Partner drills and sparring for stick-fighting have a tendency to encourage sticking with your opponent. His is ideal if he is a fellow that is hard to position, difficult to get to.
But what about the street thugs we are training to defend against?
This guy may have friends, a knife. We don’t want to be in front of him, don’t want that competitive instinct to put us in a bad street situation.
There is also the opponent that cannot stick with you and the danger of standing in front of him and beating him up and then getting grappled. At our last event, Charles was beating Erique and Damien and Oliver like redheaded stepchildren. Then he started pouring more strokes into them and did what would work against a mover like me, got in their face and beat them up—and down the stick wizard went, under many pounds of apish meat that was sick of being beat. Later, in sparring with me, we worked on him staying out of range and beating me up, but when it came to moving and finishing there were problems. The problem was we had not drilled passing while finishing, but only worked on passing as a tactical gambit to get the upper hand, not finish the fight.
The goal of the pass is usually to step off and past while slashing through your man, using that same body movement out of his way to power the stroke that should make him stay.
In the finishing pass the goal is to deal with a fatigued and less mobile fighter by moving in behind a stick-clearing beat stroke, then hitting the opponent, then hitting him with a combination as you pass close by him, hopefully snaking his stick as you go. We are talking five strokes at a minimum. This is analogous to a boxer’s finishing flurry.
The static partner—ideally the coach—should suit up in a heavy WEKAF headpiece, heavy gloves and elbow pads. The static partner should be armed with two sticks.
The drill begins with the mobile partner out of range.
As soon as the coach begins throwing stick strokes in a continuous fashion the fighter must move into the range of both sticks, straight ahead, almost entering the pocket, then beating to one side, then moving at a roughly 45-degree angle past the coach as he continues to beat, score and check.
The coach’s lead foot must not move. He may only pivot or step around to try and keep his man in front of him.
Experiment with varying the angle from check-close to maximum contact range and by all means look for the snake disarm off of a check.
The holy grail of stick fighting is to mesmerize, beat and tire your man in short order, within the first minute, and then do a close pass, power-combination, disarm, leaving him beaten and unarmed in the pocket.
Twerps, Goons and Meatshields: The Basics of Full Contact Stick-Fighting
All of the above sounds very complicated.
For self-defence purposes it would seem quickly bashing the bloke(s) until he can't fight or pursue you and then vacating the area would be best.
Is your book suitable for beginners to the art of belabouring people with sticks/blunt weapons?
If it is more advanced can you recommend any books/DVDs etc more suited to the beginning student of self-defence rather than sport?
Thank You.
If you have a knife and you have a group to deal with, step in and rip cut their guts.
But if you are using a blunt weapon—which will usually fail to drop your man on the first stroke [the average baseball bat attacks requires 3 strokes to disable] then you need to be able to pass or you will soon find yourself wrestling for the shared weapon, which could become theirs.
Using a blunt weapon effectively against larger, more numerous attackers is just as complicated as fighting a highly skilled stick-fighter. This is why knives and guns get you in a lot more legal trouble, because they are equalizers, which a stick manifestly is not.
The Twerps Goons and Meatshields book is not suitable for a beginner who has not learned a sport or other combat art. You either need a partner or experience self-coaching to fully utilize it. Try our training videos under the agonistics tag.
Essentially, all the escrima, arnis, kali instructionals are bullshit. Pull up the Dog Brothers videos on their site and you will learn more than any of these instructional videos. If you are learning how to self-coach you must watvh fight footage.
When I get back from the Rockies Charles and I will begin posting some sparring and bag-striking videos.
If you have any training questions email them to me at jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com and I will post it as an article on the modern combat page.
Thanks for your interest Mr. Ecks and just let us know what you need.