Start with your basic level call and response type drills in safety gear with increasing amounts of intensity. Initially focus on single skills until you can consistently pull them off under pressure. Initially do the drills in a structured fashion (for maybe 5 minutes) then add in movement and un-telegraphed attacks, so no turn taking and range control and entry become important. Once you've got that down start working short combinations, linked skills and more advanced skills. Go through this process at each level until you have a solid skillset. Take your existing drills (you may find they need some modifications with pressure added) and create new ones from bits of Jurus. It's also good to add in scenario based work and adrenal stress training.
I was responding to a reply by KunderEmp. And yes lineage is important when we talk about Cikalong and it's mentioned link to Kuntao. Now do you have (and anyone else for that matter) anything to say on how you can make your Silat practice more effective? I have no need to make my Silat more effective As it is i'm fine with the methods I train and feel no need to change them. Some of the silat styles are very much about conditioning and toughening the body, i do like those training methods. You have to know what it feels like to get hit in the kidney, face and liver without wearing gloves. I don't mind getting bruised up. Is it with full power to the liver or face? No, but enough contact to make you respect the fists. What is very helpful is training your stuff with people of other sylets. You should try your own thing, not in a common sparring format, but by testing out your techniques against some of the attacks of thaiboxers, krav maga guys, wing chun etc. Especially the parts where people ask 'but what if i do this' are interesting since they test your understanding of your own style. Sometimes people stay sceptical after several answers, which is their right, but then sometimes you need to show a bit more. And sometimes you get hit in the face or somewhere else which is fine as well since you know you probably did not follow the 'rules' of your jurus. Faith in the effectiveness of your system helps you further.
Right, so you don't actually know what it's like. Trust me, if I hit you clean in the liver with a 16oz boxing glove on, you're going to be on the floor. Inconsistent with your previous statement. Again, if I hit you in the face at half strength barehanded you are going to be bleeding and probably broken or unconscious. You are increasingly painting a picture of someone who is very unfamiliar with the realities of violent struggle.
Pff Sifu Ben, just because I don't use the same methods to train my style doesn't make me wrong. It might sound like a surprise to you but there are other ways as well. Now if you are willing to listen to other ways, which you were respectfully doing before that's fine, but painting a picture of silat being useless without following your path sounds a bit close minded. I dabbled enough with styles like JKD and Krav Maga to see and train those methods as well. It's just that I found a silat style that gave me more than enough to keep it real. You just might not have encountered it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I happy you found your ways of training, it's just a bit sad that you dismiss other views. I trained stuff like krav maga to see what that was about, did you train traditional effective silat? I know that a good hit with a 16oz glove can do, also to the face. But in my experience i don't need that experience frequently done to me, since on the street they don't have gloves on. So instead of learning how to eat those punches (which is still very different to a bareknuckle hit as you mentioned) i'm focussing on other areas of skill. Lets agree to disagree allright?
Taozit, even in this very post you are making derogatory fallacious statements about equipment training, yet ask people to be respectful and understand that they don't have experience. How can you not see that this is inconsistent? Also, you state that your training places emphasis on absorbing blows and that it's valuable to take blows so you know what they feel like, then say you don't need that experience. How can you not see that this is inconsistent? Or that it's inconsistent with your earlier statements about technique Vs strength and living in a rough place where people are frequently armed? Try absorbing a strike from a pisau. How many times do I have to say it? There is nothing wrong with Silat. This isn't about Silat. It's about you and your ability to perform Silat under duress against a motivated opponent with any kind of skill. Yet again, as Ap, Hannibal and I have all told you THIS IS NOT ABOUT SILAT. These are universal concepts that apply to all martial arts. I should point out that you've not really said much about how you believe that functional training can be achieved, apart from your assertion that bare handed is better (which we've explained several times over is fallacious). As I've told you before, ALL of us have experience of barehanded drilling and sparring, we all know what it entails. Seriously, I have black belts from schools that do it. We are not speaking from ignorance about the subject, we are intimately familiar with it and it's pros and cons, and the bottom line is that barehanded training compromises pressure to a fatal degree. You cannot know that your techniques work because you've never actually done them. I've not dismissed your viewpoint, I've meticulously explained the flaws in it.
Sorry Sifu Ben, this is NOT about me and my abilities to perform under stress. The very subject of this thread is 'Is silat useless or misunderstood?' That's what this is about. Now my opinion is that rbsd training is not necessary for having effectivity in silat. Perhaps for specific people yes, for people in police enforcement..yes. But for a guy like me who wants to be able to defend himself and loved ones in a troublesome situation? Personally I don't thinks so. Silat, some styles more than others, has enough good by itself, also in training methods. We come from different worlds Sifu Ben. Which is ok by me. But don't argue in a thread about 'silat and it's usefullness' and claim this is not about silat. If it was not about that, then why respond to this thread in the first place. As for your logic about me being inconsistent: i mentioned that i prefer having contact in a training. I mentioned that i prefer not using protection (as in bodyprotection or gloves), and i also mentioned that i don't see the use in getting hit with gloves on frequently. To me that is not being inconsistent, it's about a different way of training. It's also not about strength as you mentioned, but as i said before, on these subjects we totally think different. To give you a hint: - To be able to withstand some amounts of pain on the arms, legs, body etc., does not mean that it is our fighting tactic to just stand there and take the hits. Also training this stuff has almost nothing to do with strength but mainly with proper technique and funnily relaxation. It can help in other subjects like mentality or proper body mechanics. You are right you can't absorb a hit from a knife, thats why it is not part of our fighting tactic to just cover up and take the pain. Anyway this discussion is not gonna get solved any time soon. Let's get the other guys get some opinions in ok?
Taozit, if you look at where I came into this thread it was in direct response to your fallacious ideas about contact training, and that's how it's continued. If you'd refrain from derogatory and fallacious posts about contact training your own position would seem more consistent. You may think you're saying one thing but you're really saying something very different. Yet again how are people who are training with higher levels of contact than you NOT getting this conditioning training, learning how to manipulate their breath when hit etc? Are you better at combat than LEOs then? For them to need such training and for you to not? You've stated that self defence is an important training goal for you yet say you don't need the kind of training that professionals view as essential? This discussion is going nowhere Taozit because you're not answering questions, instead trying to derail the conversation with foot stamping cries of "you don't know Silat". I've asked direct questions about Silat techniques in the past day and you've not answered them. I've asked you to discuss your training methodologies as you seem to feel that I don't understand how you train, and you don't do so. I have laid out the basis of developing functional training methods for ANY martial art and all you've done is go on about old ways (and let's face it, old ways include dying of smallpox, child prostitution and women being denied the vote, so old ways aren't necessarily better) and culture. Unless there is something unique about Silat techniques which in 20 years of looking I've not seen any hint of, Silat is made useful in the same way that any martial art is made useful. Through functional resistance training.
OK, so to summarise. Questions you've not answered. What prevents you from practicing Silat drills with safety equipment? How does training with safety equipment prevent you from using movements directly from Jurus? How does sparring with your classmates with safety equipment prevent you from working and developing your Silat tactics? Why is training at 20% intensity more representative of a fight than training with gloves on? What specific methods do you feel offer better options.
I don't want to sound like a mr. knowitall, i realise that sometimes it might look like that but i think this has more to do with lack of proper english grammar skills, or subtleties in the language. I just want to mention that good silat doesn't have to adopt too much to use it in modern day altercations on the street. the only problem might be legal implications which can be good thing to train for police men for instance.
Now that was a very good and well thought out post. I will think on it and share some thoughts regarding the points.
I just want to say thank you to everyone in this thread. It's gotten heated, and I've been tempted to intercede. But I'm really glad to see that people with diametrically opposed and strongly held viewpoints can still recognize when they need to step back and evaluate the tack they're taking. I don't expect that anyone will necessarily come around to anyone else's line of thinking here. And I'm certainly not expecting us all to sing camp songs together around the fire. But you all have my genuine appreciation for the civility and thought-out responses.
OK, this is going to take a while, so bear with me The whole point of gloves is that they reduce the effectiveness of your striking. It's training, not a fight. Again, barehanded you're not striking to your full ability, so this is something of a non issue. However, with gloves on you can train to something approaching realsitic power and intensity. What styles don't punch with just the knuckles? Everyone who wears gloves doesn't complain about the difference, even though their punching mechanics are the same (in my style the name for a straight punch is even pierce). I'm not a big fan of body armour for general training, I only suggested it in that instance because doing high reps of ginger fist strikes to the ribs gets pretty old pretty quickly, and also because ginger fist is one that if you haven't thrown it at speed against a target you're going to break your hand against a real opponent (I practice it on pads). However, on the Sim days where you're doing it for 5 hours, I wouldn't want to be doing it without body armour. I can assure you from my experiences that you can still feel plenty through body armour. This does raise an issue however of pain perception in combat. You may well find that when your opponent is hopped up on adrenaline those stinging shots have much less effect than they do in training. If your shot isn't powerful enough to break their structure with gloves on then it probably won't for real. For straight shots to the body if you can't break their structure through a body shield then you probably won't for real. Certainly I've been hit in the torso twice for real and both times I barely felt it. Again, the purpose of punching is not to hurt people with your knuckles, it's to deliver percussive force to/through the target. As I've said before, all training is a compromise between safety and realism. I will always argue that pressure is the thing you least want to compromise.
One of the big problems throughought this thread is you appear to equate equipment training and sparring to kickboxing. They are tools to be utilised however you need. If you change the emphasis of sparring you change the nature of it. Even in boxing covering is the defence of last resort. Footwork and head movement should be used first. If you spar with intensity you pretty quickly realise that standing and covering are not desirable, because you still take a battering. Novices are reluctant to engage because they're afraid. This is why it's imprtant to emphasise that sparring is training/play and there are no winners or losers. However, consider that if they behave this way in the safety of a class how are they going to behave when there's real consequences? Regular sparring in the right environment makes you much more willing to engage. Also when martial arts students are exposed to real violence the reason they don't do well is because they're unprepared for the pressure and intensity of a real assault.
True most folks do. But! You can 'spar' in a completely un-kickboxing manner if you so wish. And you can use MMA style gear instead of boxing stuff. And you can make it a rule that you stop yourself going more into 'sparring distance'. By only engaging at close-range (real fighting range). Stopping and starting to 'reset' if you need to. I try to retain my Silat in any kind of 'sparring' and equipment work. Mostly though I end up defaulting to a more Muay Chiaya style. Which is an older 'blade aware' system of Muay and NOT 'Ring Rules' Muay Thai as such. This is probably because most of my martial base is in systems of Muay. And whilst the system of Silat I train in has certain things in common with the older muay systems. It's still different enough to me to be 'foreign'. But! I recently managed a number of pure Silat takedowns against equipmented-up and expereinced muay thai fighters. Also I managed to pull off a couple of purely Silat sequences in an MMA class. Basically what I'm saying is be prepared to take a few smacks in the gob etc now and then. Just doing static drills against compliant strikes is not enough. As it doesn't replicate (or come near to) the duress you feel when someone is pressuring you. True. Adrenaline and duress are the great levelers. A lot of Martial Arts techniques completely fall apart when the 'tremblies' happen.
Ive pulled Silat takedowns of when I was wrestling with decent wrestlers to,its all a matter of timing and experience imho
The second part of this paragraph goes back to my previous point that you falsely link equipment training with kickboxing. The first part brings us to a large training concept, the difference between tool development and delivery systems. The techniques that you use are tools. Traditional martials arts training (although of course this should really be the oxymoron modern traditional) is pretty good at tool development. Most people unless they're in a McDojo can strike a pad with decent force, execute throws and jointlocks in a mechanically sound fashion etc. However time and again experience has shown that most people are unable to perform said techniques against a fully resisting opponent. This is because their delivery systems are deficient. To be able to utilise a technique you need to control the relative positions of you and your opponent's hips and head, and manipulate the relative positions of your limbs. Otherwise the technique that you drilled beautifully against your training partner or the strike that nearly split a punchbag won't come anywhere near working. Now, there will always be tools that are too dangerous to train in a fully live manner, that's the nature of the game. However, the delivery system for that technique for the technique will almost certainly be the same as a technique that is safer to train. You'll often hear people in "sport vs street" discussions say "if you can't consistently jab someone in the face then you're not going to be able to poke them in the eye". This is because the delivery system for those two techniques is the same. I train in a high concept system where everything is broken down into ten basic movement types. If I throw a straight punch (which is easy and safe to do with pads on) I'm using the same or very similar mechanics as with a palm, a finger jab, a tiger claw, a crane's beak, a crane's head etc etc. The tools are different, but the delivery system is the same (it's called Tsop or pierce/stab in CLF). It's not safe to kick someone in the side of the knee, but it's reasonably safe to kick them in the bottom of the quadriceps. This way you can safely train the delivery systems with good pressure, and then develop the tools when doing your tool development work separately. Then you're much better prepared to use that tool when it all goes wrong.
and wrestling practice. As I've said all along, Silat has some great technical material (I've seen Sherdog top 10 ranked fighters drilling entries and takedowns from it), but all too many people are ignoring the benefits of live training.
