Saturday 23 January 2010

FMA - Filipino Martial Arts

At STMA we tap the FMA for the core of our wepons training. These systems have unarmed combat that is drawn directly from the weapons training, which makes them unique in MA.



Kali-Eskrima

The core art. Kali is a blade art while Eskrima is a stick art. As we train with stix, there is not much obvious difference between Kali and Eskrima at the lower levels.

K-E is seperated into sub-systems.

Sinawalli - fighting with two sticks. This is done at the long or largo range.

Serrada - close range single stick art that moves through the ranges of largo, medio and corto.

Largo Mano - long range stick. Often done with the longer 3 foot stick. Builds to longer weapons including sword, staff and spear.

Kadena de mano
- knife and hand art - drills include knife to knife, knife to hand, and hand to hand. The hand to hand combat develops from the knife drilling.

Pekiti tersia
One of the Filipino knife systems I trained in extensively which has some great drills relative to kadena de mano and knife training and defence.


Unarmed combat systems:

Panatukan
Filipino boxing, developed from kadena de mano. Has much more use of trapping and destruction than Western boxing. Fills the ground between boxing and Wing Chun. If you are having trouble making your traps work in boxing phase, panatukan has the answers. The knife defence training makes the boxing much more sensitive and effective.

Sikaran
Filipino kickboxing, similar to Muay Thai but much more evasive and sneaky.

Pananjakman
The art of low line kicking, similar to kempo, atemijutsu or koshijutsu. A training phase, becomes an art in it's own right at a higher level.


I don't want to overload you by thinking there are lots of different arts to learn. Quite the opposite - we may well only use 10% of an art like panatukan at a certain level, but we will use it to bridge the gap between boxing and Wing chun and knife to empty hand.