Last month, students of Modern Arnis Stowupland took part in in their next set of belt exams.
The testing was a gruelling, four-hour session of non-stop hard work, including elements of empty-hands, weapons training, and sparring.
The exams warmed up with students demonstrating their stick drills, showing various striking patterns and angles, both with single and double sticks, before moving on to their empty hand striking combinations.
Like many South-East Asian arts, Filipino empty hand fighting includes a mix of punches, kicks, elbows, and knees.
Working with partners, the exam then moved to throwing and sweeping techniques, before progressing to a series of joint-locks, and traps. From there, weapons were reintroduced, applying those locks with and against stick attacks.
With everyone fully warmed up by that stage, weapons work really began in earnest, with techniques and drill from a huge number of variations of stick, sword/machete, knife, and kerambit/dulo.
Sometimes partners were using the same weapons as each other, sometimes using alternate weapons, and often using more than one weapon in each hand.
Pretty exhausted towards the end, the last half an hour was spent in a round-robin sparring session, with each student fighting a number of one-on-one stick-fighting matches.
Then just for a last push before finishing, were a few special matches with three people all fighting against each other at the same time.
While testing is obviously a great way to measure everyone’s progress, a hard four-hour session like this has it’s own benefits, consolidating and reinforcing what the students have learned so far.
Those who took part are now already training towards their next exam next year.
