SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

All of the early weapons requirements are patterns. The purpose of these patterns is to help develop a comfort level with weapons. You learn to move in tandem with another person while swinging a weapon in a prescribed manner.

It’s not fighting but it is challenging. In that way, it is a baby step toward developing some courage and competence around weapons. Once you’ve got those basic patterns nailed down, it is easy to get complacent when you do them with a partner. Don’t. Don’t let the patterns become a patty cake drill. Add some variation to challenge yourself.

In the video above you can see some basic ideas (borrowed from Sifu Jeremy) on how to mix things up with the pattern called double sinawali.

The way we play stick sparring, if you hit your partner ANYWHERE, you get a point. Well, at least that is the way we would play it if we had those awesome helmets – so instead we play with contact anywhere except the head.

Regardless of our lack of helmets, it makes getting out of the way a hugely valuable skill. Sure, you can block their strike with your stick but what happens when your stick isn’t in the right place to do so? You get out of the way.

Now imagine you’ve got no stick to fight back with. Evasion becomes even more vital. Before we sparred tonight, we played stick versus no stick and worked the idea of getting out of the way and then getting in close so that the person with the stick was jammed up because who wants to get hit with a stick?