Arnis

So first of all, this is a point of order.

In my house, we do talk about Escrima a lot.

So I think that's what you're referring to.

Yes, yes.

And there are actually Escrima instructors in my town.

And whenever we see it on TV, we're like, hey, that's Escrima on TV.

So that's very cool.

But yeah, but you mentioned people coming out of these more structured...

I give this a 5 out of 5.

Tikbalang doing Eskrima.

And if you're wondering what Tikbalang is, that's that horseman.

I thought they'd be a bigger part of this because they're like one of the coolest creatures in our folklore.

They all work together, and that's something I've learned throughout my martial arts journey.

My primary focus has always been judo and Filipino Kali.

Now, I've trained in different martial arts over the years, and I've had the opportunity to learn from some fantastic instructors, but judo and Kali are the two disciplines I've spent most of my time focusing on.

Through judo, I've learned about balance, leverage, timing, movement, and controlling another person's position.

Through Filipino Kali, I've learned about angles, footwork, striking, coordination, and understanding different ranges of confrontation.

And what's interesting is how many of those principles overlap.

Different terminology, different approaches, but a lot of the same underlying ideas.

And three, during a physical confrontation, move or create a barrier, blocking and redirecting, striking, takedowns, and submissions.

You have to evade.

Eskrima forced Lee to refine his evasive angles and footwork to a razor's edge.

He learned to slip outside the line of attack, controlling the weapon hand while simultaneously destroying the opponent's structure.

And he didn't hide this influence at all.

And then, you know, we had whiteboard time too.

It's like, how do you train the intellectual? But the tactics don't work in any system, whether it's, you know, Filipino Eskrima, whether it's Indonesian knife fighting, whether it's a weapon-based system, whether it's a physical system, it could be Shuai Jiao, it could be Judo.

The tactics do not work if the body hasn't moved in those patterns and forms properly.

That make the neural pathways for the tactics to work properly.

Hack and slash, obviously.

He's got fucking knives in his hands, he's not about to break out the fucking Escrima sticks.

You parry, you dodge, you mash attack, you wait for your cooldown superpowers to reactivate so you can hasten an end to this particular installment of the rigmarole.

And every now and again there's a boss fight with an insultingly small number of attack patterns, including the classic torso of giant robot bringing its fists down upon the point where you were standing a second ago, where you just memorize the dodge stroke parry timing and then shave off its health bar one millimeter at a time until you get it down by one third, at which point some quick time event speckled cutscene ceremoniously signals the arrival of a fourth attack pattern, hold on to your knitting, ladies.

No, not really.

We do some like Kali Eskrima a little bit because my husband and I both have a background in that.

But it's really when we do it, we're just doing it for the fun of it, for the movement of it.

And because people have fun, you know, like swinging sticks around and learning different patterns with the sticks.

And I went out and met a bunch of cool people.

And then I just went straight to Cebu because I was going to learn the stick fighting, the traditional martial law of the Philippines called Arnis or Eskrima.

Of course you were.

And I spent two weeks with a Eskrima grandmaster and he taught me how to fight with a stick.

What I know of Cebu is they have great mangoes.

I always see Cebu...