The Filipino Martial Arts offer a wide variety of techniques that range from striking, locking, and breaking to trapping, disarming, and takedowns. The options are vast. With so many options, it can become challenging to focus training on core elements that will make you effective and well rounded. In budgeting your training time, it is best to spend the majority of it on skills that will get you results. Typically these are fundamental skills, skills that permeate all other skills. For example, if you cannot recognize or create an opening, then entering to successfully apply a trap, lock, or disarm will be very difficult to do. However, once you have developed fundamental offensive skills, simply learned how to get in, then you can apply many of your other techniques such as trapping, loc...

Developing prowess in the Filipino martial arts requires access to quality instruction, hours of training alone and with partners, and a real dedication to improvement. It requires the development of coordination, timing, and a variety of other skills specific to the application of the Filipino martial arts. However, there is some low hanging fruit that can greatly approve your capability to apply Kali. This low hanging fruit is simply developing well-rounded athletic fitness. This is not ground breaking news, but it is significant. If you improve your ability to perform basic athletic movements (running, jumping, throwing, etc.), you will notice a significant improvement in your Filipino martial arts skills. If you develop strength, you will see it replicated in your strikes, takedowns, a...

When studying Kali, learning in the beginning is easy. You just imitate those who are better than you. You drill to develop coordination through consistent repetition. Eventually, you memorize patterns of movements that become techniques. You learn to perform those techniques when your partner feeds you a specific attack. The process for learning this in the beginning is pretty clear. The tough part of learning Kali starts when you move beyond those basics. This is where things get fuzzy. It’s gets difficult when you have to coordinate your movements to attack and counter an unpredictable opponent. You have to see what is going on, decide what to do about it, then select and perform the right technique. It is hard because you must choose from a wide variety of responses, and in choosing th...

Check out this short video of training that we have been doing recently at the Tactical Arts Academy. In the video, you will see a few arm breaks and finishing techniques from our Indonesian martial arts class. The series is from Harimau found in Pencak Silat Mande Muda.  Included are a few basic tips for applying the techniques.  

If we had more time to do so, many of us would spend more time training. Training for most of us is enjoyable. Putting in hours to improve our skills a little at a time is not a chore; it’s more of a pleasure. However, work, family, money, life can all compete for time that we would otherwise be training, talking about training, or, at least, thinking about training. Because of these demands on our time, we need to use the time we do have for training wisely. This is especially true as you climb to higher levels in the art. Once you have past the beginner levels of learning Kali, where everything is new and improvement is exponential, you have to be focused when planning your training. At the intermediate and advanced levels, there are so many things to train. It can be difficult to remain...