FMA Chariry Seminar - 14th Oct '07

Filipino Martial Arts Charity Seminar - 14 Oct '07

For the 1st time(hopefully not the last) 7 Filipino Martials arts came together to raise money for Irish priest Fr. Shay Cullen & with work woth charitable organisation PREDA.

The event was a great success raising €1200 for this very worthwhile charity.

All of us at Warriors Eskrima Ireland would like to thank everyone who attended & all those who donatated their time, money & year of experience in the Filipino Martial Arts. We'd particularly like to thank those people who couldn't attend but still made donations to this event.

Here is a very brief synopsis' of what was covered at the event....a more detailed report coming soon!

The two Dave’s had the pleasure or should I say pressure of being first to showcase their art.

They opened the event by briefly going through the first 6 angles of attack taught in the Sayoc system then & the tapping counters.


Demo by: Dave Joyce & Dave Greaney
 All of the attacking lines were tight angles which left little room for someone to counter, the angles were so tight as it’s predominantly a blade you don’t need to generate much force, simply allow the blade to do most of the work.

Angles 5 & 6 also incorporated secondary live(non-weapon) hand hits to help gain entry for the blade strike.

Master Ding & Paul demonstrated some of the empty hand self defence aspects of the Filipino martial arts, they demonstrated some wristlock counters which progressed to lock & takedowns of their own. They also covered trapping against punches.
Demo by Ding Llanera & Paul Gahan 		What struck me from their demo was Ding’s unique teaching manner which was very concise & his use of analogies to help people to learn the techniques was excellent.
Aidan & Richard’s section was insightful in it’s clarity as the took what appeared to be 1 simple counter to a right-handed vertical attack & broke it down into all it’s individual parts until all the precise nuances of this Illusitrimo technique came through.
Demo by Richard McMahon & Aidan Corcoran 		They countered by angling off to their left while simultaneously striking with a Planchada(Horizontal strike to the stomach) – followed by an upward strike(a verticale) to the arm before finishing of with a downward strike to the hand or weapon to disarm the opponent.

We'd like to thank Aidan & Richard for going the extra mile literally,for this event as they both flew in from London .

Aran & Dave firstly began by clarifying why Atienza & Sayoc Kali use the training rig, as a lot of people misunderstand & see it as posturing. It is a very effective training tool as it gets people familiar with the most likely places a blade can be drawn from as well as helping when doing disarm drills as you don't focus on the blade once disarmed you simply draw another one if available.

Demo by Aran Keenan & Dave Joyce
 They went "Evolution Drill 1" which appeared to be their form of flow drill but it has a built in win lose scenario where as a lot of other flow drills can infinitely loop. What I took from the drill was how immediately it combat applicable it was.

They finished up by testing everyone’s reflexes with a hand striking drill with padded sticks & it became clear why they keep all their strikes so tight as to try to get within their opponents reactionary gap.

Paul & Steve covered some aspect of corto(close range) stick fighting & help to dispel the idea of Doce Pares corto being all about a whipping circular strikes in favour of more direct punyos strikes.

Demo by Paul Cox & Steve Rooney
 They went through Doce Pares variations of the most commom FMA flow drill...Hubud.

Paul seemed to have a very open minded view of the FMA’s on display & noticed all the similarities & cross over within the styles & he pointed out “We all do the same thing but with a different style to it.”

Double Stick – Within the Warriors system Double Stick drills drills are broken down into:

1. Co-ordination Drills
2. Flow Drills
3. Combat Applications Drills


Demo by Shane O'Neill & John Hoey
In this section they discussed combat application double stick techniques against particular fighter types e.g. a fighter who won’t engage but instead prefers to counter strike or a fighter who uses backhand witik(jab like) strikes a lot & how to setup strikes with baiting, fainting & other techniques.
Nicolas & Aidan had the unfortunate task of being last & trying to hold the interest of a tiring & hungry group after already having trained for around 6 hours.

Nicolas did however keep the crowd in trawled by livening up events by firing Aidan to the ground a few times while demonstrating some effectively simple disarms.


Demo by Nicolas Maraite & Aidan Canavan

 

What struck me about Newman Escrima was there unorthodox striking angles (1&2) as both were stayed on centreline & the angles was created by the angling the body & not the stick.