My take on a popular recipe
Steve Perry has written a great article on sweeps and given a video to compliment it on his blog. Ironically, I have just finished a training video for a close friend that covered a similar aspect. I thought it would be a great tie-in, so I’m sharing it here.
1: Steve and I practice SIMILAR styles of the same martial art, not IDENTICAL. Our teachers were different. We have different outlooks. I’m a lot smarter than he is. Therefore, some of our approaches and mechanics will differ. We arrive at the same outcome, and that’s the thing to focus on.
2: At one point you will hear me say something that may sound a touch derogatory about certain ways of training this technique. Please pay attention to the video and understand: I am speaking of MY PREFERENCE, nothing else. Steve’s way (which is Maha Guru Stevan Plinck’s way, by the by) is just as valid as mine. This is a private training video, it wasn’t really meant for public eyes, so I speak a bit more candidly than I do on the youtube vids. Forgive me if it offends, such is certainly NOT my intention.
One thing I don’t mention (at this point in the video) is that the reason I prefer my way is due to my disdain for solo training methods altogether. My approach is unique in this way, maybe 10% of my style is solo training, forms and the like. The rest is all integrated, using person-to-person drills and sparring. So Latihan Tiga (the sapu-triangle exercises on Gartin and Perry’s videos) are done in my school with a person actually stepping in to attack. It changes the focus a bit, and raises the awareness. I liked the results, so that’s how I do everything now.
Sapu is one of many techniques I feel must be trained with a partner, as the empty-air work doesn’t give you (in my opinion) the correct balance. Your position and center is different when there is a live leg at the end of yours and you’re dragging over a hundred pounds on it.
Also, you may hear me use the term “Four Tools” throughout the video. I see a commonality in most Indonesian styles, and that is they tend to gravitate towards four main techniques in any order:
1: Sapu (front sweep)
1: Beset (back sweep)
1: Kenjit (compression)
1: Puter Kepala (head turn)
I have culled these techniques into their own section of training, and in my basic curriculum I teach mastery of each one in several variations. This tends to give the student a good sense of balance and technical understanding when they start their Jurus and Kembangan. Students will often recognize a technique from the four tools, or a set up leading to them, if they have been prepped with the mechanical attributes in advance.
If I have offended anyone with this presentation, I apologize. Most of the Plinck Serak school students are friends of mine, and it’s not my intention to cause animosity between us.
Unless your last name is Perry.
17 comments:
my experience with the "lifting" sapu is that sometimes it leads to the person (being off balance and wanting to correct) stepping out of the lift and regaining themselves.
I hope your friend gets a lot out of the DVD.
Very cool.
I see some information that will work quite well with some of the complex stepping patterns of Bagua.
Thanks,
John at Dojo Rat
Four tools? Ah. I thought you were saying "Poor fools."
Never mind ...
This is another one of those times where I look at the vids, talk to the people and ask "What was it we were disagreeing about?"
The fundamentals of how you get the sweep to work are exactly the same way we do it. All those variations like "I like to put a knee knock in there" or "I prefer to take it here and then out at a slightly different angle" are purely personal style. You've got ones that work for you. They won't be the same ones Perry uses. They certainly won't be the ones that Tiel uses. But anyone with good skills immediately see that they're the same sweep relying on the same basics and the same body mechanics.
Weight on the leg that's being swept? Check.
Disrupt the structure so that you can sweep the leg? Check.
Coordinate your legs and arms, hips and shoulders, so that you aren't moving everything at once? Move his center? Don't let him move yours? Restrict his mobility and move his center of gravity off from over his feet? Good position? Good structure? Opposite levers (to crib one of my teacher's terms)? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The only real differences I see are in the flourishes and styling. It's the same way of sweeping even when it looks different.
Compare that to someone who claims to have some Silat skills but doesn't. The sweeps might look very similar. But they are completely different because they don't have the same technical foundation. They're different even when they look alike.
Very interesting. I'm the anon from Mr. Perry's blog who asked the initial question. Thanks again for your answers and the hard work you've put into all your videos. Please, please keep doing it because it's excellent stuff. To answer someone's question on Mr. Perry's blog, my background is Mande Muda, so seeing what you do is sometimes a bit more familiar to me than the serak or more kuntao-based arts.
I also tend to agree with you about learning things "on the body" as it was put to me, instead of in solo forms.
But on the other hand, people who do solo forms tend to have a level of physical precision that "on the body" training doesn't produce.
On the other other hand, that physical precision may be wrong, and solo-trained people may lack in the ability to cope with the statistical slop of a fight.
You have the largest selection of self-produced training clips I've seen on youtube or elsewhere, except for sale. Plenty of people are selling similar stuff, but I think if you continue giving it away, it'll end up being very rewarding because you're going to develop a following. And I think these ad-hoc videos are much better material than a lot of stuff in the Paladin catalog.
"But on the other hand, people who do solo forms tend to have a level of physical precision that "on the body" training doesn't produce."
I disagree. Real precision, in my training experience, comes from making it work on real bodies. If your angles are just slightly off, it may still look good on the video but it won't work.
"Real precision, in my training experience, comes from making it work on real bodies."
And then there's the ability to cope with imprecision, which you don't get from forms practice. If you get the feel of a real body, you learn to tell if your positioning is right and your body becomes adaptible to rapidly changing conditions, which rigid "perfection practice" doesn't give you.
Part of the gameplan of things like monkey kuntaw, and of many seasoned street attackers, is to add as much chaos as possible to the situation, thereby forcing you to fight in conditions that they're familiar with and you aren't. In effect, they're dragging you down to their level and then beating you with experience.
This is the reason why people like TKD forms experts get shitcanned by streetfighters. They're able to destroy other rigid, precise fighters from the same style, but when it gets time to throw down against a scrapper who only knows how to throw a chaotic flurry of punches, it doesn't work so well.
The only advantage to forms practice-- and it's a huge one-- is that you can do it on your own. Dummy work and silat jurus improved my hand speed immensely, but there's no way that can compensate for running through drills with another person or fighting a resisting opponent.
Partner training is necessary for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which are distance and timing. Tiel's point is valid -- looking good is not the same as being good.
Still, if you don't have a partner, solo forms and drills are certainly better than sitting on the couch with the chips and hummus dip watching the tube for getting something out of your training. The more you practice the root movements, the mo' bettah they get.
Very informative.
Good explanation of what to look for and what to avoid.
So when's that DVD coming out? hehe.
Steve: If I had a partner, I would always be doing two-person drills. Her point is of course valid. But on the other hand, there may be something that comes from solo training that is not so available from partner drills. In things like silat, geometric perfection of throws is extremely important.
There is an ideal position for things like footsteps. For many movements, a 45 degree angling is an ideal, perfect compromise between movement in the two cardinal directions, and as you fall off in either direction from that 45` you move away from the optimum.
But in a real fight, those foot positions don't look like solid footprints as much as they look like a grey cloud of uncertainty, fading at the edges. That 45` optimum line also becomes uncertain; because the foot positioning is fuzzy, the optimal response position itself varies in a fuzzy way.
That is what I was saying about guys like Gartin. Gartin's movements are very loose and casual, and he doesn't care so much about perfection. Instead, he compensates later on in the movements for any lack of optimum.
I have also experienced great results from trapping dummies, in fluidity and speed of hand techniques. That's because there are things about trapping that are possible to train in isolation. If I had a training partner who wanted to run trapping drills 4 hours daily, that would be great, but I don't.
But 99% of martial artists don't work the dummy, or train outside of class, so it's academic anyway.
Here I go again vociferously arguing a compromise position between two viewpoints.
Cool. Question, what do you think of the terms Sapu Nuwar (sp?) or Sapu Dalam (sp?) ie are they necessary to know or over analyzing etc.?
My background is in FMA so I only have some Silat from seminars and bits from instructors so I'm very spotty on the basics. Mostly a lot of flash bang "Here's a cool move from Mande Muda..." Leading me to have a lot of phonetically spelled terms next to stick figures in my training notebook, but nothing cohesive.
B, I think you mean Sapu Luar.
Sapu Luar means "Outside Sweep" And Sapu Dalam means "Inside Sweep". That's all, it's not different than what I'm showing, just terminology in a language other than Engrish.
On the video I am mostly doing Sapu Dalam, except the one where I step outside and around my student's body. That would be classified as Sapu Luar.
So, to your question, no. I don't think it's necessary to learn the meaning in Bahasa Indonesia to do them. It's a cultural nuance to do so, but if theres one thing I've discovered it's that martial arts instructors are RARELY language instructors. They'll try to say something in the native language of their martial art, butcher it to hell and back, and pass it off by saying "Well, that's what my teacher called it". Ungh.
My students know very few Indonesian terms. I keep cultural effects out of my style as much as possible, because that's not what they're coming to me for. I will mention cultural points from time to time...But not much.
I get crucified for this a lot, mind you. Well, among other things that I get crucified for, this is at the top of the list. My argument always goes something like this: If I go to the International House of Pancakes and order my French Toast in French, does that make them so much more delicious? What does teaching this art in English do to diminish the effectiveness of it?
Ans: Nothing. But in most cases I find that I've demystified it enough for students to get a firm grasp on it, and Pencak Silat is so difficult to learn WITHOUT alot of mystical oogah-boogah or terminology nonsense, so why bother? It will take a dedicated student a MINIMUM of 15-20 years to get proficient at it, if I teach it full-tilt no nonsense all cards on the table. Anything else just impedes learning, and you don't have that kind of time to spare on this planet.
Hi!
Someone posted your video on a forum. It's very interesting, but I do have a question for you (I posted it on the forum as well, but of course, it's better to ask it here, as you can actually answer it now ;)).
Isn't it very hard to do a sapu the way you do it on a person who is very heavy?
Yours,
ChingChuan
Well, go back to the first principles: You have to get their weigh slightly off the foot to pull off the sweep, or go for timing two.
How slightly off is situational; you may have to do a lot of work or not try it altogether.
Also, keep in mind that this sweep can be done at other places in combat, not just right after he punches. You can do it as they are trying to match your footwork, after they have fallen, all kinds of things.
Thanks for your question! By the way, which forum was this posted on?
:That is what I was saying about guys like Gartin. Gartin's movements are very loose and casual, and he doesn't care so much about perfection. Instead, he compensates later on in the movements for any lack of optimum."
Of course, you can make things work without them always being perfect. But if you know optimal position, that's better.
When I was going through medical training, I learned about sterile technique. If you use it when you are in a hospital setting, chance of cross-infection among patients goes way, way down. A lot of medical folks don't bother, and nosocomial infections (those you catch in the hospital) are rampant. These days, some of them are resistant to all antibiotics, so it can be fatal. Sterile technique is easy to learn and do, but you have to be mindful.
Same with looking for the perfect position for a sweep. Might not happened often, but if you see it and understand it and can get to it, you save yourself effort. A proper sweep doesn't take a lot of strength. It does take timing and practice and skill.
chingchuan: I come to all this stuff from JKD originally, and one thing I was taught was to work on his legs with kicks from long range and during the entry to soften them up before closer work.
As for weight, I think that if you can get the initial stages of the sweep going, the actual falling down part might be exponentially worse. I weigh over 300 lbs-- hey, I'm tall-- and I've been swept so hard the way that Bobbe does it, that it broke my nose. It may be harder to deweight a bigger guy's leg but if you have the leverage he'll go down like a human sack of rice.
Or a human sacri... Oh, never mind.
Would anyone (Mr. Edmonds?) feel like sharing any single-person pukulan striking drills, possibly repetitive or freeform on the tiga?
Bobbe, thanks a lot!. I have a similar outlook, since the local language sounds pretty but always ends up translated "lock one" or "front sweep". I started thinking that way since when I was newer to the arts I spent a lot of time writing things in my training notebook instead of practicing the technique and I've also seen instructors "snow" their students with fancy terms.
Anyways, after a long ramble, I look forward to the next vid.
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