With 669 stick-fights under my tightening belt, and having trained over 60 stick-fighters in a full contact setting, I was still having a hard time locking on the fast track to basic proficiency, as there exists in boxing, and has for generations. Like it or not, even though I do not practice Filipino Martial Arts [FMA], most of my cross training has been with FMA people, and I have been infected with the curriculum-biased complexity of these arts.

Charles has been with me since 2002, and has suffered minimal exposure to traditional martial arts training, and is our best fighter, despite having started out as an overweight computer nerd with no athletic experience. Not only does Charles work me over in sparring, but he has bi-passed me as a coach. I hand off the session to him and he does two things with me:

1. He taps me on the shoulder, which is his TMI cue, that I have gotten too involved and am overloading the young fighter with content, which, ironically. I do not do as a boxing coach.

2. He sends the fighters to me at the end of the session so I can put something new in their head.

This past Monday he brought me down to his house to watch video of Erique and I fighting in June 14, 2015. To put it bluntly, the younger, keener, and less stylistically cluttered coach, chastised me for continuing to entertain reduced versions of FMA counts as the basis for our arsenal.

We had reduced all the FMA esoterica down to the seven strokes that are actually used in stick fighting. In my fight with Erique I was winning with just two strokes, primarily one. And the guy with a fraction of my experience was trying to process way too much information, and is lacking the one stroke that comprises virtually my entire arsenal. We needed to reduce the stroke count to four: the one forehand that every FMA count starts out with and three backhands, most importantly, the one that almost every count finishes with.

Charles said, "Cut out the fluff. Strip it down—all the way down.”

I expect to fix this problem and reduce our introductory set to a truly fundamental level by late this summer, based on the eight fundamental aspects of stick fighting preparation outlined by Charles at our video study.

So, my bruising assignment in hand, I head off to the gym to begin implementing another evolution in our agonistic progress. Since I have also recently been contact by numerous folks interested in acquiring basic uncluttered stick fighting material for training at home, this evolution will be documented in a series of articles under The Stick Fighting Basics tag, and published in book form before the end of the year.

This is not a self-defense, survival, or sport oriented training evolution, but rather a sequence of developmental exercises intended to form the basis for a successful defender, survivalist or stick-fighter, who finds that the tool at hand is—just a stick.