How To Strike With Escrima Sticks

Hello and welcome to this video which is how to strike with escrima sticks. Now, it's important to know a couple of things about these to begin with. Usually, they are made from a wood called rattan, okay.

They originate from the Philippines and the Philippines would use this in martial art to learn how to strike and cause harm on your opponent to defend yourself, okay. They kind of believe that it should just be an extension of your arm so you keep a nice tight grip of it. Wherever you send your arm, the stick follows, okay.

It requires a bit of hand-eye coordination and like everything that you learn, there's a beginning and an end so you need to kind of learn things very slowly and very easily. Okay, especially if you're playing with these wooden ones here, it hurts if you get wrong, okay. So, makes sure that you maybe choose some foam ones or rubber ones to start with.

Okay, I'm going to show you a very basic set of moves now that you can implement if you look into training with escrima sticks. Okay, now I'm going to show you a couple of strikes here. The first one I'm going to show you is the pressure strike.

For demonstration purposes, I want to use the arm here because it's a nice soft area and it's not going to hurt my partner too much, okay. Now, a pressure shot, keeping the hands up in a kind of natural guard position, maybe taking the elbow across the face to protect yourself or using the stick at an angle here to protect yourself, you're going to use the backhand here and you're going to strike just like that, okay, just like you would if you were going to hit someone with a stick. It's as simple as that.

However, when you strike, you're going to hold pressure on the strike surface, okay. What that does is it reduces the ability for it to bounce off so that the shot is fluid and strong and it gives a lot of damage to your opponent. The arm isn't the best place to go, okay.

For a great damage and to protect yourself, you really want to be looking in just on the throat here. So, I'm not going to do it hard for safety reasons but it would something like this. So, in your guard position, straight down there and holding still, okay.

You're looking at literally half a second and then pulling back. What we don't want is a bounce, okay. That's a different kind of strike.

To do a strike like that, you're looking at an area of maybe the jaw, maybe the side of the leg here in the knee, the ribs, okay, or maybe even if they're on the side, under the throat here, okay. This second strike is used to get in and out really fast, okay. So you want to keep your hands in the guard, maybe you're looking to hit, maybe you're under pressure and you're going to hit and you're going to get out of there, okay.

So, you don't want to hang around and it's just a quick shot and out, okay. So there, shot and out. What that does is it's called a tick and it gives a little tick on your opponent, it's painful but it allows you to pull your hands back into guard position again, so it's very useful.

I'm going to show you one last thing, a single stick, okay. If you find a single stick, the best place to hold it is to leave a couple of inches underneath. Okay, the reason for that is you can strike like I showed you, fluid and tick, but also you can use this blunt end here as a pressure point application, an extension of your fist, if you're looking to punch like so.

Okay, thank you. That was how to strike with escrima sticks. I hope you found it useful.

There are loads, loads more of knowledge out there but I'm just giving you a little bit of a basic insight into what it takes to strike with these. Okay, I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next time. .