Continuing Steps in Karate

I had a silat suffian seminar yesterday with Guru Maul Mornie and was once again deeply impressed by his skill, the depth of thought and care put into the seminar's content and by his art. What follows are some of my impressions, observations and thoughts on the seminar.  I was only able to attend Saturday's class, which was primarily concerned with basic drills that were to form the foundation for a lot of Sunday's content.  While I would have loved to have gone to both days, I was really happy to have attended just the Saturday session.  If truth be told, I tend to get more out of days where I can focus on the fundamentals, as too many techniques in one sitting can make my poor head spin! As usual, what follows is my interpretation/impression only and is subject to my general lack of memory, filters and incomprehensibility. correct distancing is vital.  Too far away, the attacker can reset, too close, the attacker can overpower the technique.  For practice,...

I had the good fortune to attend a 2-day seminar this weekend with guru Maul Mornie of Silat Suffian Bela Diri.  It's a Bruneian martial art and mostly weapons-based. This weekend, we did knife-knife, knife-hand and machete work.  It was my first time working with machete (apart from my teen years hacking acres of blackberry) and although we didn't progress much beyond the fundamentals with it, I still found it fascinating. We started Saturday with an hour and a half of basic drills - the basic cuts with a knife (over/fore, back, thrust), and the basic defenses against those attacks.  These formed the basis of the rest of the seminar. It was interesting to me that all basics began as knife v. knife.  Everything we did for the seminar (even the empty hand v. knife) went back to this basic premise.  It was also interesting to my uneducated viewpoint (I have done bugger-all knife work before) that the knife was never used to block/check/intercept the incoming kn...

Last month, I attended my first Silat seminar, run by Maul Mornie of silat suffian bela diri.  It was possibly the most enjoyable seminar (martial arts or otherwise) I have ever attended. So, what is it?  Silat Suffian Bela Diri is a Bruneian martial art (about the only one I've heard of, at that).  It is the family art of Maul Mornie, who took the seminar.  From my impression, it is an integrated weapon/weaponless martial art.  By integrated, I mean that the core principles of the art are the same regardless of whether there is a weapon or not, and that the same body structures are used in empty and armed conflict.  Maul seems to spend a lot of the year travelling from country to country running seminars in the art. Things I enjoyed: 6 hours of doing nothing but physical partner-based training the core principles and techniques are congruent with the core principles and techniques of my karate, so I was able to pick them up well, and not...