As the founder of Pencak Silat Pertempuran I chose to deliberately look at the things I was taught through a different lens. My views were formed through testing and fighting primarily and against many different martial arts stylists, opponents, and sizes. Those experiences taught me a lot.
For example, having earned a few different instructors certificates over the years for various martial arts I remember being taught stances by all of them and being told, “that we only use this to strengthen legs.” Or a series of blocks which ultimately became, “in reality this is only to teach the new people to defend themselves.”
And similarly for many things that didn’t seem particularly useful. Basically, we’ll teach them this wrong thing and then later teach them something better. As if people were incapable of just jumping in to what was valuable. I chose to believe that people could do the useful stuff from the start and the problem I often saw is that many people never really took to the later modifications because the early stuff was so ingrained.
Even for myself, I tried many of the things I was taught and realized that much of it was not very useful or practical for me at least. (Later, as my skills grew deeper some of those things were found to be useful—but it took a Long Time.) It was during this refining process and the burning off of the dross that the core of Pencak Silat Pertempuran was developed.
It has been revised and refined over the years to what it is now. Essentially the act of reduction and redundancy. Almost exclusively.
When you look at the curriculum you’ll notice, for example, that I don’t specifically teach stances, or blocks, or even parry’s per se. It was a deliberate choice to start people in the learning process by only teaching them things that they could actually use. No training wheels. Most people don’t need to learn how to stand longer, they need to learn how to move better—why teach them to stand then? You don’t need to learn how to block, you need to learn how to move and counter. That’s a much better use of your time than conditioning bad habits of being stationary and trying to block attacks.
I’d rather people walk away from every class learning how to actually be better at defending themselves rather than teach things that aren’t particularly useful or that I have to unteach them later.
And if we’re honest with ourselves, those things like stances, blocks, etc. are not even useful for keeping someone safe. To be in defense means that you are specifically and deliberately putting yourself at a timing disadvantage and I have no damn idea why you would do that…. particularly when you’re already not very good. It makes no sense—it only makes dollars.
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