Is Kali so complete as to be devestating on it's own against any art?

Discussion in 'Filipino Martial Arts' started by Richdog, Apr 7, 2005.

  1. burungkol

    burungkol Team Yaw-Yan

    i bet the male lion came with arnis sticks on his paws. :love: :love: hehe, cheers! :D
     
  2. Cuchulain82

    Cuchulain82 Custodia Legis

    @filipino stick-fighting

    I am not an experienced Kali/Arnis/FMA type. However, I am an experienced fencer, and have an anecdote that seems relevant.

    I recently moved to New York City from a small town in Vermont. I had always wanted to study MA, but none were offered locally besides Karate, and I wasn't interested. I began fencing in high school and continued through college, and by the end of college I was a very proficient fencer, a saber fighter specifically.

    Upon moving to NYC I decided to find a MA school and fill that longtime goal. I looked for 5 months, trying to decide between BJJ and MT. In my search I stumbled across a JKD school teaching Kali concepts.

    "Kali" I thought "That's like, filipino stick fighting, right? How hard can it be- I'll bet I can at least hold my own."

    So I went in and took my free half-hour trial lesson, which included 10 minutes of kali-style stick work. Literally 2 minutes into my free lesson, the instructor had disarmed me, pinned my left arm under my right arm, and rendered me totally useless and incapable of defending myself. Had that been a real fight, even though I was (and still am) a solid saber fighter, I would not have been able to stop him from killing me.

    The point is, I'm pretty good with a sword. But only only under certain rules. FMA removed that ruleset for it's practicioners. It changed the way I went about finding a dojo. The end result? I started studying Kali last week.
     
  3. burungkol

    burungkol Team Yaw-Yan

    nice to hear your story. glad you had your share of the fma. welcome to the league :D
     
  4. BatongBuhay

    BatongBuhay Valued Member

    tricky

    yes id say its devastating... but id qualify against what.

    ultimately its the level of training of the practitioner and maybe even his well-roundedness as a fighter that should be the indicator since you cant fight what you dont understand.

    but what Eskrima/kali/arnis/FMA does is inform the practitioner of every available reality and his options versus those realities.

    we study the ranges of fighting for our weapons as well as the inter-relationship between that of the opponent's... so at the begining it generally is an advantage versus practitoners who train for 1 range exclusively.

    partly it's practicality or rather the pragmatic aspect that has been the core belief around it hence it's perceived invincibility
     
  5. ap Oweyn

    ap Oweyn Ret. Supporter

    Styles are like universities. They're a collection of resources. The fact that someone attends a good university doesn't guarantee that they'll turn out to be well-educated, productive students. It just guarantees that the resources will be available to them should they choose to take advantage of them.

    Same with FMA. It encompasses a lot of resources. But it's up to the person to take advantage of them. Same as with many other styles. Nobody automatically gets good at knife drills, grappling, low-line kicking, and stickwork simply by virtue of taking up kali.


    Stuart
     

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