Continuing Steps in Karate

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...