Last Wednesday's training night, we received a guest, Scott McQuaid who will be with us on and off for about 2 months. I have seen him before, in Youtube.com where he produces some clips to promote mainly the Harimau Minangkabau system. Then, he had visited our place before, few months back when I was 5kg lighter, to do a little shooting and conduct an interview with Guru Jak.
That night too, we received new silat students, they are those who have went through kickboxing training under Guru Jak and are now being offered a place to learn the Harimau Berantai system.
Now that we have the new students with us, I would take the opportunity to polish my basics again by training with them. Actually, I had to jump up a level so that Guru Ed could have a training partner. I being the only one left doing Silat would feed him attacks for him to deflect and counter. Good for me as this situation allowed me to learn more weapons techniques besides the Belati.
While the new students were training the basics of Belati attacks, yes, we learn to understand the mechanics of belati attacks, learning how to attack before we can learn knife defense, Guru Ed and me train our 8 belati buahs again. Again and again and again.
When we're done with Belati, we proceeded to train using our Sakti Pencawangan, as oppose to the Sauh that we had last Monday night.
The Sakti Pencawangan is a two-part weapon which looks like a tonfa with a concealed blade. While our left hands are holding the tonfa-like part of the weapon, doing defense and counterattacks, our right hands will be holding a blade that is unsheathed from the tonfa like part and hidden close to our body, away from the opponent's view. Again, we train using the Sakti Pencawangan against a Bokken. To our surprise, that Bokken is very strong and durable, taking punishment after punishment for months against the iron made Sauh and also the Rattan-made Sakti Pencawangan. The Sauh should be the more punishing weapon against the bokken as it is made of iron steel.
Up until now, we have learnt 5 buahs of the Sakti Pencawang, taking attacks from different angles, attacks from up slashing downwards, from the right cutting diagonally down the body, from the front coming straight stabbing through the torso and one coming from the left cutting the neck.
Usually, I do kickboxing before silat which takes place after that. However, I have been missing kickboxing classes for quite some time due to my own lack of motivation and current state of mind and emotion that I decided to give myself a break from it for a while. I really need this break. However, last night, I told myself that I should resume training soon, because, I could feel that I was catching my breath during Silat training. This would not have happened if I still do my Kickboxing training. However, I've been told by Guru that come December, Kickboxing and Silat classes would run concurrently. Hmmm.. Probably, when that happens, I could sometimes do Kickboxing sparring while wearing my Black Silat uniform. Kickboxing rules though. You Silat practitioners should understand why. Furthermore, I don't know how to spar using Silat.
After our training has ended for the night, our Guru brought in a box of newly made Silat training weapons consists of the Belatis, Parangs and Kerambits. They look real, they feel real with their weight and their balance are made to feel like one, and their finishing, the metal they were made of and the little details carved on their shellacked wooden handles, I can only say that I was so impressed. I must get each one of those for myself. Now that we have these new training weapons, we can train better in disarming these bladed weapons.
Salam.
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