I went over something of the history and origin of combatives training in parts 1 and 2.

Modern combatives originated from the necessity of teaching military recruits something useful of close quarters combat in a minimal amount of time.

What happened most often was, a skilled martial artist would pick a small number of his favorite techniques from a number of systems, judged to be effective in the most common situations for the circumstances he was training them for.

For an example, see here: http://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Dozen-Techniques-Self-Defense-Situation/dp/1581603177/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225551295&sr=1-2

Of course, when you have recruits who, by circumstance or choice, are going to be in the military for a long time, it’s natural to want to extend and deepen the training with more techniques.

At some point after adding a whole lot of techniques, what you have is another martial art.

That’s what some of Fairbairn’s diciples have done, see: http://www.defendo.com/

And lately, you have had militaries deliberately setting out to design a new martial art from the ground up. See: Tongkut Moosul, Krav Maga, Haganah, KAPAP and Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP).

You’ll notice that three out of five on that list, come from Israel.

This should not surprise anyone, Israel was and is, one of the primary battlegrounds of “asymetric warfare,”(1) which is the most significant driver of modern martial arts development.(2)

This was necessary because formal martial arts had too often become either
sports (3), classical combat forms preserved as traditional cultural practices (4), or physical exercise to promote spiritual development (5).

Militaries, and law enforcement, had to return to the roots of martial arts to find the combat effectiveness that had been lost.

This they did by turning to older forms of sport martial arts (6), and by looking to parts of the world where men still fought seriously, such as the streets of Hong Kong and Taipei, and the jungles and villages of the Philippines.

In sum: combatives is not a new development, it is martial arts returning to their source and orignal purpose.

Next: Old is new again.
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(1) Asymetric warfare, to put it bluntly, is when you have to power to exterminate your enemy, and won’t.

This kind of delicacy is relatively new to history, and pretty exclusively western.

Ghengis Khan used extermination of whole cities which refused to yield, or violated Mongol customs by killing envoys*, as a matter of policy.

Democratic Athens did it once during the Peloponesian War at Melos, and almost immediately regretted it.**

Subduing enemies who hide among civilians, as opposed to, “Kill them all. The Lord will know his own”*** requires soldiers to go among hostile or wavering populations and dig out the enemy up close and personal.****

* Sometimes rulers of cities and nations who thought their subjects might be less than enthusiastic about fighting to preserve their rulers’ lives would murder Mongol ambassadors. Then their people would have to fight for them.

** Euripides staged The Trojan Women the same year as the slaughter by Athens of all male inhabitants of Melos above the age of 10.

*** Oliver Cromwell’s orders during the Irish campaign.

**** The parallel development driver in civilian martial arts was the outlawing of private warfare, duels and feuds, in modern western societies.

(2)Another is the Philippines, which I’ll deal with later. (The primary arts I practice are headquartered in Israel and the Philippines respectively.)

(3) Judo, Tae Kwon Do, sport Karate, etc.

(4) Kenjutsu and the more esoteric arts such as Ho-jutsu (traditional Japanese gunnery with matchlocks), and Yoroi kumi-uchi (wrestling in traditional samurai armor)etc. Modern Chinese Wu-shu falls into both categories.

This category is important, because if the forms still reflect the original training for combat reality, the function can still be recovered by analysis of the movements and comparison with other arts.

For example, Yoroi kumi-uchi is practiced by two armored men wrestling for position to see who can pull an armor-piercing dagger and get the other first. The art’s relevance has unexpectedly revived in an age of dragon-scale body armor.

(5) Tai Chi, modern budo such as Aikido etc.

(6) For how this might be done, take boxing for example. It’s a great study, and many Asian martial artists consider the handwork among the most advanced in the world. More than many other martial arts, western boxing teaches “the continuous and returning fist” and the art of delivering punishing blows while maintaining good cover.

It is however, hemmed in by a lot of rules that reduce combat effectiveness, and the gloves protect the hands, which restrict hand formations and allow techniques like hitting the skull with knuckles – almost guaranteeing breakage bare-handed.

To “weaponize” boxing, one might get competent at it, study the fouls – and practice them. Practice on the heavy bag with light gloves, and perhaps take up the archaic fist conditioning (though that’s a little hard-core for most tastes.*)

*Bare-knuckle boxers used to punch to the head with a standing fist (Chinese “Sun” fist) rather than the palm-down flat fist. They also used to condition the fists by soaking them in brine, brine and whiskey, or horse piss.

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Review and History

In part 1 I mentioned that close combat training needs for military, police and civilians are different in focus.

Military personnel need training to quickly kill or incapacitate an enemy at close quarters when their primary weapons are unavailable, malfunctioning etc.

Police and corrections officers need to restrain and control subjects without causing them serious injury, which all things considered requires a much higher level of skill.

Civilians need enough skill to escape from assault and/or abduction. Civilians, sometimes have an option not available to military or police – submission.

If your wallet is all an armed aggressor wants, safest bet might be to just give it to him.

(And please don’t give me grief about gender-specific language, armed thieves are almost always men. And I must stress, this is NOT an invariable rule. A fair number of the beatings mugging victims get are gratuitous, i.e. received after the money has changed hands. Some thieves evidently, take offense if you don’t carry enough money for them to take.)

There is however, a considerable area of overlap.

Soldiers in anti-insurgency operations are increasingly having to function as cops (and social workers, judges, civil engineers, etc) or may have to use police-like restraint and control techniques to capture enemy personnel alive for interrogation.

A civilian in a hot situation may not have an avenue of escape, or may be with someone they cannot bear to abandon – even if it’s the wisest thing to do. (You have to consider if survival odds for both are increased if one can escape and summon help. And, the perps may be less willing to murder the one(s) left behind if they know there is a someone out there who can identify them.)

Abduction attempts are perhaps the most nightmarish scenarios. Caught in such a situation, the unequivocally best course of action is total all-out resistance. NEVER let anyone take you to what criminologists call with grim understatement, the “secondary crime scene.”

The horrible truth is, against an armed kidnapper, it is better to resist and be left wounded (or even, God help us, dead quickly) than to submit.

Home invasion creates a similar scenario, except in this case the secondary crime scene comes to you.

In such a case, potential victims may have to be as ruthless as the predator after them.

And oh by the way, if I haven’t turned your stomach enough yet, the most likely abductees are precisely the people who appear least able to resist – and predators have a fine-tuned sense for this.

Now I have to break and stress something – close quarters combat training is not the answer to your security needs. It is part of a whole range of things you must consider, most of which are beyond the scope of this post. Again (and again and again) I urge you to look at Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s website No Nonsense Self-Defence – and his books and videos. What he doesn’t cover, he shows where to look for it.

It’s here: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/

OK, back to “combatives.”

Modern combatives seems to start with a small group of men, of whom one stands out, William E. Fairbairn of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, Shanghai Municipal Police, and trainer of British commandos, US Army Rangers, and OSS operatives.

That last is important, for reasons we’ll go into.

Fairbairn and his partner Eric A. Sykes (who some sources say was a bit miffed at Fairbairn getting all the publicity) developed a rough and tumble fighting method based on Japanese jujitsu and Chinese boxing for police operating in one of the roughest cities in the world at the time.

During the war they jointly designed the Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife, though it actually looks to me like an update of the medieval misericord dagger.

They had one of the worst situations to deal with: a criminal class desperate enough to be willing to resist arrest and die rather than submit, in an environment where a fair number of criminals had close quarter combat skills.

Fairbairn at one point in his life, spent some time at the Kododan in Japan, home of judo (which was at the time much closer to its roots in combat jujitsu.) His Chinese boxing (or “Kung Fu”) may have been picked up in a sort of here-and-there use-what-works way.

Kennedy and Guo point out that more Chinese martial artists may have learned their fighting skills this way than the stereotyped image of joining a school with a respectable lineage and study for years and years.*

In any case, though too old for active service in WWII, he was one tough dude and the British and American militaries took advantage of his skills.

Fairbairn’s teaching refined the skills of an American, Rex Applegate, already a pretty tough customer. Applegate, who died in 1998, was the last survivor of the WWII generation of combatives instructors**. He later developed his modification of the Fairbairn-Sykes knife, the Applegate-Fairbairn knife, more suited to “knife fighting” than commando-style silent sentry removal.

Applegate was in charge of a lot of the training of the OSS.

At the same time, the U.S. Coast Guard independently (as far as I know) created their own close quarters combat training program. They commissioned Jack Dempsey, “the Manassa Mauler,” heavyweight boxing champion from 1919 to 1926 and told him “make ‘em tough.”

Dempsey was not just a boxer, but a brawler in work camps and saloons. His book written from his Coast Guard experience, “How to Fight Tough” actually has little of sport boxing in it but a strong influence of wrestling and jujitsu.

In closing, I’d like to point out a couple of things to ponder. One is that a naval force seems an unlikely institution to stress close combat. But the Coast Guard are an odd hybrid, during peacetime they’re cops, during wartime they’re an arm of the Navy.

As part of their duties policing the sea lanes, they do a lot of boarding, which the Navy hasn’t seen much of since the days of sail and buccaneers.

Second, surprisingly the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the WWII precursor of the CIA) may have had training needs closest to those of modern civilians.

The military takes men who are judged to be of adequate fitness, and makes them even tougher with rigorous training. However, the amount of time that can be devoted to hand-to-hand training is very limited, compared to all the other stuff they have to learn about weapons use and maintenance, battle formation, etc.

However, with the move to a professional military, command has found they can devote more time to it, and that the training pays off in a way having little to do with the likelihood of close quarters combat in battle, fighting spirit. There is probably no better way to develop fighting spirit than hand-to-hand combat training.***

However, the OSS had a different selection criteria. They had to have men (and women such as the late Julia Childs) who had language skills, and could pass as native speakers in occupied Europe.

This was the primary consdieration, all others were secondary. Thus they had to develop methods of training civilians, who were more likely to be academics than brawlers, how to fight effectively with fists, knives and pistols.

Next: Modern combatives and martial arts.

* See: Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Martial-Arts-Training-Manuals/dp/1556435576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224420660&sr=8-1

**Caveat: Charles Nelson was a WWII vet and learned some of his skills in that late unpleasantness, but he began his career as an instructor after the war ended.

***Research has turned up references to this in classical Chinese military manuals which say that training in Chuan Fa (boxing, Chinese root of the Japanese word “kempo”) is seldom of use in battle, but useful for developing fighting spirit.

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Some time ago I published a post on my study of Pekiti Tirsia Kali here:
http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/08/my-martial-arts-study-pekiti-tirsia.html

A few weeks back I flew down to Dallas for training with Grand Tuhon Leo Tortal Gaje – an opportunity I try not to miss. However, with work and funds, it may be a while before I can connect with my brothers in the art again – that and Grand Tuhon may be running for governor of Negros in the Philippine in 2009 and not available for a while. I’m following that development with close interest.

So what am I doing these days, stuck up here where everybody’s idea of martial arts is Tae Kwon Do for kids?

Nothing against TKD, and in fact I may be enrolling my son in it for the exercise and social activity. At age seven, I can’t teach him what I do. But the fact is, it’s very rarely taught as a serious martial, as in warlike, art these days.

TKD is interesting in that respect. Though it was founded within the memory of living men, its combat effectiveness has degraded unusually quickly in historical terms.

A generalization of course. There are still TKD teachers who take fighting seriously, if you know where to find them. But for Korean teachers who take real combat seriously, you might look up Tukong Moosul.

That’s a problem all martial arts face when they get away from an emphasis on function and start to stress sport or purely spiritual development. They modify technique and training for safety purposes, or preserve ancient forms simply because they’re ancient, with little understanding of the function behind the form. The oriental tradition of apprenticeship, where knowledge was given out in drips and drabs over a long period of time doesn’t help either.

There’s a saying about the students of Yip Man, the Wing Chun master who taught young Bruce Lee, among other martial arts luminaries.

They say the first generation of Yip Man’s students were great fighters, the second generation were great technicians, and the third generation lived off the reputation of the first and second generations.

That’s an uncomfortable thought for me. I’m a fourth generation student in the Yip Man line, or third in the Bruce Lee line, and I’m afraid it shows…

So, what am I doing to keep and improve my level of skill and readiness?

One thing I’m doing is creating an exercise program that incorporates martial moves into the fitness routine: sit-ups combined with punching with with hand loads or striking with Kali sticks, bag work, and striking the hanging tire with the sticks. (More later.)

Another thing I’m doing is research, particularly research on combatives.

There has never been a better time for research. Amazon.com has the used book option for purchasing a lot of classics on military combatives, and a fair number of cheap new or used DVDs are available and military manuals can be found online

Combatives is a term for what might be called a subset of martial arts training originally designed for the military, though there is now significant development in police and civilian combatives.

The idea of combatives is, to give a military or police recruit useful hand-to-hand and personal weapon skills in as short a period of time as possible.

Military training is overwhelmingly occupied with weapons training and lots of other stuff. The time they have to devote to close-combat skills amounts to hours in Basic, and not a lot more in advanced training.

This is of increasing concern to the military. It turns out that lo and behold, in the modern age close combat has become increasingly more likely, not less, with operations moving more and more to urban areas.

Police and corrections officers constantly face the necessity of closing with resisting suspects to restrain and control them – law and public opinion doesn’t allow them to say, “Screw ‘em, just shoot the bastard.”

And civilians increasingly want courses that teach them quick and dirty, without a life-long commitment to training.

So they want effective stuff that’s easy to learn in a short time by people who aren’t martial artists or athletes.

Want some super powers while you’re at it? If there were such a thing, the serious martial artists would be teaching it to their students too.

These needs require some thoughtful and tough-minded planning. For example, when I tell women concerned about self-defense, that the best and quickest option for them may be to learn to use a knife and carry one, a great many react with what can only be described as horror.

With apologies to liberated women everywhere, the physical limitations of women versus men mean that a woman will have to train a hell of a lot harder and longer than any man to have any chance at all of prevailing in a physical, unarmed encounter.

The good news is, that one need not necessarily prevail, in order to escape.

And here we come to the difference in emphasis between military, police and civilian needs in combatives.

A soldier needs to train to quickly kill, or completely disable, an opponent in the comparatively rare situation where firearms are not in play. Keeping in mind that almost always, a combatant has a knife as backup, or an empty or malfunctioning rifle as a club-like weapon.

Police or corrections officers face unarmed struggle when subduing suspects or prisoners on a regular basis, but are obligated to use sub-lethal force whenever possible, and may face a world of trouble if they kill or seriously damage the opponent.

This actually requires a higher level of skill than a soldier may need. The good news is, law enforcement officers may have the opportunity to train over the course of their careers, and often have the luxury of piling on to a suspect/prisoner in numbers. If they don’t have the numbers, the restrictions on using firearms, tasers, etc are less.

For civilians, the good news is that what they need to do in a hot situation is escape, not kill or restrain. The bad news is, civilians are generally not in anything like the physical shape military personnel and police maintain.

Next: history and review.

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I am 60 years old, and have two small children and a sedentary lifestyle. This is not the perfect formula for fitness.

In my youth I had one of those metabolisms that never stored fat. I was the same weight (about 140 pounds at 6 feet tall) from high school into my thirties. I really wanted to gain a few pounds and finally got up to a bit over 150 by going to the Rocky Mountains and living out of a tent for a while, eating heartily and exercising.

Then I moved to Bulgaria…

In Bulgaria at the time, there was a 10% inflation per day. There was little bread to be found (the wheat crop had been sold by the government for foreign currency), food was expensive – and I was living on a local salary. It came to about $40 per month, and they wanted $25 American for the room I rented.

Of course, I lived on my savings until they ran out, and in the meantime I lost a lot of weight. A Polish girl who came to visit me exclaimed, “You look like you just got out of Oswieciem!” (Auschwitz in Polish.)

I moved to Serbia after that and started eating better. While doing yoga spinal twists, I noticed that a spare tire was starting to develop around my middle.

Then I moved back to the States and stayed with my parents while waiting for the paperwork to go through for a job in Saudi Arabia. Eating my mother’s cooking, I… perhaps “ballooned” is the word I’m looking for.

I was mortified. Getting fat had been the Fourth Dimension to me – something I knew about theoretically, but really couldn’t imagine. Obviously my apostat, which had been in equilibrium all my life, was knocked out of whack. I think I hit 250 at one time.

Living in Saudi actually helped. Middle Eastern food is healthy and delicious, and the climate encourages one to eat light. And since there was very little to divert the attention, forcing oneself to exercise was easy. (It probably didn’t hurt that the bootleg beer was godawful either.)

After that I returned to Poland and kept the weight down with exercise and eating well. I never diet, in the sense of counting calories. Eating healthy and staying active is all I’ve ever had to do – so far.

Now my weight has stabilized at 200. That’s not bad for an active guy of six feet, but counts as a tad overweight, and I’ve got a beer gut I don’t like at all.

I want to be around to see my kids grow up, and hale enough to enjoy any grandchildren that I might have, so I must do what everyone should do. (Though if junior is as retarded as his old man in that respect, I’ll be 100 when I see my first.)

I take inspiration from the fact that Grand Tuhon Leo Gaje (see Pekiti Tirsia) is in his 60s, Chuck Norris is pushing 70, and Danny Inosanto is already past it.

However, those guys are professional martial artists, they do it every day. I don’t, I do it in my spare time. And sometimes there isn’t a lot of that. In addition, there isn’t a lot of spare room in the house and during winter I can’t go outside to exercise. Going to a gym? Fuhgeddaboudit! Two small kids remember?

So, given that I need to do exercises that don’t require a lot of space or equipment, I’ve evolved a routine that meets my needs during the winter.

For equipment I use: Indian clubs, two fist-sized lengths of bar stock, one 15-pound dumbell, an 8-pound sledgehammer, a 12-pound medicine ball and a 35 pound (one pood) Russian kettlebell.

I start with simple Chinese Chi-gung exercises to warm up and get me in the mood if I’m feeling sluggish: a face rub, arm swinging, head tapping, and light beating on the lower back and long muscles of the leg while bent over in a wide stance.

Next, punching with the bar stock fist loads: classical chambered Kung Fu punches in a low horse stance, straight punching from a medium horse, Wing Chun chain punches from a high horse, hooks, uppercuts etc.

Procede to medicine ball lifts, side stretches, leg lifts etc. Follow with a set of dumbell curls and graduate to kettlebell lifts. Kettlebell lifts are OK if the kids are in the room, but if I want to do a set of swings I have to shoo them out, so all I’ll destroy is the TV if I lose control and it flies.

I do an exercise with the sledgehammer I found on an old documentary about Sir Edmund Hillary’s trip by motorboat up the Ganges. It’s from the traditional Indian physical culture. You grip the sledge with two hands, much like a samurai sword, with the lower hand near the corresponding hip, shaft slanted across the body and the head above the opposite shoulder. Swing around the back to the other side until the hand positions are reversed.

I include Indian club swinging – carefully, because the ceiling is rather low, and about a hundred-plus knuckle pushups interspersed in sets of ten between the other exercises. Follow with situps. I combine the situps with punching with the fist loads or medicine ball thrusts.

All this time I drink LOTS of water. End with yoga stretching (I’m hoping to regain some of the flexibility I used to have.) I try to do this at least three times a week. A session takes a little over an hour, or I can do an abbreviated one in 45 minutes.

Classical forms? The three Wing Chun forms can be done in a confined space – but unlike the Northern Shaolin Long Fist forms, they aren’t very strenuous. If the weather is good I go outside and do a 5-minute Tai Chi form for warmers. (Some Tai Chi people say you shouldn’t mix it with strenuous exercise. Sorry.) Some of the short Pentjak Silat jurus can be mixed in when you don’t have much space.

During the summer I can do all this outside and get a bit adventurous with the kettlebell and Indian club swinging. I can also add suburito, classical Japanese sword cutting exercise done with a long heavyweight wooden sword, and Filipino Kali exercise with a heavier than normal stick.

And whatever the weather, long walks are just the thing. If it’s cold – dress for it.

I’ve made an Indian club video (look for it yourself, I don’t get any money for it) and I’m going to get around to doing a longer, more comprehensive one someday. Sometimes I think about doing a fitness camp for people in my situation.

Hey, I’m not an exercise guru – but then neither are you.

Final tip: don’t let your kids distract you. Remember, you’re setting a good example. And don’t be afraid to say, “I can’t now, I’ll be finished in a half-hour.”

PS Yes, I take vitamin supplements. With the proviso that I am utterly unqualified to speak to the question of whether, and how much good it does, I’ve noticed that medical opinion has shifted in my lifetime from “absolutely unnecessary” to “take a multivitamin and mineral a day.”

I take that, plus a combo of L-acetyl carnatine/alpha lipoic acid, fish oil, vitamin E and reservatrol. Some of that may be useless but heart disease runs in my family so I’m covering the bases.

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In my last post I wrote about martial arts, and pointed out that self-defense is only one of the reasons for studying them.

But what about self-defense?

I mentioned in my post ‘Virginia’ http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia.html that self-defense involves firstly, a comittment not to be a victim, and directed readers to Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s site ‘No nonsense self-defense’ here: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/

I repeat, it’s worth your time to go over it.

In my post ‘The Amish Tragedy’ http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2006/10/amish-tragedy.html I talked about “soft targets”. NNSD can help you evaluate if and what kind of target you might be.

You should at least be familiar with the sections of criminal psychology, the four motivations of violence, patterns of behavior that lead people into violent situations and what responses the law considered justified – versus what will get you sued or serious jail time, or both.

Nota bene: saying that people’s own behavior leads them into violent situations is NOT the same as victim blaming!

That doctor in Connecticut who just lost everything he loves in life, wife and daughters, and now has nothing to live for but the execution of the men who took them from him, is not, repeat not, responsible for their actions. That does not change the fact that they entered through an unlocked basement door.

The McCann family (whose little girl went missing on a vacation in Portugal) without doubt did not realize that a resort area, while seeming like an oasis of tranquility, peace and pleasure, attracts predators like blood in the water attracts sharks.

There’s no need to tell them that leaving small children alone in a hotel room is stupid, they’re already torturing themselves with that knowlege. Now the least bad possibility is that their little girl was kidnapped by someone who wanted a beautiful child to raise as their own. The others are too horrible to contemplate – but I guarantee you as a parent that they are. Constantly.

Everyone with a working knowledge of self-defense (in the broadest sense of the term) experiences the same teeth-grinding frustration of observing the same patterns of behavior nearly every time a college girl goes missing. I could go into detail (see NNSD) but essentially it amounts to being unaware of the environment.

On an even deeper level, it’s complete cluelessness about the fact that the world is a dangerous place. I believe that this is perhaps one of the most dangerous and most common illusions of our culture and effects everything from our personal safety to the safety of our nation.

In future posts, I’ll be dealing with both.

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In this age of mass-produced cheap firearms martial artists are often asked, “What good is that stuff? Why don’t you just get a gun?”

This is a fair question and deserves reasoned consideration. To begin with, it is often neither legal nor desirable to carry a gun. Handguns are a significant bother to carry and more and more public places require passing through a metal detector on entry.

And, if you go out for recreation where alcohol is served you are under legal and moral obligations not to carry. In the ordinary course of events a firearm will not be available most of the time, so one possible answer to this question is, “So where is your gun right now?”

Secondly, the use of firearms IS a martial art by definition and firearms training is a part of advanced training in any comprehensive modern art. So another answer to that question is, “So why do you think that because I study martial arts, I ignore firearms?”

And most importantly, self-defense is not the only or necessarily the most important reason for studying martial arts. Aside from self-defense people study martial arts for sport and recreation, health and exercise, the fellowship of like-minded comrades, for the cultural experience and for spiritual reasons; the development of character, self-confidence and self-knowledge.

So taking into account all of these motivations, I would like to explain why I study martial arts and why the Filipino art of Pekiti Tirsia Kali in particular.

When I was a teenager I studied Judo/Jujitsu and Karate, then virtually the only Asian martial arts available in the States. Since then I have studied various other Asian martial arts plus Western boxing and fencing. I am ranked in Wu Wei Gung Fu (a Wing Chun-derived style) and have intermediate to advanced level training in Thai boxing, Jujitsu, classical Wing Chun and various other martial arts including a few other Filipino styles. I don’t disparage any of them, but I now make the central focus of my training Pekiti Tirsia Kali for reasons I’ll explain.

I first encountered Pekiti Tirsia when I was in university from a fellow graduate student who had had the opportunity to study with Grand Tuhon Leo Gaje in New York. After we went our separate ways I didn’t find the opportunity to train with PTK again until making contact with the European branch under Uli Weidel many years later. Nowadays I travel to Dallas on a regular basis to study with the art’s senior American representative Tim Waid and try never to miss an opportunity to train with Grand Tuhon when he’s in the area.

These days I study PTK because it fulfills my personal needs for a practical reality-based martial art and for reasons that go beyond that. My reasons include:

PTK is practical. Real fighting is about weapons, and the world is full of objects that are potential weapons: sticks, knives, bottles, rocks etc. Training solely for empty-hand fighting one-on-one is training to duel, not for self-preservation.

But empty hand fighting is an important part of training, because a weapon may break, be lost or an assault may come by ambush when there is no time to draw a weapon and response must be immediate.

The way one teacher explained it was, “Karate means “empty hand, we are not empty hand, it’s just that whatever is in the hand is whatever’s in it.”

Ring sports such as the various kickboxing or grappling styles have good empty hand skills, but train on a smooth padded surface with good traction, a gym mat or boxing ring and don’t include weapon defense. PTK footwork is designed for surfaces that might be irregular, angled away from the horizontal or slick and training takes weapon involvement into account.

PTK is a comprehensive art. It includes the use of long and short, impact, edged and flexible weapons, firearms, and in the empty hand component, striking with all natural weapons, throwing, grappling, locking and breaking techniques.

PTK is both traditional and modern. PTK, like the traditional warrior arts of most ancient cultures, is not artificially divided into armed and unarmed arts, nor does it specialize in one branch of martial skills such as kickboxing, wrestling etc.

It is modern because it is adapted to modern conditions and modern weaponry. It is close to its origins as a combat art­ and was created by exponents who experienced real combat where failure meant death or crippling disability.

PTK is a versatile martial art because of its origins. The cultures of the Philippines were in contact with virtually all the cultures of Asia and much of Europe.

Martial arts influence each other either by fighting each other, whereby they learn to adapt to the technique and technology of the other arts, or by friendly contact whereby they exchange ideas, often first the one then the other.

Unlike Japan, which went through a long period of self-imposed isolation during which Japanese only fought other Japanese, the Philippines has been in constant contact and conflict with other cultures, both Eastern and Western, from prehistory to the present day.

It has a logical training progression; PTK gives the student something that is of practical use immediately. A few elementary stick techniques can be used effectively right away, but the art has depths that one can spend a lifetime exploring. The root motions taught at the beginning can be applied to a variety of different weapons or empty-hand applications. The art is holistic and principle-based rather than a collection of techniques.

This makes PTK ideal for police and military training. Empty-hand, impact and edged weapon training is important for police and military personnel, but training time is often limited by the demands of all the other skills that must be learned.

PTK is not sport but can be practiced sportively. I do not disparage combat sports and enjoy watching them, but my interest is in martial art. Making an art into a sport inevitably degrades combat effectiveness because the techniques used must be limited for safety reasons. When bouts are won on points, weapons are often modified in unrealistic ways (by making them lighter for example) to score points better. For reasons of fairness, participants often compete in weight and rank classes, which is utterly unrealistic for real combat. And when sport becomes professional or semi-professional with tangible rewards for competitors, very often sportsmanship and character development suffers. And a competitive attitude, which is healthy and normal for sport, fosters ego, and ego is death in real combat.

Nonetheless, students often want the chance to test their courage and skill in a controlled setting. For the development of martial skill and warrior spirit this is best done among friends in an atmosphere of fellowship. In contrast to sport, where a competitor will either defeat you or be defeated by you, a comrade in the art by giving you his best effort is helping you improve your skill. Regardless of who wins the bout, both are in a very real sense, winners. And who would not feel reassured by the possession of friends with formidable skills in these times?

PTK fosters health and fitness as well or better than other martial arts and can be practiced into advanced age. Use of the sticks is a resistance exercise that does not damage the joints and tendons when practiced correctly. It promotes flexibility, which is probably the most important factor in countering the effects of aging, improves and maintains coordination and muscular efficiency and takes the boredom out of regular exercise. Practiced solo it is ideal for meditation in motion, which is according to a Zen proverb, “a thousand time better than meditation in stillness”.

Like other martial arts, PTK has a spiritual dimension and fosters the development of character and self-knowledge. Man is an aggressive species, the descendant of animals that hunted in packs and fought for territory, dominance and access to resources. We carry that heritage in our nature, and the history of the 20th century has shown that attempts to change human nature only result in death and suffering on a gigantic scale.

But Man has an ethical and spiritual side that can confront his animal origins and discipline his nature to a higher purpose. We can tame the beast within only if we are not afraid to face him. The aggressive instinct that motivates theft, bullying and murder can also motivate the protection of the weak and helpless and the defense of family, nation and personal honor when disciplined and trained. Martial arts training in its highest form is all about this.

We live in an age in which paradoxically, weapons of unimaginable power have brought war and violence back to where we live. The danger of thermonuclear annihilation has lessened, but the danger of terrorism and warfare on the neighborhood level is increasing. The arts of personal combat are not obsolete, today they are more important than ever.

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