Drills have been a big debate as of recently. A lot of people feel that drills are the most important things while some disregard them all together. Once again, each individual to his own taste. The way I have been taught to use drills was to isolate a certain type of energy by using a predetermined angle and working some types of defenses. We like to isolate certain angles and than once we go through all the angles, we mix it up until you feel comfortable dealing with different types of energy. Drills are just vehicles of training, nothing more and nothing less. Knowing a lot of drills mean just that. You know a lot of drills. It doesn’t make you a good fighter, it just develops certain attributes. I feel that certain drills can make you fairly decent at self defense situations. It all depends on where you want to take it. There are "sensitivity" drills that can be done slow like chi sao, like hubud lubud as demonstrated by Ted Lucaylucay in his pocket stick video that can be transferred into something you can see being done by Paul Vunak’s drills tape (very good tape/series by the way). The way Paul does it is dealing a little more with a "hitting/striking" type of energy while Ted is working more of a "tie-untie" type of energy. Even the same drill done with sticks by Grand Tuhon Leo Gaje and Nene Tortal on the Contradas tape deals with the weapon aspect of the flow. Even with the weapons you can work a softer energy to work on the finer points of your body mechanics or a harder energy to work on the footwork and dealing with the power. Another plus that doing hard drills like the hubud with weapons is that constantly having a rattan stick, even at 25% power, hitting your forearm does develop your forearm muscles and resistance. It depends where you want to go with it. The whole point is that these are all vehicles to travel wherever YOU want to go. I believe strongly in using drills to work with your energy familiarization and credit my ability to free flow highly to the fact that my partners and myself used to work a lot of drills. Check back later for ideas that you can use to further develop existing drills and descriptions of types of drills that we have worked with.

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Last modified: October 24, 2001