The 12 Principles of Presas Arnis - Find the Fight

Ever watch a really fantastic martial arts demonstration, where someone is spinning and tossing a weapon, doing fancy gymnastics and flips, maybe even doing it to music?

Maybe you’ve seen really amazing board-breaking demonstrations by tae kwon do schools, especially kicking them high in the air? Or they do an amazing number of kicks knocking things off peoples' heads?

That could turn INTO a fight, I suppose.

Both of those things are related to the martial arts - and fighting and combat - but neither examples I gave above are actually a FIGHT . They are all demonstrations of martial arts skill, in a variety of contexts, but all of them are missing a couple of key components of a FIGHT.

One of those key components is intent.

Intent is very hard to replicate. It’s closest in combat sports like boxing and judo and muay thai and tournament jiu jitsu, but because most people aren’t willing to permanently injure other people, even if they are completely committed to using their skills against another person, there’s always something being held back. The actual intent to cause serious bodily harm or death is missing.

There’s other components to a fight: how much energy or power you put into a technique, targeting for maximum damage and not taking safety into consideration, things like that.

We usually are missing one or more of these elements of a fight in everyday training. We don't actually try to injure each other, we keep safety in mind when we train, and we don't usually hit other people as hard as we can in dangerous spots on the body.

In short, we don't mean it.

Usually.

However, it doesn’t follow that we aren’t thinking about it; we constantly look at what we do and ask, “Where’s the fight?”. If I needed or wanted to, how would I hurt this person meaning me harm to stop the conflict as fast as I can?

Presas Arnis - like most variants of arnis/escrima/kali/eskrima - has plenty of flow drills, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell what the purpose of these drills are. Often, we are isolating on skills to develop or concepts to understand, and it isn’t always obvious how that relates to physical conflict.

That’s why we shake our head when a video that’s obviously a drill developing a skill gets posted online, and people comment, “That’s not how fights work!” or “That’ll never work like that on the street!”

Well… yes, nobody’s claiming that. We’re developing skills useful in a fight.

However, on the flip side, you get martial artists who get so into the flow drill, and some of the less-than-practical and more theoretical side of things, and they lose sight that in all of this training, we’re still trying to fundamentally train in MARTIAL arts - skills to use in violent conflict.

It’s very attractive to go down those rabbit holes - and we’re certainly not immune to it at times - but when the esoteric, removed-from-reality side of the martial arts becomes the primary focus of training, it’s no longer actively training people to deal with violence.

They are no longer looking for the fight.

We believe that we have to keep the fight - the conflict - in the forefront of our training. That's why the second principle of our 12 Principles of Presas Arnis is Find the Fight.

Come join us at Kindred Protective Arts for a free trial lesson (click HERE) - and learn to FIND THE FIGHT!