further in ability is obviously going to take them years more. I dunno if I'll have that problem, and I'm enjoying Kali so far, but feel free to check back in 23 months to see if I'm still at it.

December 3, 2004

Class was fun Thursday night; we worked with the stick for a time, mostly to refresh our memories on the proper form and posture for the 12-strike, but also so the one new student (a young woman in her third class) could learn it. I don't really know how forms and move sequences are taught and used in other forms of martial arts, but in our variety of Kali it's very free form, as most things are. We have a thing called "12-strike" but it's mostly to give us a shorthand for the basic types of attack. You need to memorize the hits, but that's easily accomplished in half an hour or so. The sequence isn't for combat either, at least not in that sequence; it's mostly meant to give us a shorthand nomenclature for our sparring and the other things we learn.

For example, we'll be learning some new move or combo, and the Gura can just say, "Do a 4, and then an 8." And it's not that we have to do those moves with exacting precision, it's that we hear 3 and 8 and know what to do quickly and easily, rather than her needing to say, "Swing overhand and forwards, sort of down in a slashing motion, and then do a stab towards the throat, but driving up from the chin." Or when we do numerado, (An exercise in which one student walks behind another student, usually with one hand on the leading student's back, and the one in front throws attacks that the one behind counters and then counter attacks against.) Gura can say, "Just throw 3s and 4s." for instance, to limit the attack style for those of us still on the lower slopes of the learning curve.

That background info is pretty irrelevant to the following point, so forget it if you didn't care in the first place. Anyway, what we did tonight was hold a knife (or whatever facsimile thereof we could find) in our left hands while we held the sticks in our right, and we learned the proper stabbing position for the left hand after the right hand strike with the stick. It was largely ceremonial, in that we did exaggerated swings and poses just to learn the proper movements, but as with most everything in Kali, you can immediately see how you'd modify it in actual combat, making things faster, shorter, more deadly, etc.

The fun stuff was learning to do the usual numerado style blocking and countering with knife/stick, rather than just one stick as usual. It's not a big change; we just block the attack with an "X" shape of the two weapons, rather than taking it all against the one stick. The fun is that your counter begins instantly, since you cut their wrist or forearm or hand as you block and begin to counter, and then follow with several alternating strikes of stick and knife, depending on the range, your speed, their style of attack, etc.

As we got the hang of that, more complexity was added with the introduction of long range stuff, where instead of walking right behind as in the usual numerado, the person behind would stay a couple of strides back and counter the strikes by dodging and flicking the stick aside, and then attacking with it cleared out of the way. This part is almost impossible to describe with words while a 5 second video clip would show it very clearly, but the person following and awaiting the attack does what we call sinawali, a double-weapon thing where you keep moving your arms around each other in a figure-8 motion. They constantly overlap and cross, and it looks boggling to the naked eye as the two sticks seem to swim through the same space constantly, but it's actually just a simple little technique to keep your weapons moving and keep ready to attack or defend instantly. Learning to move from the sinawali to blocking or scooping an attack aside without pause, and then flowing instantly into more sinawali or a counter attack, is the tricky part. But it looks oh-so-cool when it's done well, or even done adequately.

I'd show you, but I lack a video camera. I'm angling for an affordable digital one for Xmas though, and if I get one I'll start posting some Kali movies, since Malaya wants to shoot some of the master and others of our class just for fun.

It was a good class, even though I lack the speed and coordination to flow from sinawali to defend quickly enough to stay alive, and even though I got smacked by hard wooden sticks on the knuckles and arms quite a few times tonight. Another guy got poked, hard, by a stick right below his eye and had an instant welt that looked like a gigantic pimple, so I guess I can't really complain.  At least not very successfully.

December 8, 2004

Kali class was Tuesday night, and as usual I'm moved to speak of it in a fashion that almost no one reading this will gain any benefit from, since it's so difficult to describe the physical movements we engage in.  That being said, it's definitely getting more interesting as we learn more stuff. Initially we learned a few basic blocks and counters, against stick and open hand. (Not that "open hand" means we only slap each other or something; it's just the term for any sort of unarmed combat, of which there are many styles in the school of Kali I am training in.)  We still use those blocks and counters, though we've since learned many more counter attacks. There are a near-infinite number of them, given how many different types of attacks we have available. Of more interest to me though, are the new types of blocking we're now learning.

It's not exactly accurate to call it blocking, since it's more a combination of blocking, countering, and avoiding, but the way they are combined is just fascinating. The most basic strike with a stick is a sort of overhand, cross body swing, as if you were trying to hit someone on the left ear or temple, and cut down through their body to their opposite hip. That's the number 1 strike, in the 12-strike sequence we learn. The basic counter to that is to stand and face the attacker, then lean to your left while sidestepping slightly, and sweeping your left hand up so you push their hand or elbow (Don't reach for the stick, it's moving too quickly, and in some cases the stick might be a sword of a knife, which you obviously wouldn't want to grasp bare-handed.), stepping past them in the process. We also hook our stick over their arm, or smack their arm or hand as they swing down, and naturally follow that with a swing down into the back of their knee or calf as we pass them. There are hundreds of more moves possible at that point, but that's just the most basic thing; duck to the left and use one hand and/or the stick to guide their strike past you.

At first this seems very difficult; like you can't possibly get out of the way or get your hand up there fast enough to slap at their arm, even at the slow speed the attacker moves while you are learning. Over the weeks and months though, as you practice this more often, you learn to recognize the way their body moves, and your own avoidance movement becomes second nature, and it becomes rather easy to avoid a strike like that, even when you don't know what type of strike they're going to throw, or how fast they're going to throw it.

You'll note that this is exactly opposite of how characters in movie fights counter attacks, where it's usually a strength vs. strength move, as they swing their own sword vigorously at the attackers, resulting in a satisfying clash of steel high overhead, and neither combatant doing anything other than tiring out their sword arm. As I've written about in the past, movie fights have very little to do with what you should be doing in real life fights.

With that basic dodge and counter well-learned, tonight we practiced a new one. When facing the same down-swinging attack the other counter is to step right, not left, and swing your stick in a fast arc, up from the right and across in front of your face, so you deflect and redirect their stick downwards to your left. You do that while sidestepping to the right, and then you keep going further back and to the right, keeping your down arc swing going so you can bring it back up and smash them in the back (or the back of the head, or the neck, or the calf, etc) faster than they can react. As I warned, this is probably impossible to follow from words, and I have yet to bother with taking photos or finding diagrams online or making movies of it. But rest assured, it's effective and very cool looking.

As usual, the problem with having our style of Kali combat in a movie would be that every fight ended so quickly. There are a few weapon on weapon strikes, but it's not sword fencing; there's way too much body movement, and almost every counter is designed to avoid the first strike and deal a crushing return before the opponent knows he's even in trouble. The only way I can see it working well in a movie (working for non-martial artists who wouldn't appreciate the subtleties of a longer spar session that's not all full of flashy and impractical moves) would be for one Kali expert character to take on a room full of enemies and dispatch them all in sequence, or perhaps for two Kali experts to fight wearing some sort of armor that would let them keep functioning while still successfully executing their normal moves. (Of course any Kali expert would modify their technique if the opponent's armor was keeping them from scoring killing blows, but that's another issue.)

While the moves and new techniques are all cool, I am having problems with something else in Kali... I keep getting dizzy. I've always been susceptible to dizziness, since I was a little kid. I could never go on any tire swing that spun around, I can't take teacup type rides at carnivals, and I can't go on those big spinning rooms that flatten you to the wall with centrifugal force. Oddly, I don't get motion sickness very often, and I love almost every type of roller coaster, love falling, love heights, etc. I just can't spin around without getting dizzy quickly, and if I get really dizzy I feel like shit for hours. It's actually good for me to get so fucked up that I have to puke, since then I tend to feel better pretty soon.

Unfortunately, a lot of our sparring and learning techniques in Kali involve moving in circles, one way or the other, and quickly. Not that we ever spin around like ballet dancers or anything, but there are a lot of basic strike and counter exercises that involve the two participants going round and round, or following each other while the one in front whirls and throws attacks that must be dodged, etc. A great deal of our art involves movement, since it's effective and since many other types of martial arts are very static and only fight head on or punch in rows. Obviously enough, if your opponent can only fight in a straight line, and you're constantly circling and dodging behind him, you're going to put him at an immediate disadvantage.

I'd be fine (in terms of getting dizzy) in a real fight, since it would be over quickly, and the circling wouldn't go in the same direction more than three or four times. And I'm fine in class when we vary our attacks and turn left, then right, then left, etc. But since quite a few of our exercises have us going in circles (walking around another person backwards on Tuesday night, while executing a circular arm swinging attack and blocking their counters), I'm trying to learn to deal with it without getting dizzy.

It's ironic, but apparently my life-long 20/20 vision is a hindrance. Most adults have to wear glasses or contacts, and as such are somewhat used to things being a blur, at least out of the corner of their eyes. This helps them not be dizzied by the turning we do in Kali, or so the glasses-wearing, non-dizzy students in my class tell me. I am not used to things being blurry, so I have to try to use focusing tricks to not get dizzy. In some exercises I look past my opponent and focus on the far wall, or look only at their eyes, or whatever. The point there is to use my peripheral vision to see their attack, and that is an actual training exercise we use, since oddly enough, it's often easier to react quickly to their attack if you don't concentrate entirely on it. If you watch them for movement clues you tend to focus too much on their arm or back or whatever, rather than seeing the way their entire body is moving. It's hard to believe at first, but it really does work.

Anyway, I have gotten somewhat better at not getting dizzy in slower turning sequences, but the walking backwards in a circle while attacking thing we did Tuesday night wiped me out. I resisted being dizzy for a while, focusing entirely on the neck of the guy I was working with, and that kept me from feeling dizzy until gura said my time was up and sent in the next person; at which point I nearly fell over trying to stand still. Literally, I had to hold onto a pillar to keep upright, and then barely made it into a seat and had to hang on to one of the arm rests to keep from falling right over to the side.

I didn't puke or anything, and felt better quickly once I cooled down and got some water, but I never felt entirely right again during class, and wasn't real disappointed that we ended up getting a mini-lecture for the last 20 minutes of class, rather than going back into active sparring. I was a bit worried about getting dizzy on the drive home, at night, in the rain, but I felt okay for that and I kept down the nachos super supreme dinner I fixed us when we got home. But I still feel a bit of the after effects of being dizzy, even though it's now more than 8 hours since class, and I doubt I'll be over it entirely until I sleep. I do wonder how I'd feel if I got up and spun around a couple of times, or did some fast moving Kali; would I shake it off and go back to normal, or would I pick up the dizziness right where I left off earlier, and become nauseated immediately? I'm not curious enough to actually try it, mind you.

The annoying thing is that I felt I was really doing well against the dizziness in class. I lasted much longer than usual, and though I was managing something without growing dizzy that would have usually put me on the floor. And then I stopped turning, and the world kept right on spinning around anyway. I've never felt the dizziness hangover for this long after Kali before, since I've always stopped doing what I was doing before I got as dizzy as I did tonight. So should I push right up into being dizzy every time in the future and hope I get used to it? Or should I always stop short of getting dizzy so I won't risk feeling like shit all evening afterwards?

Remind me to do some online reading on dizziness tomorrow; there have to be sites with info about it and tips on how to fight through it.

(Update, June 2006: I eventually got over most of my dizziness issues in Kali by improving my posture. Sometime in 2005 another student pointed out to me that I often held my head at an angle, and once I managed to straighten up, much of the dizziness went away. I also learned, over time, to move more smoothly and to glide, rather than bouncing up and down when I walked, circled, fought, and that helped a lot as well.)

December 13, 2004

Kali BBQ Party.

There wasn't any room indoors for any Kali, but the lot next door is narrow, vacant, lumpy, and covered in very thick green grass. Grass that we had trampled down quite a bit an hour after we finished eating, when everyone trooped over next door and got out Kali sticks and started fooling around/sparring. Several people had brought long staves, 7 or 8 feet long and made from bamboo, and I enjoyed playing with those since I haven't gotten to use them yet in class. We don't really have a large enough space for such long weapons anyway, at least not with more than one person using it at once, but outdoors in the lot it was on.

No one was in too serious a sparring mood, but with eight or nine people standing around with various sticks, double sticks, and staves, there was a fair amount of hitting and swinging, especially since Gura was there to give some advice and encouragement. The comic relief/danger was provided by the host's 3 y/o son, who loves Kali, or at least the "hitting with sticks" part of it, and spent 45 minutes racing around the grassy lot, swinging his stick at anyone else who held a stick. It was amusing when he had a short stick, and somewhat hazardous when he had a staff twice as long as him. Not so dangerous to the person he was swinging at, since he was mostly aiming for your stick and just having fun. No, the danger was to the people standing behind him, since he had no concept of where the end of the stick was when he wasn't hitting someone in front of him with it, and he'd hit your stick twice, shout in glee, and whirl around to go after someone else, sending the bamboo tip slicing through the air at your head as he ran off.  No one lost an eye, but there were some shoulder strikes and lots of blocks from behind.

Oddly enough, it was useful practice for taking on a staff wielded by an actual student, since as I found out with some sparring, those are goddamned hard to judge.  Forget that Robin Hood style "hold the stick and hit with alternating ends" bullshit you see in movies. Real stick technique is downright scary, as the wielder spins it around, slides his hands up and down the length, and can attack with any sort of swing, poke, stab, or overhead smash at any time and any range from two feet to eight feet.

I've tried and failed to describe technique in the past, but take a broomstick, and hold it like a pool cue. You then use your hands, spacing or clustering them to control the length of the stick that you're poking out to hit with. So you can poke it in any direction, very quickly, while guiding it with your left hand. Or you can hold the end and swing. Or you can spin it around and hit behind you, or to the side, and it's very difficult to tell if it's coming in high or low. Much harder to judge than a short stick, or even double stick.

If you don't have a staff of your own, you can go against a staff with one stick, but that's not recommended since you're just giving up way too much range and versatility in style. What you can do pretty well is to use two sticks, but you've got to be quick and good. I tried, and while I was neither quick enough nor good enough, I had some fun and learned a lot; mostly about my own inadequacies. The key with double stick against a staff is to block or sweep their attack aside, and get in close. The staff has the range, but you've got two things to hit with and yours are quicker in close. The problem is that the staff can hit with both ends, and it moves very quickly and with more force than you can easily turn aside with just a stick in your hand. Plus it's so quick to hit with one and of the staff and then switch to hit with the other than you have to move very quickly to get in close after dodging or parrying a blow. I couldn't do it properly, but I could get a hint of how I needed to be moving, and I had some fun trying. And I really want my own long stick now, since they were a lot of fun to play around with, and the advanced students who had been practicing with them on their own looked awesome using them.

December 15, 2004

In other news, I did Tuesday as I do most every Tuesday and Thursday night; I went to my usual martial arts class. I didn't know what class would be like, since when I got there at around 6:55 I was the only one there. Well, the only one but Gura, who was looking through a coffee table book of political cartoons from the early 1900s. Class is supposed to start at 7, though it usually starts around 7;15, when everyone straggles in and gets stretched out a bit and people stop talking. Anyway, I left later than usual, stopped to buy a birthday card on the way to class, and got there 5 minutes early, thanks to very light traffic.  So when I saw that no one else was there, my first comment to Gura was, "Tis the season to slack off on Kali class?" She agreed and we sorta laughed as my semi-joke required, and then by 7:03 there were six more students there, turning my potential private session into a slightly-larger than usual class.

It was a fun one though. We worked on empty hand vs. stick; taking turns in our usual pairs. The person with the stick would do a move, mostly simple single-strikes, and the other person would dodge/counter it barehanded. It was mostly an exercise to give us practice dodging and getting into position, since we spent more time working on that than working on the actual way we'd hit them in that given situation.  Plus the person with the stick was swinging far slower than they would in real life, and only doing a few simple moves, etc. As always, we did each exercise for 5 or 10 minutes, taking turns using the stick, and then Gura would stop us while she showed us the next step; doing the technique against a different move, going faster with it, adding a better counter to the initial technique, etc. It's all very improvisational, and quite often she'll see what all the pairs are doing, see one pair doing something interesting, and then have the whole class watch them and set us all to doing whatever that pair was doing on their own. Usually it's when one person starts modifying the initial move, the other person asks how to counter that, she works something out, and then everyone practices that while throwing in more variety and modifications. Which is what I really like about our style of Kali; it's not all just using some ancient forms within the rigid guidelines of some style manual.

Anyway, we did at least half a dozen basic things, worked up to some intermediate stuff, and then to close class we all took a turn going against multiple attackers. At first we went against two; and it was of course friendly sparring, and the attackers were just doing the basic "1 strike" which is a downward slash from the right shoulder across the body. Countering is quite simple when you know what they're going to throw in the first place, which was the whole point, since the difficulty of double attackers is dealing with one while not letting the other hit you at the same time. I'd never done it before in class, and I had a lot of fun with it, though I was of course killed half a dozen times during my session.  I did better than some of the other guys and girl did though, and it was fascinating to try it and see how other people did it.

Oddly enough, the key to dealing with two attackers is to keep close to one of them. We were of course not killing each other, so the exercise involved countering the first one, slipping behind him and dealing a few (simulated) hits, then pushing him off while moving to counter the next attacker. The best way to do it was to get in your hits, but not shove them away too soon, since once you shoved them they would just turn around and come right back, and then you had two people trying to hit you at once. Much better was to counter, strike, and push them at the other attacker, or keep them between you and the other attacker, or push them aside just as you moved to counter the other guy.

The styles of the students really showed up in it too. For instance, one very tall and muscular guy who has been in the class for over a year tends to retreat a lot; he's long and lean and slides well, and likes to get space and move in and out. That style usually serves him well in 1 on 1 sparring, but was not good in 2 on 1, since he would deal with one guy and then fall back, and as the first guy turned around and came back, it was always 2 on 1 again. He eventually realized the problem, with some tips from Gura, and started staying closer to the first guy until the 2nd came in.

I did pretty well at it, but my style tendency showed up since I tend to move quickly, using my better than average foot speed and agility. Which was fine, but I ended up dodging around too much rather than countering and killing, and got very tired as I scooted around the room, and since I do 35 minutes at high speed on the cross country course on the elliptical machine 5 or 6 times a week, and my resting pulse is the low 50s, trust me when I say that I don't get tired very easily, under normal circumstances. I also kept moving away from the first guy, but away from the second as well, so even while I wasn't really retreating, I'd end up in a corner or trying to use one of the columns in the room for a partial shield, rather than just going at the 2nd attacker while the first one was still recovering from my counter attack.

The trick of it was to deal with one, and push him away so that the 2nd came at you from a good angle (for you). Then you dealt with him in a way that set you up to deal with the 1st guy again, and so on. When done properly, so you got them coming at a nice alternating rhythm, it wasn't any different than sparring with a single guy who was able to come back at you  with supernatural speed. It was a lot of fun to do and to watch too, almost movie-like, but before you think we're good, remember that all the attacks were a simple 1-strike, so we all knew how they were going to swing at us, and that the attackers were keeping very under control so that no one accidentally got crocked in the head with a 2.5 foot length of rock-hard bamboo.

As for Thursday's class... I have no idea what we'll do. Which is part of the fun for me; we do something totally different every time out, and even when we return to remedial stuff so the newer students (I've been going for nearly 3 months now and there are now 2 regular students newer than me, so I'm no longer the weakest link, every class.) can learn and keep up, we always work it so that there's something new for everyone, even in the seemingly most remedial stuff.

One interesting thing Tuesday was that we had a brand new student who had only come once before. I'll call him John, just since every guy is named John. John's first class was over a month ago, since he'd been traveling and too busy to come to class since then. That first night though, back in November, I was paired up with him most of the time, and since he was a near black belt in Kenpo (as I recall) I hardly felt like I was any better than him at Kali. Oh, I knew more about the proper form and such, but he'd spent years throwing and dodging punches in his other style, and I'd been doing that sort of thing in Kali for less than two months, so if there'd been an actual fight, he would have creamed me.

Since that first class of his though, I've gone twice a week and learned much, and on Tuesday night I felt years ahead of him. He didn't have good stick form, he was slow with his hands, he didn't have the natural movements or muscle memory for countering a stick strike, and so on. I'm not saying he sucked; he was actually pretty good for his second Kali class ever, since most other forms of martial arts are of very little use when you start doing the type of Kali we do. But I felt really fast on Tuesday, and maybe he was feeling slower than usual, but whatever the case, I felt so much more confident and capable than I did the first time I worked with him, and I think that's 95% about me and my improvements in Kali since I started going once a week in mid-September and increased that to twice a week in late October.

January 19, 2005

I'm trying to get out of the habit of talking about Kali every single Wednesday and Friday blog, but it's hard, being as I'm always writing these Tuesday and Thursday nights, hours after getting home from... Kali class. I'll still mention interesting things, but my usual technique seems to be saying that it's impossible to describe something without photos/to people who aren't practicing Kali themselves... before I try to do just that for about 10 paragraphs.

Class Tuesday night was a tough one, mostly since we were doing something that seemed very easy, but was actually quite difficult. What we were doing is called "walking the circle" which is a generic term for moving around a stationary target and hitting it (or throwing attacks that stop just short) with a variety of maneuvers. High hits, low hits, with stick or bare hand or kicks or other weapons, etc. None of the attacks are that complicated; it's not like we're doing backflips with a spin kick in the middle. What's hard is working the attacks into your movement around in a circle, and mixing in kicks, spins, direction changes with hits in the middle of them, etc. I watch the advanced students and the Gura and see how they're doing it, and I know how to do everything they're doing -- but when I try to coordinate those moves into my own time spent walking the circle, it's damned difficult. Sort of like how I can juggle, and run upstairs backwards, and yodel... but if I tried to do them all at once I'd likely end up on my back with balls bouncing down past me while the echoes of my agonized Swiss-flavored words came echoing back to me.

The consequences of disastrous failure at walking the circle are far less dramatic than they were in my absurd hypothetical, but I did spend a good 5 minutes pacing around the metal pillar in the center of the room while the teacher and four other students watched me repeatedly fail to transition from the simple walking and hitting in rhythm to a quick spin and hit in the other direction.  It sounds easy and it looked easy, but for the longest time I simply could not coordinate my steps and arm movements and stick hits. I finally realized that I was about a quarter step slow on my stick hit, and that I needed to hit with the stick just before my right foot came down, so that I could then pivot on that foot and take two quick steps backwards, while still moving around the pole, and bring the stick all the way around to hit low just as I rocked backwards on the second step.

As always, this description is useless without a video or photos, so don't sweat it, but it was ridiculously-frustrating at the time. And of course the minute I got home and talked to Malaya about it and showed her... I could do it perfectly and had no idea why it had been hard in the first place.  Grrr! 

February 2, 2005

Kali class this week is a bit different, since we're doing unconventional weapons. Last week the topic came up at some point while we were all shooting the shit, and Gura asked us to bring in anything. Literally, whatever we wanted to bring in to fight with, and she'd show us how best to use it for a weapon.

Tuesday's selection wasn't that fascinating, since with 7 people there we had like 5 belts, two flashlights, a credit card, and a couple of towels. I'm trying to think of something more interesting and unique for Thursday's class, but haven't had any luck yet. I want to keep it reasonable, I mean what am I likely to have on me or handy when/if I ever need to use it to defend myself in a fight? That rules out silly stuff like desk chairs and cat bowls and frying pans, though I guess I could imagine someone attacking me in a CostCo someday (likely some fat fuck I crashed my cart into when I lost patience waiting for him waddle over for a free sample of a brownie) and in that case I could use pretty much anything I wanted to. Providing it came in a gargantuan family pack, that is.

Anyway, belts were the most popular item, and they're pretty damn useful, as it turns out. Obviously, anyone can imagine using one like a lash and swinging it around to try and hit the other person. If you don't think about it you'd probably jut throw it at the opponent and be helpless. If you think a bit you might take wild swings with it and scare them away or even hit them, but you'd likely swing through and miss and hit yourself in the leg, or have the belt wrap around your back after one swipe. What we did was swing it in a figure-8 style, since that gives you better speed and lets you keep swinging it indefinitely. That was just common sense for us though, since that's how we swing sticks and other things all the time.

The more advanced stuff with a belt was to use it to counter punches or someone using a knife to try and stab you.  A knife is sharp and dangerous, but a belt has much greater reach and you can swing it much more quickly than they can punch with their arm, or stab with a knife. In that case you just keep your distance, keep moving around, and when they come in you dodge to the side and lash their hand or arm; a good hit with the buckle is just about guaranteed to make them drop their weapon.

For more advanced stuff we shortened up the slack in the belt and used it to counter punches and stabs. Just make a quick whipping motion over the incoming wrist, then immediately sling it up into their face. We also did cool Jackie Chan type things where we'd catch the incoming wrist and twist the belt and turn the hand backwards, or hit the arm coming in and immediately slipped the belt around the neck for a choke hold/neck break, etc. None of it was as good as quality open hand or stick or knife work, but it was fun for a change and it helped us to think about how we could apply the techniques we already know to new types of weapons.

The scary part of it was that we were using two hands and a belt to tie up our opponent's hand and knife. Which was fine, but since that meant we had no free hands and they had one, it was necessarily a very temporary technique. Basically we had about 1 second after surprising them with a counter to their stab in which to press our advantage, since after that time they were going to recover and start punching, or kicking, or biting, or switch knife hands, etc. We all got good at ensnaring the incoming attack, but it was the "what do I do now" moment after that that tripped many of us up.

In practice, I'd likely run from someone with a knife, even if I were armed with a belt. If running wasn't an option I'd use the belt for a lashing weapon and take advantage of my greater reach, and if they managed to come at me and I had to tie them up, I'd go for one of the dozens of ankle-breaking kicks we know, and hope to cripple them, or at least slow them down enough that then I could run.  Trying up their arm, stunning them with a punch/elbow, and slipping behind them with a choking knife grip was fine for the Gura with her supernatural speed and technique, but all I could think was that the guy had a knife in one hand and that I was standing right behind him, in each reach if he stabbed over his shoulder or head. And, as Yoda said, that is why I fail.

Fortunately, I've got Thursday to practice it some more.

February 18, 2005

Kali class was a lot of fun this week. On Tuesday we worked on lots of open hand with punching. Parry check, which is where you counter the incoming punch by deflecting it with your hands and dodging with your head, and also various other punching and defending exercises.  There was a lot of "how to punch correctly" stuff worked in also, and I definitely need to work on that; my lefts are sloppy and wide and not as powerful as they should be.

Thursday we started off with half an hour of pretty intense numerado, which is a sort of stick sparring, where one person follows the other and reacts to the various attacks they make when they spin around and make them. We do it all the time, and it's easy to learn the proper forms and footwork to counter... but can you do it quickly, when the person you're following can throw any sort of attack; high, low, upper cut, stab at any direction, etc?  Usually I'm okay at it, but yesterday I was the best I've ever been; making very few mistakes, moving quickly, dealing nice okay counter hits, etc.

After everyone had a round of numerado (following the most senior student in class, who is very good at leading numerado) we switched to parry check again, and worked more on good punching form. This time we took it further though, and did some light sparring in pairs, before everyone got a go sparring with the lead student, barehanded this time. It was mostly us punching (pulling them, and going slightly open fist just in case) and him blocking, dodging, slapping us in the head, moving, etc, but it was fun and good practice. He's a big guy, muscular, and very quick on his feet with great reach, so if we'd actually been hitting there is no doubt we would all have been dead while his injuries were limited to bruised fists. But for the purposes of the exercise he was mostly defending, with just enough slapping and pushing and such to keep us honest.

I am good at the quick low kicks, and got him with half a dozen of those, but I never landed even one decent punch (though I pulled a few that might have connected) and he pushed me in the head numerous times, and hit me pretty good in the mouth once, when I lurched into it. Lucky he was pulling it and didn't go with a hard fist, or I'd have been bleeding for a while. It's pretty sad to realize that you physically can not hit another person in a relatively small room when he's not even trying to hit you, but the only way we'll learn is to keep trying and following the gura's advice, so it was a good learning experience. I learned that I am not ready for a fist fight with anyone who has some boxing experience, though I pretty much knew that already. I could perhaps survive by keeping on my toes and breaking his ankle with defensive kicks, but that's hardly the glorious victory the crowd would demand.

The interesting thing about class was that Malaya and another relatively new female student were there, and they were both in there punching the best they could, having never really punched before. Of course I hadn't either, not since like 6th grade when I was afraid to fight anyway, but girls aren't naturally boxers. Men are, for the most part, which isn't to say we're any good at it, but we are used to projecting our energy/fists outwards, swinging at things, moving in that way, etc. Women are much more internal, much better at small quick movements, knife slashes at close range, that sort of thing. So for Malaya and the other woman, they were really having to struggle to throw good punches, to extend their arms with them, to jab quickly, etc. But once they got the hang of it, it was quite a show as each woman, neither of them too much over 5 feet tall, went after the lead student, who is about 6'4", very dark skinned with dreadlocks, and probably weighs 220 pounds of which 90% is muscle.

As gura said, that obviously wasn't a fight or fighting style they would have chosen in real life, but since that's how guys naturally fight, they needed to go against it some and move around to see what it's like to face it. Lots of stuff in Kali is based on being hit to learn what it feels like, and this was the same principle. You don't know the strengths and weaknesses of a style until you try it out yourself, at least a little bit. I used to play some Honda and Zangief and Chun Li back in my tournament Street Fighter days for the same reason.

The best part about Malaya and the other woman though, was that they didn't get many hits in, but both of them got frustrated and mad after five minutes of non-success, and started really swinging and just charging after their opponent. I'm talking like blood fury; in both cases the gura had to call it off with shouts of,  "Whoa whoa whoa!  Easy!" and both girls were like, pissed at the end. And breathing hard, and all charged up, etc.

Malaya and me are now all in the mood for punching, and we want to spend some time sparring if it ever stops raining and we're ever home in the daylight, and we want to get the back patio cleared out so we can put the heavy bag back up and beat on it some.  And yes, I felt exactly the same last week, after we did long staff one night, and I was all ready to get some 8' sticks at Home Depot and go to work with those. And I never did. Not yet, at least.

As for next week, there's no telling what we'll get into. That's the beauty of Kali, there's an infinite amount of stuff to work at, and the more I learn the more I see that I need to learn, and the better I get at beginner stuff the more I can see how the intermediate and expert stuff works. Me with 5 months at it can spar with someone whose got 3 years, and while it's somewhat competitive, he's learning and working on things just as I am, even though our ability levels are so far apart.

Lastly, to repeat something I told someone in email, don't take my comments on Kali for much, unless you're able to attend class in the San Francisco area, and can take classes from the master or one of the gurus in the style I'm using. There are lots of other types of Filipino martial arts, some of which call themselves Kali (Escrima is the more common term), but they're not doing the same stuff we're doing.

Lots of the moves would look similar, and they use the same weapons (though in different ways), but the school I'm working in is much modernized over the old forms, and really stresses improvisation and adapting to the style you're facing. We hardly do any rote memorization of moves, we do a lot more footwork and circling and sideways and backwards attacks, things that other types of martial arts and most types of Kali don't do much, if at all. Some types of Escrima are much more the sports martial art, where it's all about competing under their rules structure, where lots of types of hits and kicks aren't allowed. That's not better or worse, it's just different; like learning boxing rather than street fighting, where you're not going to hesitate about hitting below the belt, kicking, hitting with the elbows, etc. You do that if you want to live, you box if you want to play a sport by the rules.

In a larger sense, the individuality of given schools is both a pro and con of martial arts. Every karate, or judo, or tai kwan do, or whatever school will do similar stuff, but they'll all stress slightly different aspects of it, and our style of Kali is much different than the more traditional forms. I think ours is better, for numerous reasons I'm not going to get into here, but that's not to say that you couldn't get a lot of benefit from taking Kali or Escrima somewhere else from some other teacher. I'm just saying that you shouldn't expect to do stuff just the way I'm describing it (hell, we change a great deal from class to class, depending on who's there, the energy level of everyone, etc), and that if you variety and improvisation I talk about so much is what you want, you might be disappointed. And I'm sorry, but I can't recommend any Kali teachers anywhere else on earth, since while there are half a dozen teaching in the Bay Area, no one from our school or style is teaching anywhere else on earth.

If you are interested in a martial art, I'd strongly recommend it; I wish I'd started when I was about 10, even though I'd think most of what I learned over the past 2 decades was bullshit, now that I'm doing this type of Kali. I wouldn't recommend one of the strip mall karate mills, but that would probably be better than nothing. I would recommend that you look around on the Internet in your area, find something that sounds interesting, had reasonable rates, and then go watch a class one time and talk to the instructor and see what you think of the vibe. It's not like a math class; you should be working constantly with the other students, and if you don't like how they do it or don't like how it's taught, don't start taking classes there. I've done almost half a year of Kali and I'm just getting good enough to see how much more there is to learn before I even approach being good at it. My gura has been doing it for more than a decade and she's still learning things all the time. Her tuhan has been doing martial arts for 40 years, Kali for more than 20, and he's progressing and making new breakthroughs and discoveries all the time as well. It's not something you learn in a year, going to class once a week, and if you don't enjoy the form you're doing and the people you're learning it with and the teacher drilling you in it, don't get involved.

March 4, 2005

Tonight we did stick stuff for an hour, practicing a variety of counters to a basic stabbing attack motion. The first was a simply down chop to the stabber's hand, flowing to a strike to the back of the knee, and then a hit to the other side of their other leg, or their head, whichever you preferred. Someday I'll have a video camera and money to pay for bandwidth and will just put up short movies of this sort of crap. Those I could talk about, describing what we're trying to do, what the technical parts are, what could be better about my form, etc. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for confusing words. 

After the stick time we moved to barehand, and worked on some stuff in long arm style. Long arm is what it sounds like; using the arms sort of like sticks, swinging from the shoulder with basically straight elbows. You bend them somewhat, but there aren't any jabs or straight punches in it; all hooks and swings, lots of them overhead and aimed down, sort of like you're turning a huge steering wheel, and the hand on top if coming down as a fist. There's even jumping and turning to punch straight down into the back of a neck, or a stomach, etc. No one's really hitting anyone, which was good for me since I was paired up with a student who has 3 years in Kali, is about half a foot taller than me, very muscular, and very good at punching.

We had a great time sparring though, since we were working on a technique where we kept in constant motion, moving side to side, taking turns hitting and blocking, and when I saw block I mean counter, where we slide to the side, redirect the hit, and return with our own. It's all very flowing and freelance, going inside and out, changing constantly, since what each of us did depended largely upon reacting to the opponent. That's exactly the sort of thing I like best about the Kali we do; that the teacher gives us a few basics of the style we're doing, and then we have to work it out from there on our own.

It's not like, "No Flux, you punch with the right hand then, and he dodges left and counters with a right drilling punch to your neck!"  I can punch left or right, forehand or backhand, and he can counter with either hand, move inside or out, whatever. And based on what he does I throw in a second move to counter that, or target him again, and he does the same thing to me, and on it goes. We went for at least 15 minutes with only a couple of short breaks to change styles, and the whole time we were improvising, working on techniques, perfecting our moves, etc. If my Kali ended suddenly, I could never go to some mall karate class where they stand still and punch at air in some precise form for an hour, or break thin little boards. The speed and sparring and adaptation of Kali is just so much fun.

One other thing I've noticed a few times recently is how scary some of the stick stuff can sound or seem. When we do stick work we're almost always working in pairs. One person attacks, slowly since it's practice, and the other person counters it. A counter always involves a sidestep and some sort of hit to them, usually to the hand or wrist they're holding the stick with, and then another hit or two or three to their back or side. At first you're just trying to learn the body movement and position and such, and you swing very slowly since you don't have any control or precision. There are often drills early on where we just swing at the stick another person is holding, so we get to hit something hard, and then learn to hit it softly, or stop just short of it. At the intermediate and expert levels you swing directly towards another person, stopping just short of hitting them, or touching them with the tip of the stick.

There is progression of course. At first you swing slowly, or stop six inches from them and then reach to touch, since you just don't have control. As you get better you swing faster and stop closer, and eventually the masters are going so fast and stopping so close that to the naked eye they seem to be hitting the target. And since the target is often the face, or head, or hands, or other painful body parts that lack in muscle padding, it looks deadly. And it would be, if their control wasn't so expert that they could stop just short. The master of our school can take a sword and whip it around you with such speed and precision that it's literally amazing. It's like standing with your face an inch from a ceiling fan.

It's quite key that you don't move unexpectedly. People do move sometimes though, and of course accidents do happen, especially to us beginner and intermediate students. No one has been badly injured that I know of, but we've all taken shots to the head, shoulders, hands, shins, etc, and that's part of the training as well. After all, you don't know what it feels like to hit someone if you've never been hit yourself. I'm far from expert at this point, but I can do most of my stick work swinging full speed, like literally as fast as I can move my arm with a 2.5 foot stick in it, and stop it within a few inches of the target. The scary part, which I mentioned before going into all of the intervening explanation, is when the other person moves a bit, or moves their stick.

A few days ago I was working with a friend in class and we were doing a series of hits with the second one aimed towards the back of the leg. The stick she was holding was near the target, and three or four times in the ten minutes we were working on it she moved her stick slightly so that it was maybe 2 or 3 inches from the leg I was aiming for. The scary part was that when she did, my stick hit her stick at full speed, making a huge cracking noise. It sounded, and would have looked to the untrained observer, like I would have shattered her ankle if she hadn't blocked my strike with her stick. In actuality I was stopping just short of hitting her, so I touched her at maybe 10% speed. The scary part to think about is that I was decelerating from 100% to 10% in maybe 4 or 6 inches, and the fact that I was hitting her stick with shattering speed when the stick was just a few inches from her leg really brought that truth home.

It was certainly enough to remind me that during such drills I must remember to stand still and let the other person hit and swing, and not move until I'm sure they've finished their flurry and are standing back to reset for the next move. As for the other person's control and aim, you've just got to hope they know what they're doing and will stay in control. Tonight I was doing a combo where the last hit came from behind my target. In real life we'd aim for the head, but in class we were aiming for the shoulder, for reasons I hope are obvious. I did it fine maybe 30 times, but once, as I brought my wooden stick whistling downwards I grazed the side of her head, before stopping it an inch or so above her shoulder. She had on a bandanna, and I just grazed her, but it made a substantial bang. The sound was actually from my stick snapping the cloth of her bandanna (I guess) but it sounded like I'd just cracked her in the head at coconut-shattering speed, and even though I didn't feel an impact in my hand, I wouldn't have been surprised to turn and see her crumple bonelessly to the floor.

Luckily she was uninjured, and when she knocked the baseball cap off of my head a few minutes later Malaya happily piped up her approval for the revenge. I'm not sure about Malaya being in the class, since she seems to take a little too much pleasure in it whenever anyone else hits me, accidentally or otherwise. Even when she's the hitter. Especially then.

I think it's a heat of the moment thing, since she roots for me during a sparring session; she just enjoys it when my cocky ass gets popped from time to time. Generally speaking though, we're very supportive of each other in class after an exercise, and we nurse each other's wounds after class with back rubs and such. We hardly ever work together in class though, since experience has shown Gura that couples playing together is not such a great idea.  I'd be curious to see how brothers or sisters would work together. Brothers especially, since they generally have a long history of wrestling and beating each other up.  Would that turn the Kali into something too competitive and dangerous? Or would it drive them to really work at it and improve?

I'm sure I'll find out eventually; we get another 1 or 2 regular students every month or so, while other long time people come in more or less frequently.  No brothers or sisters yet, though.  The newest current student (A 20 y/o Chinese woman watched class Thursday, but she's not starting until next week.) is a 14 y/o boy who looks older and was driven to seek out a Kali class after loving the style of fighting he saw in The Bourne Identity. I've probably mentioned it before, but Matt Damon trained in Kali for those films, and while the moves he uses aren't really classic Kali, there is an obvious influence, mostly in the lateral movement and hitting quickly from behind after dodging a punch. If you saw The Bourne Supremacy you may remember when he was fighting the German guy who was the last other Treadstone agent? In that fight Damon rolls up a magazine and uses it as a stick-like weapon. That's straight from Kali, both as a training thing as a sort of non-deadly short stick, but it's also serious; you can really batter someone in very painful fashion with a rolled up magazine or newspaper. Our master runs workshops with rolled up newspapers as weapons from time to time, and trust me, they hurt.

March 9, 2005

Kali class was tough in that I ended up sore and well-aware of my limitations in stationary hand to hand combat. We basically just did empty hand parry/check for 2 hours, and I was paired with the biggest, and probably best-punching student in the class. That's good, since I can and did learn a great deal from him, but it's damn tiring, mentally as well as physically. He's bigger than me, he's stronger, he's faster, and he's got 2 years more Kali than me. Fortunately he's also very nice and helpful and has great control over his fists, or I'd be sitting here with several fewer teeth than I currently boast.

I'm pretty good against right hand attacks now, thanks to my Kali practice, but I still suck against the left hand, though I improved a great deal tonight, just through sticking with it no matter how many times I was too slow to parry, or slow to dodge, and would have been whacked if my partner hadn't stopped his fist short of my face.  I would say that it was humbling, except that I had no expectation of doing well against him, so in that light I actually did pretty well. True, I was having trouble dealing with a lot of punches that were being thrown at maybe 1/3 or 1/2 real speed, but a month or two ago I'd have been hit far more times than I was tonight. We takes progress where we can find it, when it comes to open hand close range combat, which is definitely not my specialty in Kali.

It wasn't exactly "fun" but it was instructive, and an excellent work out. My shirt and cap were completely soaked with sweat by the end, and that was with very little footwork; all arms and body leaning and such. My only sorta injury was a painful dent on the back of my left hand, basically where I would deliver a karate chop. I got it blocking a hard left cross that I didn't lean well out of the way of. That was my only injury until I cooled down, at least. When I got home, parked, and started to hobble across the street, I almost couldn't walk, my right hip and lower back were so sore. Hours later though, after a hot shower, two Advil, and some back rubbing from Malaya (who did not go to class, and thus did not need any pain relief herself), it feels fine. As long as I don't try to bend over from the waist. Since typing a blog entry requires nothing more than sitting in my office chair, typing, petting the kitty next to me, and shoveling corn chips into my face, I'm good.

...

The second email is from Erik, and it's about something I mentioned last week. At that time I talked about how our Gura seldom puts Malaya and I in a pair to work together, since that's generally a bad thing for couples. I also wondered how it would be with brothers, who are often very competitive and probably spent their childhood fighting and competing. Erik said that he had gone in taekwondo against his brother a few times, but that he (Erik) was much better and more experienced, so it was sort of pointlessly easy. Not much different than fighting anyone else would have been. I still wonder what it would be like for two really competitive brothers, who weren't as mature as Erik is.

He added a bit more about couples, though.

As for couples, I agree with you that they shouldn't train together. Not only does the couple might get into an argument, it might also be disturbing for others. We used to have a couple too, and god they were annoying.

I can see that. Malaya tends to talk a lot more than usual when we're working together, mostly in terms of shouting "You deserved that." if she happens to whack me a good one. And she's much more likely to do against me than against anyone else, since in her reasoning I know and love her and therefore it's okay for her to hit me, while with strangers or others in the class she has to be careful and she's very sorry if she makes a mistake and wings someone. No, it doesn't make any sense.

We practice at home sometimes together, but haven't done enough of it lately (it's always been dark and/or raining, though with spring coming that is changing) to really see how it would be, now that we both have about half a year of Kali and know enough to teach each other some stuff. The only thing I notice about our sparring or practicing here is that any time I hit Malaya, she makes a much bigger deal about it than when anyone happens to smack her in class. She also argues with me when I give her a pointer or tip or observation, while in class she would listen and ignore, or appreciate it, depending on how useful the advice was. I also feel more comfortable giving her advice or making comments than I would with another person in class, and I probably coddle and try to help her too much if she's not getting something, since I want to see her succeed and be helpful when I should probably shut up more and let her figure it out on her own.

I don't think we'd actually get into an argument in class if we were working together, but I can see that we might be talking too much, especially about non-class things, and that would be distracting to the others in there. I know I find it annoying when other people are talking rather than practicing, and those are just friends who are usually talking about class stuff, rather than totally off topic issues. If there were another couple in there, and they were all caught up in their own interpersonal dynamic to the point that it was a distraction as it overshadowed the class atmosphere, I would want that stopped. Which is probably a large part of why our Gura seldom puts us working together.

March 16, 2005

March 18, 2005

Last time, I spent quite a few words extolling the virtues of teaching new people stuff in Kali. Given that we had three brand new people on Tuesday, 6 last night, and are scheduled for a block of 10 of them from Stanford next week, it's a good thing I've come around on that whole issue, eh? It's fun in the short term, but we're hoping the numbers will thin out rapidly, since our space is somewhat limited, and about 8 is as many as we can usually go, if we're doing stuff that involves moving around a lot, sparring with sticks, etc. Tonight we had 13 once the late noobs got into it, 5 girls and 8 boys, and we mostly paired up and did empty hand parry/check and joint locks and other such mostly stand still things.  God knows what we'll do Tuesday, if all of the Cardinals really show up and want to participate, but that's a bridge to burn when we come to it.

One interesting thing for me Thursday night was with the parry/check. That's basically punching and countering and punching back, in a sort of give and take thing. You're not really trying to hit each other, but you will if the other person totally blows their block and dodge. Anyway, we started off with just eight people, six of us long time students, and I had a really good session with an older student who is big, strong, and knows how to punch. I could see how much faster my hands have gotten and how much better my reflexes are, since we were going literally twice as fast as I could have gone a month ago and while he was still landing a lot more shots than me, I was doing pretty well. It was a lot of fun too, with us both throwing punches right, left, high, and low, alternating smoothly and changing style and moving around in a circle as we did it, and doing it all at nearly full speed.

Tragically we rotated soon after that and I ended up spending most of the night working one on one with another of the new guys. It didn't suck and I learned some new arm break/submission hold things, but there was never the "don't screw up or it's going to hurt" speed and free form style I had for that five minute spar session at the start of class.

Oh well, there's always Tuesday... if the noobs are late, at least.

The thing I was going to say though, was that after the spirited sparring I had early on, it felt strange to do it with a new student. He was in pretty good shape, and was punching pretty fast, but I never for a minute felt in any danger of being hit, even as he was throwing shortarm rights at my jaw from a foot and a half away. I simply dodged them in one direction or the other, steering his incoming arm away with my hands, and that was that.  A few months ago I would have asked him to throw slower, or I would have been bending over backwards dodging, worried about being hit since I knew I didn't have the reflexes or quick hands to dodge. Now it's effortless.

No wonder the older students showed such nonchalance when they were parry/checking with me early on! Back then I felt like they were going a million miles an hour and I was out of control and helpless, but now that I'm mostly on the other end of things I almost laughed at how slowly I was punching, and how frantically the new guy was working to parry me. I never hit him, though I could easily have done so, and even when he was slow to parry I stopped my hits short. It was all very slow and controlled from my perspective. From his end though, he probably felt like I was hurling jabs at a terrible speed and that his punches were moving through molasses. In fact, he was punching faster than me, especially when you consider that I was doing a full arm cock to give him time to react, while he was tossing his up sort of half-side arm, from the side of his chest.

And that's most likely just what I was doing early on, five months ago, when advanced students sparred with me and watched me stand there and wave pathetically at their incoming fists, when I should have been ducking and weaving and using quick hands to parry them as soon as their hand came within range.

I'm not exactly ready to go wear a Broncos hat and heckle Raider fans angry after another blowout loss in a TGIF parking lot in downtown Oakland, but since NFL season doesn't begin until Septemberish, I've got six months yet to work on my hand speed, now don't I?

March 21, 2005

I didn't do any Kali this weekend, but Malaya and another female friend of ours did, and they were both kicking ass. Not literally in this case, but their stick work is really progressing, and they were doing better than ever before and were very excited about it. With Kali the teachers often speak of themselves or others needing to make a breakthrough, and while they never really explain what they mean, it's obvious what they want. They want us to get much better, all at once, even if it's just that one time when we were super motivated. It's basically punctuated equilibrium, rather than slow steady evolution of skill. Improving in a great leap, all at once, mostly due to mind triumphing over matter. 

How this happens is never discussed, but I think I see the theory: We (the students) know what to do. We know all of the movements and techniques the intermediate and advanced students are using; we just can't put them all together yet. Especially not under the time pressure of sparring with another person, with other people watching, when we're going totally freestyle. It's silly though, since it's just physical movement. It's not magic; we know the moves, and the Gurus aren't growing a third arm or extra thumb to do the same moves better, faster, and with more precision. It's mental; they just think faster, know how to move their bodies better, and so on. A lot of what holds the students back is thinking that we can't do it that fast, or that well, and not to get all Yoda on you, but that is why we fail.

It's not entirely mental, of course. Anyone can shoot a basketball, but only a few people on earth can do it well enough to earn a living in the NBA, and it's not all mental attitude that's holding back those guys you see on the playground. There are other prerequisites too; you've obviously got to be very quick, or very tall, or very strong, or some combination of the three, but a large part of it is being able to handle the pressure and being able to do it when you're exhausted at the crucial end of a tough game.

Kali doesn't have such physical barriers to entry. You don't need to be fast, or strong, or tall or anything like that. It helps, and you can hit harder and do some things faster and others in a more athletic style, but the art is designed and can be modified to be effective for short people, or people without leaping ability or foot speed or youth. Leaping and speed don't hurt, but Kali isn't Muay Thai or some other martial art where the champions are 20 or 25 years old, and after that it's all downhill as they lose their leaping ability and their bodies break down from the extreme stresses their high impact sport puts them through.  To be great at Kali you just need to move in coordinated fashion, which is where the breakthroughs come in; everyone has the coordination, but it's learning to harness it. Some really brilliant students make leaps forward all the time, the master of our school keeps progressing in frightening fashion, and other students and Gurus/Guras learn quickly and steadily (me) without making great sudden leaps, and others need much more practice to get the moves down, and may never be able to do them well enough to be really good.

Something the teachers often do in Kali is have us work on something during class, and then during the last 15 minutes or so they stick all of the pairs out in front of everyone and have us do it with an audience. Kali isn't really a competitive situation; it's not like we're fighting for a starting spot on the team, but when everyone is watching you there is definitely more pressure than when you're just doing your thing off in a corner of the room with another student. At first I didn't see the point in this, but as I've done more Kali I've realized that the benefit is that it weeds out the people who don't have the balls to be there, and that it is a good way to force you to step up your game. You want to do well with everyone watching, you want to look good and make your partner look good, and you want to make your teacher proud. It's pressure, but in a good way, and that sort of thing pushes you to make a breakthrough.

One thing the teachers say is that "eventually you'll get tired of being hit." It's sort of an adversarial style of learning, but when you're learning or practicing a move or technique with someone who's better than you are, they're going to hit you. Not that hard, but hard enough that you know you're being hit, and while some people can't take it and drop the class, it tends to push the rest of us to get better. It's not so much to avoid pain, since we're not playing that rough; it's more a point of pride. The breakthroughs come when you simply get tired of being hit, and start moving faster, or dodging better, or doing whatever you've got to do to improve. Malaya simply got tired of sucking at stick (as she put it) and when pushed to do well with an audience she stepped it up a large notch and did the best she's ever done. She was put in a pressure situation and she did far better than she ever thought she could do, and did better than she would have done if not pressured.

I haven't had such a breakthrough on anything yet, (I've improved steadily on everything, and I'm not dissatisfied with my skill, but I could be better than I am.) but I've been thinking about it all weekend, and I realize that I'm tired of just being okay. I'm tired of being slow with my stick, and having to be careful not to hit other people. I know I can move faster and with more precision, and I know I can do multiple different hits in a row the way the masters do. Just because it's acceptable for me to do the simple hit, under-hit, double stick spin hit, etc, doesn't mean I have to settle for that when I could be doing so much better. With that in mind I've been thinking about Kali a lot this weekend, and even dreaming about it, and I have decided that I am going to step it up from now on. When pressured in front of class, but not just then; all the time. I am going to really concentrate and I'm going to work harder at it when I'm doing it. I don't need to practice six hours a day; I just need to fully concentrate and do much better in the time I do spend on it.

To quote another movie, remember Morpheus with Neo in The Matrix in the training room? "Stop trying to hit me and hit me... You're faster than this... Don't think you are, know you are!" It's corny, but that's really what it's like in class, at least in my thoughts. I know how to do it, I'm just not pushing myself to do it, and I can't wait for the teacher to drag me there, kicking and screaming.

My barehand has improved a lot lately, and I'm not sure why; I haven't thought consciously about wanting to get better at it, but now that I've had this semi-epiphany I'm going to try and work at it in the same way. Just because the guys I spar with have a year or two more time in Kali than I do doesn't mean I have to always be worse than them at parry/check, especially when we're just doing the basic left and right high punching. I have fast hands and I've always had very fast reflexes. Why shouldn't I be able to parry their strikes and land my own? They might beat me with better technique and knowing crafty ways to do quicker punches, but the only way I'll learn those is to master the simple stuff and push them to have to use those tricky things to keep ahead of me.

In conclusion, you can probably expect an ebullient follow up post on Wednesday, or else a very disappointed and very short blog entry about how Kali sucked last night.

In Monday's blog I talked about my new intended devotion to Kali training, especially when it came to stick work. I wanted to improve more quickly and try harder and all of that, and concluded by saying:

"...you can probably expect an ebullient follow up post on Wednesday, or else a very disappointed and very short blog entry about how Kali sucked last night."

When Tuesday night arrived and it was time to write Wednesday's entry, I thought I would be happy about my stick work, or angry about not doing it well, or perhaps even have nothing to say if we happened to do only open hand. What I did not expect to be was injured... by another student's stick, appropriately enough.

It was sad too; we were doing some sparring at very close range, the other guy was leading, and as he was swinging very quickly to one side and then the other, while I dodged back and forth countering him. The problem came when he brought his stick up overhead to go from one strike to the next, but he was tired and going too fast and brought it up too low and it got me sideways, across the bridge of the nose, with the butt end held in his fist. What makes it sad is that it wasn't even an intentional. We do butt end strikes all the time, but we pull them up short, and he wasn't even trying to do one when he hit me full speed. He was just lifting the stick up to swing it over, and when he went a bit low and I leaned in a bit too much... wham. It's fun to have an interesting Kali story to tell in class, but getting injured this way is sort of like being run over by a hit man while he's backing out of his garage on his way to kill someone else.

I wasn't knocked unconscious, but when it hit me the blow was solid enough to jolt my head to the side, and (as onlookers told me after the fact) we both froze and they knew someone had been hit, but didn't know who until my legs unhinged and I sprawled into an awkward seated position.  It was only then that they realized how hard a hit it had been, and closed in to see the damage.  I was bleeding a bit, and my first instinct was to get up and check it in the mirror, but when I got to my feet I started listing sideways and Gura and others led me to a chair. I would have fallen if they hadn't, I think. A towel was pressed to the cut and I held them there until the bleeding stopped, while the room wobbled up and down and spun slightly. Or so it seemed to me.

Fortunately the bleeding stopped soon enough, since it was a dent, not a cut. The only reason it bled was that the rough wooden end of his stick scraped me a bit, and the skin split from the sheer force of the impact. I'd have gotten a substantial bruise if it had been to the shoulder or arm or something like that, but since it was right to the cartilage of the nose there was no meat to absorb the blow.

They say that bells go off or you see stars when you get hit really hard in the head, and while I didn't hear or see either of those things, I clearly remember a very loud sound when it hit me. Other people said they didn't hear anything, but in my head it was a boom, like a coconut being dropped from several stories up. And it was loud, I mean like ear-hurting loud. I also now see what it's like for boxers when they are out on their feet: if you remember the famous Mike Tyson loss to Buster Douglas, Mike got nailed, went down and lost his mouthpiece, and rather than just getting back up to keep fighting, he started groping around with his boxing glove to try and pick up his mouthpiece. It seemed insane to the home viewer; why is he wasting time with that when he should get up and beat the count, and then have the ref or someone hand him the mouthpiece.

What did I do after being hit? I got up, after a few seconds, and started towards the bathroom (five meter walk) to wash off the blood and inspect the damage. I was carrying my stick, and my idea was to put it on a table on the way to the bathroom. When the Gura and others intercepted me on my way there and told me to sit down, I was agreeable to that, but I wanted to put my stick on the table and then turn back to the chair. I was unable to communicate that though, so we had a brief tug of war with me trying to go that way, stretching my stick out, while they pulled me back towards the seat. They won when I gave up and let them seat me, and once sitting I dropped my stick on the ground and completely forgot about it for maybe ten minutes.

To an onlooker on TV, my actions would have seemed as strange as Iron Mike's when he was fumbling around for his mouthpiece. It didn't matter if my stick went on the table or not; it's just a baked and lacquered length of bamboo, I smack other sticks with it dozens of times per class, I hit the ground with it all the time, etc. But in my mind at that moment, I simply had to set it down on the table before I did anything else. It was all I could think about, just like the dazed Mike Tyson and his mouthpiece.

Once seated, I pressed the wad of tissue to my head and waited for the bleeding to stop and the room to stop swaying. The room came to rest first, and fortunately the wound stopped shortly after that, and though any sort of spinning or fast movement was out of the question for the remainder of the night, class was almost over when I got whacked and I made it through the talk and Flux's-injury-as-object-lesson-on-proper-leading-technique lecture okay. I was also glad to see that the night was cold and a bit drizzly, since after I stood outside talking to a classmate/friend for 10 minutes, my head was definitely clear enough for the drive home. I had to do it alone since Malaya hadn't come to class with me that night.  Once home she made dinner while I showered, and then we basically sat on the couch for a few hours and vegged out with TV and food while I kept an ice pack against the swollen third eye region of my head.

I had a sort of headache, but nothing throbbing. The bad part was that my wits were addled, as they say. I could walk and talk and cook and such, but I couldn't think very well, and I couldn't multi-task at all. It felt like I was slightly drunk, or sick, and I kept getting that, "What am I doing here again?" feeling every time I walked into another room. Conversation was possible, but I was dumb. I kept fumbling for words, couldn't remember names, couldn't make quick adlibs, and when I tried to write after Malaya went to bed, I couldn't do it. I could type and make words appear and such, but I could not make any sense of complicated topics, and I certainly couldn't write a book review of a tricky novel, which is what I had planned to include for the lower portion of Wednesday's blog. I had also planned on finishing the editing on the current chapter of my novel after I blogged, but without the ability to make sense of a book review, I wasn't about to try to go over 20 pages of my own fantasy. So I surfed mindlessly, read the first half of Deaver's The Stone Monkey, and wished I were tired enough to go to bed early.

Unfortunately I wasn't, and since I can't force myself to sleep if I'm not tired, I stayed up far later than I wanted to, bored. Being awake wasn't much fun either, since the top of my nose was swollen enough that I had to breathe through my mouth, the tip of my nose felt numb enough that I kept poking at it to be sure it was still there, and I was hungry, but had no appetite.

I felt pretty damn groggy Wednesday as well, but by late that night I was feeling normal enough to finish editing the chapter I was working on. Thursday I felt fine, albeit with a sort forehead. Sore in two places, due to Wednesday's Kali, which I'll detail in a moment. First though, as for my "improve my stick or get knocked out trying" resolution... it was inconclusive. We did stick stuff all night Tuesday and while I didn't suck and I didn't slack off, I wasn't especially brilliant at anything we were doing either. Part of it was my partner, who was pretty new and therefore needed a lot more reps than me, and needed my help in getting things right. Teaching is fine, and it's better to perfect something I already know a little bit, but having a more advanced partner is a great teaching aid since they force me to work harder to keep up and inspire me to do it better. And yes, in theory that was my job in the pairing, since he was the new guy, and I should have been doing it perfectly to inspire and pressure him to keep up.

We always say that you've got to get sick of being hit to do better though, and I certainly got hit. Perhaps it's a sign?

Hit Flux in the head week continued Wednesday, with our once a month workshop held at Master Tuhan's house. This time the class was going to cover cane and backhand knife, and everyone had canes with them, most of them recently purchased from Cost Plus World Market. Seven bucks, and light enough for flicking but sturdy enough not to break right away.

I won't bore you with endless non-illustrated talk about what we learned, but the class was okay, while the chance to watch the other Gurus and expert students spar was awesome. It's fun sometimes to tell myself that I'm doing really well at some technique, and that I don't have too much further to push it. And then I get to watch some guys with 10 or 15 or 20 years experience in Kali do it, and I feel like a rentacop with some pepper spray watching the SWAT team storm a fortified compound. There's just no comparison, as they do everything I can do 5x faster and 10x more accurately, and then add 5x more variations and other details that I couldn't even have imagined. It's like watching a really good fight scene from an action movie, except that everything is much faster, more accurate, more deadly, and it's real.

The real fun of the night began near the end of class, after we'd been working with several backhand knife techniques for an hour or more. I was taking my turn being the dummy with another guy striking me; a guy who is regularly in my Tues/Thurs classes, oddly enough (there were like 19 guys there, only two of them guys I had ever worked with, so long odds). The move was for me to stab at him, to which he would counter by cutting my wrist on the way in, then cutting my throat across the front, then reaching around the side to cut it from the other side. He'd done the sequence a dozen times or so, but on the last try, for reasons unknown, he was a bit off when he reached across my body, and smacked his wooden pretend knife into my right eyebrow.

It wasn't a very hard hit, far less of a thunk than the one Tuesday night, but he hit right on the arch of the eye bone and made enough of a dent that blood began to flow pretty freely. I was annoyed; I wouldn't even have taken a turn off of the sparring if not for the blood, but I didn't want to bleed all over myself, and I'm sure other people didn't want to get splattered with my blood, so I had to take a time out and go get it stopped.

The funny part was when I went into the house and got a paper towel from Tuhan's wife. I held it with my right hand, but my left was covered in blood and I couldn't turn on the sink without getting the handles all messy. Fortunately, their two girls, ages 6 and 4 or so, came running into the kitchen to see what had happened and they were simply thrilled to see my injury. With the enthusiasm only precocious children can muster, they burst forth with a chorus of questions.

"What happened?"
"Is it bleeding?"
"Does it hurt?"
"Can I see?"
"Ohhh! Cool!" (when I lifted up the towel to let them see)

And so on. They did turn on the sink for me though, and though the bleeding didn't stop entirely, it slowed to a trickle that a Band-Aid was sufficient to staunch. Plus the gory-looking Band-Aid got me plenty of sympathy points from everyone else there. The whole thing put me into rather a foul mood though, and when I had no appetite and didn't want to talk to anyone afterwards, Malaya was happy to leave early so we could come home and eat. I told her to stay and hang out and talk some; I just had a headache and didn't want to be in the noisy patio, but no, she wanted to go.

This picture isn't terribly impressive either, but you can see Tuesday's wound healing, along with the new hole to the right (as seen in the mirror). I should have taken some more photos later, since several hours after this shot the whole right side of my eyebrow swelled up and turned a lovely purple. Bruising that had almost completely faded by Thursday night's regular Kali class, during which we played with my favorite thing of all, double stick.

Nothing else to report from there though; class was fun, the two hours flew by, and no one, not even me, got smacked in the face.

April 6, 2005

Kali last night was pretty good. We had a big group again; a dozen students and the teacher plus some skinny white girl who watched without ever saying a word and who we will almost certainly never see again. (People who are curious sit in and watch class all the time, and it seems like 75% of them say they like it and want to start, and are then never heard from again. Since this girl didn't say anything or look enthusiastic, perhaps she'll be back every class for a year, just to be contrary.)

Since there are still a bunch of relatively new students, we did kicks of all types. Most Kali kicks are low ones from nasty angles, kicks meant to break ankles or dislocate knees. Since we practiced on each other, as always, control was required as we practiced kicking at the instep and the outside of the ankle, from all different directions and in combinations with other kicks, punches, using them on defense and offense, etc. It's always interesting how class gets balanced between beginner stuff and expert stuff, with the same things teaching the noobs while the intermediate students work on perfecting them or using them more quickly, or in trickier combos, etc. I was working with a very new guy most of the time, and while he was doing all the kicking for the first time, I'm pretty good at them (soccer habits from my childhood help) but we both had to work to keep up and push each other.

Of course there are impacts during such work, and while we try to keep them minor, no one is perfect. I had a few bruises by the end of class, and I'm sure I gave the guy I was working with some bruises as well. The real bruise fest came during the last ten minutes though, when Gura had us all circle up in one corner, and picked me to lead everyone through a quick sparring session.

We do this often after class, and she always picks one of the older students to be the tackle dummy. In this case I simply punched at everyone else, one at a time, and they worked through the various moves we'd learned in class, doing them as well or as poorly as they could, depending on their level of expertise. I wasn't tutoring them, I was just doing what their partners had done all night, but as usual at the end of class, I was ordered to throw faster and harder than we had been doing in practice. This pushes people to work harder and be more creative, since they're up in front of everyone and the person throwing punches at them is going faster than they're used to. The downside, for the person throwing at least, is that the control everyone has at half speed tends to slip a bit when they pick up the tempo. So yes, my shins are pretty much purple and swollen right now.

It was fun though; that was the first time I've ever been the one picked to lead the demo at the end of class, and it's a sign of respect or confidence from the Gura. It's also a sign that she knows you can take a bunch of hits without too much complaint, but more on that in a bit. I enjoyed it, with a few regrets. Mainly that I didn't lead very well -- well, I wasn't horrible, but I could have been better.

As always when I teach in Kali I think of all the stuff I should have done afterwards. Now I realize that I should have varied the speed more, alternated left and right punches more, and especially should have thrown faster, without throwing harder. Gura kept telling me to go faster, to make them work more, and I was doing so, but I knew that a lot of the people there weren't good enough yet to deal with my throwing hard punches at them, and I didn't want to smack anyone in the mouth, even with a loose fist. So I wasn't going anywhere near as quickly as I could have, since even though I was aiming to the side of most of their heads, some of them were trying to block and go inside at times, and I was afraid they'd lean right into my fist.

What I should have done, I realized on the drive home, was to throw faster, and right at their chins, but to pull the punches short. I was concentrating on getting extension and going from the hips and shoulder in good form, and that's fine (Gura was yelling at me to do it anyway) but I didn't need to extend my arm all the way out as I punched. I could have done it all with good form, but just not reached all the way to their faces. And I could have done that as fast as I wanted to, making them really scramble, while still not hitting anyone in the mouth. I would have gotten kicked even more than I did, but what the hell, that's what I was up there for.

I also regret that I didn't get to kick myself.  I threw for everyone else, including Gura when she went last and did tons of advanced kicks that no one else had even seen before, but she didn't pick anyone else to throw for me. I was hella ready to go too, after watching everyone else go and seeing a lot of different things and wanting to try them out. Plus I'm good at kicking, at least with my right foot, and I wanted to show off. *pout*

Perhaps I'll get another chance Thursday, but we'll almost certainly do something other than kicking, and it's very unlikely that I'll get to lead again anytime soon. I'm good enough, but so are several other people in class, most of whom are a lot better than me. It was something of a surprise that she picked me, when there were 4 or 5 more senior students there on Tuesday.  They'll all get a turn or two at it before I'm picked again, I suspect, which is fine; I enjoyed being in the center of the circle, but I enjoy hitting and doing moves out there as well, and I learn a lot by watching others do their thing, and it's hard to watch much when you're the punching kicking bag.

April 8, 2005

After 7 months of martial arts training, I am now sufficiently-advanced (well, sufficient-intermediate, to be more precise) at Kali that it's no longer enough that I merely execute the maneuvers. It's expected (by me and the Gura and the other advanced students) that I do the new moves we're shown that day, and that I do them with style, grace, precision, etc.

We work on form and positioning and such all along, but it takes a while to move beyond simply trying to get your body to do the basic maneuver. Once you've got the skill to progress though, you begin to discover just how vast a difference there is between doing it tolerably, and doing it like the experts. It's also surprising how subtle the higher level movements are. Thursday night we were doing a two-strike move with a lot of footwork mixed in, and while almost everyone could do it after a few minutes of practice and/or observation, the learning curve between just doing it and doing it like a master is almost infinite.

What I found odd was what I mentioned a second ago. How tiny the changes necessary to improve at it were. Everyone realizes they need to be more fluid, to make bigger circles with their stick and their open hand, etc. What's harder to grasp is that something as small as head positioning, or finger extension, or the angle of the chin will make a huge difference. And not just to experts, who could pick out the tiny change; everyone can see it, even the most beginning students. You can do the same move ten times in thirty seconds, feel like you're doing it as well as you can, and if on the eleventh time you finally look at the fingers of your left hand, as you extend that arm over your head for balance and grace, and extend them precisely as you strike with the stick in your other hand, it 1) feels much better, 2) looks much better, and 3) makes the strike visibly and audibly harder and more precise.

It defies logic; why would looking at your fingers, actually focusing on them, make the stick in your other hand move faster and more exactly? I can't say quite why it does, but the whooshing sound of the stick cutting through the air is unmistakable, and when you watch six other people slowly learn and then finally do it correctly, and see how much better they all look when they get it right, and hear them all tell you how much better you looked when you finally did it right, it's hard to argue with reality.

On top of the body position stuff, we're now getting into the "eye of the tiger" type attitude. We don't call it that, but you've heard the term.  We go with a different movie. The King and I. Yes, an absurd musical (I think all musicals are absurd in concept, actually.) but if you ever see it, even for a little bit, study Yul Brenner's body language and facial expressions.

But analyze the photo, and your reaction to it. Why does he look so bad, rather than just looking like a short bald guy with a big earring? He's got the bald head going on, a look that few non-black men fail to look ridiculous with, and he's got great eyebrows. The way they drop down over his eyes is scary. He's doing something with his jaw too; it's very tight and lifted. But mostly it's in his eyes. There is an intensity; a fire; the eye of the tiger, if you prefer.

Of course being able to see this in others and being able to summon it up yourself is an entirely different matter, as we've been discovering lately in Kali class. Doing a series of moves with your mind neutral is one thing, but doing the same series with an inner fire lit is entirely different. The Gura and a few other experts can summon it up whenever they wish, and it's downright eerie to watch. In a blink they go from someone you know to an entirely different person. An angry, hard person, one who would not hesitate to take you out. That's how they look, anyway, and this is a look gangster types cultivate, for obvious reasons. Walk into a room glowering and exuding energy like this, and you'll definitely be noticed. I wouldn't advise it if you aren't ready to back it up, though.

It's basically acting when we do it (well, we try to do it), but at the same time it's a real feeling or emotion that's causing the look. One guy tonight who is about as good as me at Kali was doing the series of moves, and not doing it poorly, but when Gura pressed him to get intense; to really mean it, he took himself mentally into a place where he could feel like Yul looks here, and goddamn if he didn't start moving a hell of a lot better. Faster, swinging harder, improved form, etc. He wasn't all the way there; he didn't have the regal chin lift and glowering eyes, but you could see in his face that he was so much more into what his body was doing than he had been five seconds before. It didn't last long either; he couldn't sustain it and tired quickly once he was doing it, but damn it was cool while it lasted.

I can't do it, at least not yet. I get into a more intense mental state once in a while, and managed it twice Thursday night while I was doing the moves in front of everyone, but while I felt like I was almost there, it doesn't show on my face to others. It was a strange feeling though; I won't go into the meditation terms of embracing the void or holding the flame or whatever you want to call it, but I definitely lost a lot of my awareness of the surrounding room and the people watching me. And I became far more in tune with my body's movements. I couldn't hold it very well though, partially because I started to lose the footwork and move sequences once I was going for the intensity.  I felt completely connected to my weapon and there was nothing in my head but moving and striking with the stick, but I apparently went too one track in my thoughts, since I lost the cross-shaped walking pattern we were doing, and when I realized I was drifting a bit I lost the intensity.

Yul Brenner's performance in The King and I is amazing since he keeps it up almost the whole time. Our Master recommends the film for Kali, not because there's any martial arts in it, but because of the way Yul holds himself. He is impossibly-regal throughout, and that is what we try to look like and how we try to hold ourselves when doing Kali. Well, the men do, most of the time at least. Women can channel this as well, depending on what they're doing, but they sometimes want to be softer or more flowing and less imperious, as do the men.

This shot of him dancing isn't a great one, since he's got his chin down and is looking where he's about to step (something we try not to do with our stick work), but his posture is still excellent. Very stiff back, right arm high and cocked, weight sliding smoothly from the right leg to the left, etc. Compare him to his dance partner, who is buried in an ocean of satin, but doesn't have any sort of intensity or look on her face. She's just following along in the dance, looking down at nothing in particular, and though the only thing we can see of her body is her arms and shoulders, they're not erect or full of energy.

And once again, I wish I had a video clip of Kali to show, since I think the difference would be very evident even over the Internet.  Although, our Gura's fiancée has filmed her a few times, and he says that some of the intensity and energy you feel in person just does not translate through the film. It's the difference between attending a rock show and watching a concert video; there's just some sort of a vibe to a live performance that doesn't travel through the video of it, except in very rare cases. Which is probably why there are about 10 actors alive today who can simply command the screen. Everyone else, talented though they may be, are just taking up space on screen.

I don't have a list, but you know it when you see it. Bruce Lee had it; watch any scene of him when he's moving or even just staring someone down and there is an energy about him that you simply don't see in everyday life. It's obviously not something every actor wants; it wouldn't come in very handy for Tom Hanks in one of his everyman romantic lead type roles, but in action movies or suspense films it's invaluable. Watch the first minute of Hopkins' performance in Silence of the Lambs, when he's simply standing in his plexiglass cell and talking to Starling, and his energy is so intense it's almost dripping off the screen.

I want to look like that. At least sometimes. Like during the photo shoot for my first book jacket picture, for instance.

PS. The sad part is that I can remember my past self well enough to know that nothing I just said would have meant a damn thing to me a year ago.

"I have intensity when I need it! What does chin angle have to do with looking hardcore? Why would you fight better emulating the way a bald guy danced in an old movie?"

All that and more might have flowed forth from my mouth fingers, and therefore I can easily envision many of you thinking those things now. I'm not here to convince you otherwise; I'm just here to blog about me, and I'm not putting on a persona to do it. (Well, maybe a little bit of the Mr. Snark when it comes time to talk about celebrity bullshit.) I didn't set out with change as a goal, but I have changed some since I began taking martial arts classes last Fall. We don't spend a lot of time on it, nor do we meditate or anything like that, but there is a philosophy of sorts that comes with martial arts, when you're really doing them and not just waving your arms and legs around like the guys do in the movies. I didn't anticipate anything like that when I started doing Kali, and I'm not becoming a Buddhist or anything, but I do have different attitudes about various things than I did before I started my martial arts training. I hope that doesn't horrify anyone too terribly.

You talk about the "eye of the tiger" (great idea by the way, from Stallone i think)

I believe it is not something that is there suddenly. There are a few conditions to it. First you have to know the moves. First of all you have to know and to be able to perform the moves. Secondly, you have to know and to realise that you know the moves. You should have the confidence to perform them 'on the edge' and take your own body to the limit. Perhaps you ind is the only limit.

Compare it with the scene from 'The Matrix 1' where Morpheus and Neo are fighting in the Dojo. Morpheus tries to push Neo to go further and faster, but doenst have the confidence to do it. Same is for the 'jumping on the roof'-scene. Only later, when he realises he has the power to do so, and with this he is self-confident, he can push himself to the limit.

Same is for you with Kali, when you know that you can do the moves and perhaps some pressure, from the teacher (is it called Gura?) and the audience, you can push yourself to the limit.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I see it too. I've even used the Matrix example in past Kali blogging (though you're excused if you missed it; as much as I blab on about this subject). I do sort of disagree with one thing Erik said though. I think anyone can get the "eye of the tiger," even if they have no idea what they're doing when they have it.  (I hate calling it that, especially with cheesy memories of Stallone in his sweaty gray sweatsuit in my memory, but it does get the concept across with a minimum of words.)

I say that because as we were talking about in class on Thursday, various gangster types frequently exhibit it in real life. It's an attitude, and one that can be born as much from desperation and deceit as inner confidence. I want it from confidence, much as Erik's mail describes it. But plenty of skinny guys with nothing more than sagging jeans, a stained wife-beater, and a cheap imitation Glock in their belt can pull off a facsimile of Yul's glower here, so long as they think it's going to keep other gang bangers from jumping them.

Maybe they might have a bit more desperation and terror in their eyes than confidence and assurance, but they'd be in much the same mental state; just motivated by fear for their life rather than inner invincibility.

As for Kali, it's not so much the look as the motivation behind it, and it really is something of value; while talking about it and demonstrating it on Thursday our teacher (Who we call Gura, which is just a slightly-controversial feminization of "guru.") said that the oldest student in class, who was not there that night, showed it from time to time, and when she and Master Tuhan saw that on his face, they realized that maybe he really had it in him to be something special at Kali. He's not there yet, and he's got years to go before he makes Guru himself, but if someone wants it badly enough, and has the look and inner confidence to back the look up, they'll get there. It's not a quick path though; five years is about the minimum to make it from student to Guru/Gura in our school, and many people have gone longer than that. There aren't any belts or regimented tests to pass either; everyone knows who can do what, and there's no lying or faking it in Kali; if you're not really doing the moves there's no hiding that with style, at least not short of the high expert level. (And even then other experts could tell; you'd just be good enough to fool the beginners like Malaya and me who couldn't tell your fast but lazy effort from the real thing.)

April 13, 2005

As for the Kali stuff, I'm not going to go into a huge discussion (famous last words) but we were doing a moving, punching thing on Tuesday night, and the differences between men and women was once again very evident. Especially at the beginner stage.

The exercise was basic parry check, in which two people take turns punching at each other in a flowing sort of motion. On person punches, the other person counters it and flows back into their own punch, and so on. It can be very fast and intense, or very slow and flowing, depending on how you play it. I've done ones where we're going freestyle and throwing full speed. Left and right handed punches, high, low, straight, hooks, uppercuts, whatever. You keep dodging and parrying or you get a free trip to loose tooth city, though we try to do it with enough of an open fist that no one gets bloodied. I've taken some pretty good ones to the chin and chest and stomach, though.

Parry check can also be very slow and flowing, and one exercise we do is to walk with it. It's basically a 1-2-3 count, where one person throws and walks forward with their punch, while the other person receives it and walks back, usually while turning slightly to one side or the other. They then throw a punch while reversing the movement and walking forwards, while the first puncher receives it and walks backwards.  On and on it goes, and it's rather like a waltz, since you want to keep moving constantly, and you need to flow into each other's movement. And as with everything in Kali, there's a vast difference between beginning, when you're just trying to get the motion down, and advanced, where the two people really look like ballroom dancers as they flow around the room fluidly and gracefully, while throwing punches at each other the whole time.

I've got the rhythm and movement and punching and receiving parts down by now, so what I worked on was doing it smoothly and gracefully. Gura helped me with lots of verbal instruction:

"Bend your knees more!
Stay on the balls of your feet!
Slide your feet when you back up!
Weight forward!
Turn your hips more!"

And so on. I tried, and I improved some over time, but it's hard. The trick to being graceful is to keep your steps smooth and to not bob up and down too much. I naturally take big, fast steps, and I bob a lot when I walk, so I'm having to unlearn and retrain in kali to move the way we wanna move. I can tell when I get it, since my thighs start to ache and I can feel how much more smoothly I'm moving, but it's hard to maintain.  There's more to it than head bobbing and such, of course; the body must flow, and in the stylized form you throw a right punch by turning as you punch and walking with your upper body turned so your right side is in front. You then pivot the other way and receive with your left shoulder forwards, and ideally there is a very smooth, wave-like upper body movement as you take in on the left, roll your right arm up, and then pivot and roll your right arm into them with the punch. It's not something you use for combat, it's more of a training aid to get the movement down, but it's fun and challenging.

I mentioned the male/female difference because it was very obvious last night.

There's one brand new woman in class, and while this was only her second time, and she didn't have the head movements or punching at all, she was moving far more smoothly than all but the advanced men.  She knew how to flow with her partner, male or female, and she kept her posture up and moved her legs gracefully and smoothly. She's never done any sort of martial arts before either, which is actually a good thing for Kali, since she's got less to unlearn.

There were three new men in the class last night, and while none of them are brand new (they've got maybe 1, 2, and 3 months, respectively) and they all punched far better than the new woman did their first day, not one of them could move in anything even approaching a smooth fashion. They're not uncoordinated, and all of them would destroy her in any sort of a fight, but when it came to flowing and receiving and moving around smoothly with a partner, they looked like they were walking on peg legs.  Even the more advanced male students (probably including myself, but without mirrors or a video tape I can't say for sure) looked much stiffer and clumsier than the brand new woman did, and the two other female students there, both of whom are intermediate, didn't look great with the punching and such, but they moved so much more fluidly than anyone but the teacher.

I've got to spend some time in the aerobics room at the gym next time, just for the full wall of floor to ceiling mirrors, since I never know what I look like while I'm doing Kali. I know I need to bend my knees more and sort of sit down over my heels, but it feels like I'm practically squatting like a catcher when I'm doing various things, and all the while Gura is telling me to bend more. Seeing in a mirror that I really am still almost completely upright will help me remember what it feels like to be down in the proper form, I hope.

I also mentioned the benefit of never having done other martial arts, and that's very obvious whenever anyone new starts up, with experience in other forms. I'm not saying other forms suck or that Kali is the best (though I obviously like it); I've not taken karate or tae kwan do or escrima or anything else, so I can't comment from personal experience, and they might be great for actual self defense.

What I'm commenting on is how people with experience in them transition into Kali. Awkwardly, with much un-learning, in a nutshell. Other forms seem to emphasize a lot of standing still and punching, since guys who start up with that experience always have the worst time learning to move, or flow, or to do much of anything with their left arm while they're holding a stick with the right. We use the left hand (or right if you're a lefty) constantly in our form of Kali, mostly as a counter balance with the stick, but there are lots of two-handed attacks as well, and it's an essential part of body control.

The newest guy did some Karate, and while his footwork is okay, he's got no body flow at all. He moves around okay, and he's in his early 20s and quick on his feet and can punch pretty well, but when he tries to flow or do anything sinuous it's like watching a robot move. Everything goes from the shoulders or elbows, and as of yet he's completely unable to do any really powerful hits, since he can't incorporate his hips and shoulders into the movement. Real power comes form the core, and Gura and other experts can do a casual arm movement that looks like nothing, and knock you (literally) across the room with it. The secret is to pivot the hips, flow from there through the shoulders, and then down the arm, and with that they can hold their hand literally an inch from your chest, and still hit you harder than big muscular beginners can with a full length punch. It's even harder if they pull back, of course, and it's much faster as well.

Gura was demonstrating to the new karate guy last night, and having him throw punches at her face literally as hard as he could; all of which she effortlessly turned aside and then used his own force and energy against him to hit him powerfully in the chest or arm before he could even pull his arm back from throwing the punch.  She could have put out both his eyes and opened up his windpipe before he threw a second punch, and if having that demonstrated on you isn't enough to get you eager to learn the Kali style of parry/check, I don't know what is. He seemed pretty excited and eager to learn more, at least.

Oddly, another better-known Filipino martial arts form, Escrima, is similar to karate (and everything else, AFAIK) in that the left arm stays clamped to the chest most of the time, and there's very little movement of the rest of the body. Another newish student, one with 3 months or so, took Escrima for a year or more before Kali, and while he's pretty good with the stick and has decent footwork, his left arm tends to dangle there, dead, when he's doing other things. And he moves like he's walking on bricks when he tries to flow, since his other form didn't involve movement other than straight forwards or straight back. We almost never do either in Kali, since it's all about turning to the side and avoiding the strengths of your opponent.

Completing the analogy, the other new male student is a young teenager, and while he's in good shape and plays lots of sports and such, he never did any other martial arts training, and perhaps as a direct result, he's far better on his feet than the other new guys. He's got miles to learn yet, but he flows better, turns and sidesteps and such pretty well, etc. He hasn't learned to pivot or turn or flow with his upper body at all yet, but at least he doesn't have to unlearn a very stiff, boxy style first, which should help him. I'm just getting decent at flowing like that now, and I've been doing it since last fall, and I've got a female who does Kali and can flow as constant inspiration. Maybe I can get Malaya to do some of the walking parry check thing with me, ideally in front of a mirror, and see how we blend. I saw how blocky the other guys were, and it was horrifying. If I look as stiff as they did, I'll certainly have electroshock-like motivation to improve.

Also, none of this is to say that Kali is easier for women or for men. It's definitely easier for women than most of the "stand still and punch and kick" type of martial arts, but while women find a lot of the graceful movements and finesse arm and hand control required for good Kali easier to pick up, they have to work harder to develop good punching and stick-swinging form, things men usually have right from the start.  For instance, women can start using knives with the quick and finesse form we use in Kali right away, while men often don't get to even touch a blade for 3 or 4 or 5 years, until their control over their hands and arms is good enough that they won't stab themselves or others.  On the other hand, men can do heavy stick and long arm right away, once they're able to swing loosely from their shoulders (things the ex-karate and ex-escrima guys take a while to learn), since that's a type of movement men are naturally good at, and since men have the upper body strength for it.

And if you were wondering about other racial and sexual stereotypes, we've never had a new black male student since I've been there, so I can't say if a hypothetical black man would have more flow or rhythm than (the very little rhythm) the new white guys and Asian guys usually have. There is one black guy who has a super sinuous flowing motion, but he's got over two years of Kali, so there's no telling how much he had going in and how much he's learned.

I can debunk the gay male myth though; there are two gay males in the class (that I know of), one who's done Kali for years, and neither one moves any more or less smoothly than the other guys do. Just to be complete, I'm not aware of any lesbian movement vs. straight woman movement movement stereotypes, but I've not seen any difference in how they move either.

April 20, 2005

As for Tuesday's Kali, it was pretty cool. Malaya didn't go, but we still had 8 people, one of whom was brand new to Kali. He'd done a couple of years of Muay Thai boxing though, and was a lot of fun to watch since he moved just like the guys you see in movies. It's hard to explain the body language, but Muay Thai is a very upright, square-shouldered style. They punch from the shoulder with almost no hip turn, and the kicks are mostly knees and side kicks using the shin. Get Ong Bak on DVD if you get a chance (Is that even out yet? I want to see it again.), since it's pretty similar. That's a purer version of Muay Thai though, and is much more fluid than the kick boxer/sport-martial art style the guy had Tuesday night.

He was good at what he did though, and looked challenging to spar open hand with. Very like a boxer; straight ahead, circling but never changing his direction to hit sideways or anything like that, and very stiff. He couldn't dodge anything, but he hit pretty well. I didn't get a chance to go against him, probably since I had to stop moving to hack and sound like I was dying every few minutes and Gura didn't want me diseasing him his first day. Several other students did though, and it was entertaining to watch.

The Gura and the two most-experienced Kali guys owned him, since our style blends and flows so much that they had no trouble getting in past his stiff punches and landing hits and kicks in close. One other guy who is about at my level had a much harder time though, since he couldn't flow in and out and get inside the guy's fast fists. I don't know how I would have fared, since while I move better than he does, he's done more sparring than me, and while it's very easy to watch other people spar and see the openings and opportunities, it's a lot different when you're the one doing it and trying to react to the fists coming at your face. Hopefully I'll get a chance if he comes back again, before he does enough Kali to start changing his movement and becomes flowing like the rest of us.

The cool thing about Kali is that it's so adaptive though, so while he'll get more movement and flow and such, he'll still keep some of his Muay Thai skills and styles, and find ways to work them into his Kali. Everyone has a slightly different style of Kali, especially people who have done other forms, since they always retain and modify some of their old stuff. On the other hand, lots of students never learn to move as fluidly as Kali can demand, since they trained in some other form first and can't completely let it go, no matter how they try.

May 6, 2005 

We worked on double weapons Thursday night, but rather than just stick and stick, we went with stick and dagger. Real sticks, fake daggers, or at least they didn't have sharp blades. It's interesting to use those two weapons, since it's like double stick, but also very different. You do a lot of the same moves, alternating hands for your hits and defending in similar ways, but the hand you're holding your dagger in has far less reach than your other hand does with the 30" stick, and you don't need to swing the dagger hard to be effective with it.

As a result, we're often positioning ourselves with the target to our left, so we can reach it with both weapons at once, and we stayed very close to the target, since otherwise the dagger wouldn't reach at all. And, since we use our empty hand a lot when fighting with a single stick; for balance and form and to physically touch the stick and redirect it and such, you're actually worse with a stick and dagger than you are with just a stick, if you're at a distance.

The real fun was in going against a person with both weapons when you only had a stick. You could try to stay back and beat them with stick on stick, but it was more fun, in a "get killed a lot" sort of way, to get in closer and try to go against both. Staying right against their dagger arm helped, since you could jam it by pushing your arm against their forearm when they tried to raise the knife, and you could counter their stick and then move back or sideways quickly enough to counter the dagger as well. It was damn hard though and honestly, only the Gura could do it well.

It was also a lot of fun to see how best to use the dagger and stick at the same time. Hiding the dagger works well, by holding it against your body and doing big swings with the stick you could create openings to get a quick stab in. Or you could go low with the dagger and high with the stick when they moved to block it, thus catching them in the face with the stick, or you could just try to go very quickly from one to the other, and if your dagger hand was better at stabbing than their bare hand was at stopping, you'd get hits in. The oldest student in class was leading mostly, and yes, he got a lot of hits in. I was no exception to that, being skewered and smacked and other such things. At one point I managed to get a bit too far away, and as a result when I reached to block his dagger stab I actually grabbed the blade, then let go in belated realization just in time to take a stick swing to the face due to being distracted by my severed hand. The dagger was just carved wood and the stick was stopped short of knocking me out again, but it wasn't my proudest moment.

He wasn't even going that fast; it's just so different to have to worry about a second short weapon when you're used to just moving to counter the first long one. It did really illustrate how lazy and slow we get when we're dealing with just the stick though, since even though we pretend the opponent has a dagger then, and move to counter the off hand, it's far different when they actually do have one and are moving it quickly enough to stab you in the ribs. So while doing all the things we'd normally do; block or parry the attack, then slip in for our own hits, we kept getting stabbed since we were standing still for too long after blocking the stick and before moving into our counter attack.

It was a lot of fun to work on though, and Malaya and me will have to go work with those weapons some on our own. We've got Kali knives too... silver plastic ones we got at the Halloween Store on November 1st for about $2.

May 13, 2005

Thursday night's Kali was interesting. There wasn't much Kali, but we did other things we hadn't done before. The teacher, who we call Gura, has done some special effects work and direction in her young career. She was actually in Star Wars Episode 2, if only just. She was an unpaid, unbilled stunt person, seen playing a Jedi way in the background of the huge desert battle scene. Full costume, tiny size, so she's only recognizable by the fact that she's doing a big sweeping Kali move, and even then you've got to freeze frame and zoom to get a good look.

That credit aside, she's done some fight scene choreography for small local projects on stage and film, and for some reason we spent Thursday working on that. She wasn't being a professor and having her grad students do her research for her though, it was just for fun and to give the five students there that night (small class) something new to play at. So for 90 minutes we practiced throwing fake punches, being hit by fake punches, falling when pushed, overacting after falling, and so on. We worked in two groups, with two people acting and the third playing the audience, letting the actors know if their stunt work was believable; or at least believably-fake.

One of the biggest keys, as it turns out, is the viewer's angle, which makes a fake fight much easier to put on film than stage, since you can control the camera angle there. Not to mention throw in film speed tricks, a soundtrack, edited shots, and so on.  One interesting thing about sounds she pointed out is how much a faster beat makes the viewer think things are happening more quickly. Her example was the opening action scene in Crouching Tiger, where the two female characters race across rooftops and fight open hand, before ending up in a large arena type area with an intense drumming soundtrack. Gura suggested watching that scene normally, and then with the sound muted, and said that without the sound you realize that they're actually not very fast, and that you've been completely manipulated by the thudding of the drums.  I hadn't thought of that in that scene, but I've seen that in class numerous times. We've got a couple of big drums in the corner, and sometimes when we're doing a drill or sparring gura or someone else will drum in a rhythmic pattern, and as they speed up or slow down the beat, the action seems far faster to watch, or even to perform. I've been sparring with stick on stick several times, and keeping up fine, until the beat starts to accelerate and suddenly my opponent seems twice as fast and I'm scrambling to keep up at all. Even though I know we're hardly moving any differently than before.  Funny how the mind works.

As for faking punches, hooks to the jaw are very easy to fake from angles behind either fighter, but hard from the side, especially from the side the person being hit is turning towards. From behind the puncher it's very easy, since you can't judge the depth of the view, and when the fist swings and the head snaps back, it looks very real, even if the punch misses by six inches. Stomach punches are much easier to fake from any angle, as are shoves and arm breaks and such.

The fake is also sold mostly by the person being hit. They have to react appropriate, throwing back their head and raising a hand in pain on a face punch, rolling their shoulders and curving their back on a stomach hit, turning and crashing into a wall after a shove, and so on. Whipping your head around with hair flying sells everything convincingly, as does falling awkwardly, or slapping the wall your just pretended to crash into, and so on. The person hitting has to sell it as well, of course, and a fierce facial expression, and/or a mighty grunt or scream of rage makes a great deal of difference. Gura showed us the same punch three times, while making a silly noise, a weak noise, and then a fierce primal snarl, and damned if the third one wasn't far more convincing, even though our eyes knew she wasn't moving any differently than she had the first two times. It was a regular pro wrestling workshop in there, for a while.

For the last half hour or so the five students got into a group and planned out a whole action scene with minimal plot and various stunts that had to involve everyone. That was awkward at first, since none of us had ever done such a thing, but once we got into it, it was a lot of fun. We had the smallest guy be the hero, just like in every movie, with the one woman there playing the evil head boss. The rest of us were her evil minions, and the shortest guy went first and fought the hero barehanded. They traded some hits before the hero knocked him out, and at that point I charged in with a stick and after several dramatic whiffs he caught me in an arm break, disarmed me, and killed me with my own stick. Then the biggest guy came in with his stick, and after some noisy and very sloppy whacking of sticks, the hero ducked and stabbed him.

The big laugh came when he then approached the boss, and she shouted, "I call upon the power of the heavens!" and pantomimed a big Street Fighter style super-fireball, and blasted the hero backwards across the room.  General hilarity reigned for a few minutes, until we realized that evil had just won, and that evil minions #2 and #3 had died too quickly and undramatically. So we tried it again, and had myself and the third guy last a bit longer before we were overcome. The final boss battle was cheesed up with bad comedy too, so the boss simply blasted him down this time, and then started monologing before the downed hero tripped her into a post, and popped up and finished her off once she was down.

This may be continued next week, since Gura made a few comments about how we might try making up a fight scene using just kali moves, for a demo. One that would show off the moves, in a story, while making them fun for an audience to view. It's trickier to set that up, since most of our techniques are designed to dodge or turn an attack aside, before counter-attacking and finishing off the opponent in just one or two powerful hits. Showier, flashier moves that involved a lot of leaping or spinning and that weren't instant kills would be more visually impressive for a demo, but we'll see what we can do. Maybe; sometimes mentions of future class topics fail to come to pass. There's no long term class schedule, since what we're doing on a given day is never set until the Gura thinks about what she wants to work on and sees who showed up that day.

The whole fight scene stuff was funny though, since early in my Kali career and late in my now hiatus'ed Diablo II columnist career, I wrote an article about realism in movie combat. I wouldn't revise that article very much if I were redoing it, though I would put in a bit more general theory and a lot less specific examples and pressure point discussion.  On the topic as a whole though, I now have both more and less respect for movie fights. I've worked as a stunt man for nearly two hours, and we went from nothing at all to staging a semi-realistic fight scene in that much time. True, everyone involved had at least moderate agility and combat experience, but one of the students was very new, and she was taking and throwing punches in convincing fashion after just a quarter hour of practice. So all that stuff you hear about various actors taking six months of combat training for a role, and then turning that into two or maybe three mediocre action scenes seems a bit suspect. Why do they need to train hours a day for months to do the most basic punches and kicks, when more than half of selling the move is up to the stuntman being hit, and when it'll all be edited and chopped up in post-production anyway?

I do appreciate the work in planning the fight scenes though, and in making sure the right side of the action is towards the camera. There's clearly an art to putting together a good action scene (look how many movies do a shit job of it), and only a small part of it is what the actors and stuntmen do as they clash. The camera angles, editing, music, and so on all play very large roles as well, and it's clear that a good director can steer two rank amateurs through a bruising battle, while a bad director can produce boredom from two masters.

May 20, 2005

There was Kali Thursday night, but talking about what we did would require far too much explanation to be of any interest. Basically it was a lot of stick stuff, and mostly just practicing countering and counter-attacking. We did running style, where we deal multiple hits while walking the whole time, rather than making each hit with good form and a pause upon impact. It's basically the same thing, except that you keep moving and keep walking and work your next counter into the movement, rather than resetting to a ready position between strikes. We did it walking both ways around the opponent, with very different hits each direction, and then broke it up into other forms to freelance and practice every sort of counter technique. I was paired up with the oldest student there, which was cool since I got to see how he did it, and was motivated to do better by his skill.

The exercise wasn't difficult in theory, but like most stuff in martial arts, there's a huge difference between doing the minimum acceptable form, and really throwing yourself into it and doing it as well as you can, to try and learn and improve. It's strange, in that I could have tried half as hard and looked better. I could have gone slower and stuck to moves I knew I could do, and I would have had better form and accuracy. I wouldn't have improved any though, which is why I was pushing myself to go faster, with more precision, a wider variety of hits, and so on -- even knowing it would  invite various corrections and comments from the teacher and the student I was working with.

I had fun though, and got a heavy workout too. I was soaked in sweat half an hour in, and by the time we'd been at it for an hour I was exhausted and really wishing I'd had a snack or a small early dinner, rather than just trying to make the big lunch platter of nachos last from six hours earlier. Energy reserves were crashing, and I actually went to check the time on my cell phone before class was over. I've never done that out of fatigue, other than when I was sick a month ago. Usually I want to hard work classes to go on longer and longer, especially if we're doing stick stuff, since I greatly-enjoy hitting people in the head with my length of lacquered bamboo.

Perhaps I'll have another opportunity next week, though.

June 18, 2005

Misc Kali Bruises, Part 02

While it's not the most impressive photo ever taken, I wanted to get started on this project at some point, and this'll do. At least for a couple of days, until the forearm bruises Malaya got Friday night have begun to purple nicely.

Misc Kali Bruises, Part 03

The bruise victim this time is not an arm or a leg, or even a nose. It's a stick. Click them for larger views.

July 20, 2005

New Kali Shiny!

Thanks to the fun we had playing with a broadsword last week in Kali class, and thanks to the announcement that this month's Kali workshop is going to cover broadsword and double stick... Malaya and me went and got a broadsword today. Behold!

The broadsword is there, with two sticks and a long kitchen knife beside it, for a size comparison. It's made from welded aluminum and is a nice weight and size. It's a practice sword, i.e. it has no blade, though you could still inflict quite a bit of damage with it if you were trying to (or were careless in Kali class) and the point is plenty to skewer someone with. Neither Malaya or I know quite what we're doing with a broadsword yet, but it's a lot of fun to swing it around, and they only way we'll gain the control and precision to use it well is by practicing.

A broadsword has slightly more reach than our sticks, and with the hilt protecting the hand it's deadly against a stick, since you can simply go for the hand of your attacker every time, and outreach them most of the time, hit harder with your narrow metal blade, and you've got a hilt to protect you in case of a tie. The drawback is that it's a bit slower than a lighter wooden stick, and that makes it hard to manipulate with very short strokes or in close quarters. You've got to use the weight and the speed of it (the narrow blade cuts through the air very quickly) to your advantage and keep moving, flowing each swing and cut back up to another one, with circular motions. That's how we do most stuff in Kali anyway, so it all works together nicely. It's also very effective with wrist twisting fencing type motions, since you can stab while rotating your wrist, and due to the curve of the blade the tip will change location by half a foot or more, making it trickier to fend off for your opponent. Broadswords are also very quick to swing and pump over, thanks to the concentration of weight in the handle, and this changes the moves you can make as well.

Of course I'm talking about fighting with the practice sword against wooden sticks here; with a real bladed sword you'd simply chop through the sticks with any hard impact, and pretty well disarm your opponent just like that. In a real fight against a real sword the person with the stick(s) would be on the defensive, and would have to do a lot of jabbing, fencing type movements, while trying to get an opening to get inside the longer/slower sword's range.

I'll likely bore you with many more sword stories in the future, so I'll stop for now. And yes, if we could afford it and knew what to do with them, we'd buy a lot more swords. As the years to come will doubtless prove.

 

July 25, 2005

Pleased with Myself

The one thing I'm not especially chipper about lately is Kali. It's not going poorly or anything, but suddenly I've reached an intermediate stage where everyone else who is a regular student is much more experienced than me, and they're better at all of the intangibles. Intangibles I wasn't even really aware of just a few months back, but that now seem all important.

It's all about movement. At first you strive just to keep up and learn to land your hits with open hand and stick, and then you refine them in control and accuracy, and then you work on your form and style, and that's the really tricky part I'm at now. The other stuff can be done merely with practice and timing, but the form and style require you to really change the way you move (at least the way I move). It's about flowing and staying loose and being "water." You don't punch by jerking your arm, you do it by sending a wave through your body from the other shoulder and up from your hips, and then flinging out your arm with the roll of movement. It's sort of like the dance move where you stand still with your arms out, start by doing a little dip with your left hand, and then roll up that arm, through your shoulders, and down the other arm. It can be done through multiple people; Dr. Evil does it while holding hands with Mini Me in Austin Powers 2, and the wave travels through him and into his homunculus.

The form they had in the movie was terrible, and we're not standing around practicing break dancing moves in Kali class, but that's basically the theory of the motion. It's all generated from the hips and goes down the leg with a kick, or up and out the arm with a punch or a stick or sword swing. We obviously don't do that every single time, and it's usually far too small of a circle or wave to see it flow through you, but once you grasp the concept of the movement a lot of things begin to make sense. I can now see why the Gura and Tuhan look so fluid and flowing when they move, and how you can punch them on one side of the body and get hit by the hand or foot on the other side an instant later; they just transfer the wave of motion through their body and lash out when it reaches the other side.

This is probably all very vague and hard to follow from my words, but in practice it means that Malaya and I are spending a lot of time walking around the house with our arms waving like the branches of a sea anemone, or standing still and swaying so our arms swing freely as our torsos and hips move. The hard part for me is separating the movements; my hips and torso always want to turn at the same time, and to start a motion down low, turn my hips, and then let it go into my shoulders and then down my arms is very awkward.

The motivator is that it translates into superior Kali almost instantly. Just last week we were doing a series of moves (blocking a punch with the right arm, then swinging that arm into a sort of clothesline, then flowing into several punches to the side) that we've done before, and that I've always been far slower and less precise with than the Gura. While doing them, I tried to stay loose and let my shoulders roll and my hips move, and I suddenly realized that I didn't need to do the sidearm block, stop, then curl it into a throat strike, stop, then swing my arm over and hit them in the ribs. I was doing each move with decent form, flowing from my hips and torso to give it power, etc. But I was stopping between each portion of it, since I couldn't think about doing one thing with my hips while my shoulders and arm did something else at the same time. I tried it though, and suddenly I was able to start with my hips, throw my arm sideways to block, and while my arm was still going I swung my hips to the left, let the wave go out my arm, and used that to change my arm from a downward swing into a sideways one, to the throat.

I don't know how perceptible it was to my partner (he was an occasional student and not one who is very flowing so I doubt he noticed), but it felt so much better to me, and I realized that I was doing it far faster than I had before, and with far better form and power. It's basically what we do with stick; you don't swing it left, use muscle to stop it, and then more muscle to bring it back to the right. You turn your straight swing into a circle at the end of it, and use the momentum to keep moving quickly as you come back to the right. It's faster and harder, while requiring far less effort. Easy and simple with a stick, but far harder with the body. And of course as I learn more about moving I realize that my initial stick swings were almost all arm and muscle, and that if I flowed them more they'd go faster and I'd have more control and power.

One of the humbling things about Kali is that you're constantly realizing just how awful you were a few months ago, and how limited your understanding of the martial art was at that time. Everything I thought I was good at in January and February I now know I was barely adequate at; in form if not results. And I know that will be true in a few more months. At least I hope it is; if not I'll realize that my progress has stagnated, and that would be truly depressing.



3.1) A tale of two students.

Student #1 has been doing Kali for about 3 years, and is good at most everything we do in Kali, but he's got very little of the flow or wave movement the real experts exhibit. He just does everything with muscle and speed and reflexes, much like me, though he's better (at everything but kicking) due to much more experience at it. Student #2 has been taking Kali for a couple of years and was pretty similar to me in results a few months ago. #2 has really been working on movement and flow though, and he's recently had some breakthroughs in his form. He can't quite work them into his Kali all the time yet, but suddenly his stick work is vastly improved, and it's scary as well as inspiring, seeing how quickly he got so much better. #2 isn't yet better than #1, but you can see huge potential for continued improvement, while #1 has basically been stagnating for 6 or 12 months, as he learns new tricks and refinements, but hasn't changed his basic movement enough to really make a big difference.

I hope it doesn't take me a year to get to where I can move like #2 is now, but I'd certainly take that over being #1 in two years. And even though I'm not either of them now, I'm happy to just see clearly enough to realize where they are relative to me. (And yes, I'll probably look back on this in 4 or 6 months and think what a completely clueless noob I was now. That's par for the course thus far, at least.)

July 27, 2005

New Kali Shiny #2

And then there were two!

July 29, 2005

The Week in (Simulated) Violence

I'm never sure about the purpose of my Kali posts. Some are to entertain and inform the readers, but some are more like diary entries for myself to look back on one day and see just what I was doing and thinking at a given time. I don't really go all out on making them entertaining and funny though (I'd lie more) and I don't make them personal and detailed enough to really be useful memory aids for me in the future. So are these the best of both worlds, or are they failing doubly?

Encouraging introduction aside, I went to two Kali classes and a workshop this week.

Tuesday Night Class: I have no memory of this one. We did something, possibly with sticks, while spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we'd do in the double stick and broadsword seminar the next night. Oh, and everyone was showing off their new broadswords to each other; a largely pointless exercise, since most of us had identical training ones bought from the same local stores.

Wednesday Night Seminar: This was a lot of fun. We did broadsword stuff for the first hour and a half, mostly solo. Tuhan (the master) would show us a strike, usually one making a circular motion so we could swing it up behind ourselves and bring it down again, and we'd do our best to emulate him while standing in two rows with enough space to avoid killing anyone with our back swing. Broadsword isn't that different than heavy stick, which we practice all the time; you just have to do larger swinging motions, and you want to strike with the middle of the weapon and then slice along to the tip, making long cuts on the opponent. With a stick we constantly strive to hit with the very tip, for maximum force, so some adjustment is needed. You also don't need to keep your grip as straight with a stick, since there's no blade on it and it doesn't matter what face hits the target. That's obviously a bit different with a broadsword.

After going through a few strikes that way, we did some stuff in pairs, practicing basic counters and parries against an attacker, and then killing him in various ways. My favorite was the behind the back stab, where you tuck the sword behind your back, stab it over to the left of your body as you step past your opponent, and then whip it around while turning and chop off their head from behind. Best of all, you not only can do it with a twirling flourish, you have to, since that's the fastest way to move it both behind and out from behind your back. It's like showing off that serves a purpose.

After the broadsword stuff we moved on to double stick for maybe an hour, and that was both enjoyable and frustrating. I love double stick, and practice it all the time on my own. This is useful since I'm very comfortable with two weapons, and I can keep the constant spinning motion (siniwali) going very smoothly, and I'm good at attacking with them. It's bad since I never practice against another person, and when you've got to keep circling them, time your spinning to get your weapons ready on the correct side of your body, and then swing them to hit the opponent's hands as he swings his own weapons, it's damn hard to coordinate all of that. I've done it a few times, and been better than I was for my 30 seconds in front of everyone on Wednesday night, but for whatever reason I was just terrible at it then. I just couldn't get in a rhythm, and kept banging into the sticks of my sparring partner, rather than blending to his speed and hitting his strikes as they passed me by. It was sad too, since others said I had the best siniwali of anyone there but Tuhan, and then my actual fighting abiility was inversely proportional. Sort of like a really hot model who keeps falling off the catwalk.

Watching Tuhan, and also my Gura, go with double stick was inspiring though. Tuhan was truly awesome with them, hitting like a machine, always on target, always taking out both sticks of the attacker, always driving two or three shots into their head or other vulnerable area before they could recover from being blocked on their attack. I honestly didn't think it was possible to be that good with two weapons at once, and while I was very disappointed in my own showing, I was inspired by seeing just how well it could be done. I've just gotta get Malaya to spar with me a bit more, so I can work on my timing and positioning and get used to fending off attacks while moving into my own counter attacks. She just needs to stand there and swing (slowly, for now, given my skill level) so I can practice. The tricky part is that you've got to keep your sticks moving in the siniwali, but speed it up and slow it down so your sticks are in the right position to counter their attacks, no matter how they move and how they strike. It takes a sort of four dimensional timing, since you've got to control your own position, estimate their speed and direction, and anticipate their next attack before they make it. Strong wrists and arms are essential as well, since you've got to snap your strikes right to their hands with good aim, precision, and speed, and you've got to keep track of your own sticks, knowing if you should hit and pull it back low, high, wrap it around your body, turn more sideways, and so on. Etc.

Thursday Night Kali: There were six of us in class, and the four guys had all been to the workshop the night before and everyone had a sore forearm from all the broadsword swinging, and most of us had sore legs from some of the lunge-like double stick footwork we'd been doing. The other two people in class were newer female students, and while Gura said we'd do something light without weapons, I ended up partnered with the biggest guy there, who is also the best open handed fighter. We did a few drills at first, practicing basic parries and counters, but my partner quickly wanted to do more and began free styling around me while I threw lefts and rights and let him practice parrying those and hitting me.

From there we began doing more freestyle, and were soon into out and out open sparring, mostly in long arm style, which is slower and a bit more graceful than your typical jab-heavy boxing match. We use both hands though, swinging backhand a lot, include all sorts of kicks, go in close for neck breaks and arm twisting submission holds, and so on. He destroyed me, of course, but we had a great (and very sweaty) time and both learned from it.

I even got him to go at more than the 50% speed he usually uses for sparring in class, and it was interesting to see just how quickly I had to move and react to stay alive at that point. He's so good at open hand that he basically does it all in slow motion, just practicing his form and aim and such, while the person he's going against is usually getting in their hits only by sheer speed. I was guilty of that, to some extent, but I tried to use form and technique and style more than just giving myself the "I'll go really fast while you're going half speed." illusion of success.

I got in my fair share of hits, for once, marveled once again at how good he is at blocking any hit from any angle, and got some great practice at blocking his attacks and counter attacking. The more I spar, with stick or kicking or empty hand, the more I appreciate that a fight between two competent opponents is really all about counter attacks and defense. Anyone who knows what they're doing (which sadly does not rule out quite a few professional boxers/K1 guys/ultimate fighters) can defend themselves well enough that they're almost impossible to hit cleanly. The way you get hits then, is to nail them when they're open, and that's when they've got something extended to hit you. Of course you've got to avoid their hit while moving to get in your own, which requires super reflexes or a lot of luck and timing, and there's nothing to say you won't just be opening yourself up when you swing at them.

Check out this compilation of old Mike Tyson knockouts, for instance. He makes a few happen with sheer bludgeonery, but most of them come after an opponent's punch; quite often a hook Tyson ducks, before exploding with his own overhead left hook. His style wouldn't work for Kali; you could just kick or knee him in the face as much as he ducks, but it's amazing how well it works in those videos, and how terrible most of his opponents are at defending themselves. You never swing and then stand there with your hands down; always keep at least one up beside your head, and ideally both. I can't see how these guys got through years of amateur boxing without knowing that much, but then again, at least half the boxing matches we see on TV feature constant terrible form and execution. That's why the occasional brilliant boxer like Tyson, or Ali, or Leonard, is able to dominate at so many levels or for such a long time. Simply knowing how to defend, how to keep your head moving, and how to counterpunch is invaluable.


And now there's no more Kali for me this weekend, while Malaya's going to her women's class tonight and then again on Sunday morning before I'm even awake. Hopefully I can get her to do some practice Saturday and/or Monday, since even if she just stands there and throws slow 1s and 2s with a stick, I can work on my double stick technique.

And yes, this is far more than almost any of you wanted to know, judging by how often (virtually never) anyone offers any feedback on martial arts stuff. I guess this answers my "why do I write these" question from the intro though, eh?s

Misc Kali Bruises Blisters, #04

Motivated by my disappointment in my double stick performance during Wednesday's Kali seminar, I dragged the mentally weary Malaya outside Saturday evening, when the day's heat had faded, for some Kali practice. She was wiped from working furiously all weekend on her nearly-completed writing project, but she was game enough to swing some slow attacks at me to let me work on my double stick technique against them. I wasn't good, but I wasn't awful, and I definitely felt myself getting the hang of it. It's all in the timing and preparation, moving your body from side to side, spinning the sticks to get them ready on the correct side of your body, and knowing which hand to strike with first. And as usual, it's pretty well impossible to describe in words.

After twenty minutes or so of that she went back inside to shower off and get ready for dinner, but since I was well warmed up and into it, I kept going, working on double stick footwork, working on striking from every angle with the left or right hand first, working on making my siniwali faster and slower and smoother and so on.

I noticed a few sore spots on my hands while we were playing, but since I constantly get minor blisters from stick work, blisters that turn into calluses over time, I didn't pay them much mind at the time. I noticed them later that evening though, when they kept hurting and looked bubbly, and when I eventually had to snip open the dead skin to let out the juice.

s

s

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.