Paul Vunak teaches the Most Effective Tactic of the Philippine Fighting Arts...

For many martial artists, weapons are the reason they train. The appeal of learning how to wield a weapon, whether traditional or modern is undeniable. Unfortunately, the lion’s share of attention gets lavished on the Japanese and Chinese arts. It’s unfortunate because, as any student of self-defense will tell you, the lowly stick holds so much potential. Perhaps the best source for instruction on stick fighting is the Philippine art of kali, and one of the best teachers of kali is Paul Vunak. A longtime student of Dan Inosanto, Vunak has focused on the stick for more than 30 years. Presented here is his interpretation of the most effective tactic in the sticks arts: Defanging the snake.

Why should Martial artists in the 21^st century incorporate stick fighting into their training?

To answer this properly, I have to go back to Bruce Lee and Dan Inosanto in the 1960s. Bruce was obviously an amazing person, an amazing martial artist and an amazing athlete. For many years, he was the only person at that level that Dan had ever seen. After meeting Bruce, Dan was introduced to some Filipino masters by Ed Parker. He noticed that those masters had the same attributes as Bruce: similar speed, similar sensitivity, and similar body mechanics. Dan had been in probably 20 martial arts before, but he’d never seen anyone move like Bruce – and these guys were in their 60s. Those masters were able to move that way because of the weapons. When you move with weapons in your hand, it expedites the development of your natural attributes. Whether you’re talking about speed, power, coordination, timing, spatial relationships or footwork, you can quadruple it by working with weapons.

How does the weapon training increase your speed?

When you swing a stick, the tip of it moves about 150 miles per hour. No punch moves that fast. So when you’re used to seeing a stick swing that fast, punches seem like they’re coming at you in slow motion. There are so many different angles and so many different weapons that when you make the transition to empty hand, it’s really easy.

What are the practical applications of weapons training?

 As I said, you can train with weapons to improve your empty hand, but you can also train with weapons to prepare for a weapons fight. Seventy percent of encounters involve weapons. You might be the best empty-hand fighter in the world, but if you don’t know how to fight with a weapon, you could be in trouble. If you and your opponent have broken bottles in your hands and you don’t know anything about weapons, you’ll probably make very poor choices. You won’t have distancing, you’ll be overbearing and you won’t understand what that weapon can do. You’ll probably die. We call that “following the way of the dodo.” So knowledge of weapons can keep you alive no matter how good your empty hand is.

Do you like the stick because it’s readily available in other forms-like an umbrella or a broom?

 Actually in the Philippine hierarchy, the most complicated and lethal cocktail is a long blade and a short blade. But in terms of what weapons will translate to empty hand, you have the first weapon that Filipinos used: the staff. A staff can be a broomstick or a pool cue; anything long and skinny can work with the same techniques.

The second category is dos manos, which means the weapon is so heavy takes two hands to hold. This would be similar to the samurai sword, which takes two hands. How could this translate to the street? In an alley, you could pick up a two-by-four.

The next category is the siniwali, which refers to two equal lengths – two sticks or two knives. In a real fight that could be a pool cue again. If you break a pool cue in half, you have two equal lengths.

The next category is double knife. That could be two broken bottles.

There’s also single stick or single knife.  A single knife can be anything edged, such as a broken bottle. A single stick can represent a tire iron, crowbar, or a flashlight.

So any one of the weapons in the Philippine system can correspond to something you can pick up on the street. The most important thing is to have a skill set that works regardless of the weapon and the only one that does that is “defanging the snake.”

Is that the one technique you’d recommend for the average martial artist?

No matter what weapon you have, it would be defanging the snake. The name means this: The snake is the opponent, and the fang of the snake is his weapon. When you defang the snake, you take away its weapon. Instead of having a pillow fight – trading head shots or trying to block – you smash your opponent’s hands. When he drops the weapon, you’ve defanged the snake. Now you can walk away or kill the snake.

Do you hit the fingers, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm or just anywhere?

You won’t know. There are certain drills the Filipinos use to train your brain so that when you see a weapon coming in, you don’t see it as a weapon to viscerally block. You see it as a target to hit. And when you do hit, anywhere on the weapon hand is good – all the way up to the elbow.

In training, do you just touch the hand as how it comes out? You have any planned responses like, if he does this, you do that?

No just hit the hand. It’s important to note that you don’t see a lot of this hand smashing nowadays because many schools that teach the Philippine martial arts have “sport-ized” it. Anytime you turn a beautiful art into a sport, you dilute it.

Specifically, what do you mean by turning it into a sport?

There are now stick tournaments all over the planet. First of all, the competitors wear helmets, so they come in with impunity and nobody worries about their head. They also wear hand gear, so nobody attacks the hands because you can’t hurt them. And they have rattan sticks. In the Philippines, a rattan stick is equal to a rubber stick. It’s a play stick so when you have rattan sticks with gloves and helmets, you end up just clashing and trading bonks on the head. Then the referee steps in and somehow ascertains a winner.

If this were reality, the very first shot to the head – whether it’s with a pipe, a flashlight or a crowbar – the person would be down in a pool of blood and the fight would be over. So it’s turned into a sport. The old Filipino masters don’t fight that way. The ones I’ve trained under all do the same technique: when anybody comes at them, they defang the snake. You don’t see kids doing this in the sport nowadays. They would rather headhunt.

How do you realistically train for real world street usage?

Interestingly enough, in a karate tournament, the competitors are what I call “under-daring,” which means they don’t really hit each other in the head, and when they do, the very first point is the one that counts. There’s no follow-up. So whoever touches the other person in the head first, wins. That’s not realistic because in a real fight, you can take punches to the face. It’s more important to learn how to trade blows and get in and hit in combinations.

In a stick tournament, it’s the opposite. The competitors are “over-daring.” They get in and trade blows with a stick over and over. Stick tournaments should be judged more like karate tournaments. After the first shot to the hand, they should break. If the guy leads with his head, that’s the target you see first, so you hit the head. Then comes the break. That would be more realistic.

In defanging the snake, do you have your weapon hand in the lead position, with your lead foot out? Does it even make a difference?

It makes a big difference because you don’t need any power when you defang the snake. It’s just a little flick of the wrist. With a real weapon – a steel pipe, a crowbar, or a blade – one shot on the hand and the game is over. If you don’t need any power, you might as well put your weapon in your front hand, where the speed is. It’s the same in Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do.

Is defanging the snake more off a snappy movement or is there a follow-through?

It’s a snapping movement, a quick jab. Again if you’re stick fighting with rattan, you could have no protection on your hands and hit each other full contact, and it hurts the day after, but you can still fight. If you replace that rattan stick with a piece of oak and inch and a half in diameter, one shot in the hand and you’re screaming. Every bone in your hand is broken.

If defanging the snake is your primary tactic, should you always try to use it?

No. Let’s say you are in a close-quarters situation, maybe in a bar. You’re two feet from the guy and he grabs a bottle, breaks it and comes at you. You have a bottle and you break it, and as he comes forward, the first thing you see is his face. You don’t even see his hand- it’s low and you’re close- so you shove the bottle in his face. The moral of the story is, you hit the closest target. Normally, with trained people, the closes target is the hand, but untrained people sometimes lead with their head. So you hit them in the head first.

How should an unarmed person fight a guy who has a stick?

The strategy is to get close. If he’s swinging the stick at you and you cover your head and charge him, he’ll hit you a couple of times on the way in, but you’ll be able to take it. Probably seven out of 10 times, if you charge properly and time it, once you’re in close, you can use trapping techniques, straight blasts, head butts, knees and elbows. The only way to defeat a stick is to get inside it. On the other hand, with a knife, that whole strategy is irrelevant. There’s no way to fight a knife.

So unarmed against a knife is a ludicrous question?

Unarmed against a knife is ludicrous. It’s the same as asking how to fight a man with a gun. You don’t fight a man with a gun physically; you fight him verbally. You use psychology - how you deal with him, how you answer his questions, how you do what he says.

Facing a knife is similar to facing a gun, then?

Yes. Say you’re an unarmed person in a restaurant. Somebody pulls a knife. The first thing you do is run.

Let’s take it to level two. You’re in that same restaurant with your mother, so you can’t run. I didn’t say your mother-in-law – with her you leave. (laughs) Now you have to protect your mom, so you can’t run. You have to grab an equalizer; your own knife, a bottle, a chair, a table, hot soup.

Now the third layer: You can’t run, and there’s nothing to grab as the guy attacks you with a knife. I can’t imagine this scenario well, I guess I could- maybe you’re in a handball court. There’s nowhere to run because there’s only one door and the guy guarding it with a butcher knife. So how do you fight him?

Many would say to protect your vital areas and go for his eyes, his groin or his kneecap. We’ve tried this for 27 years. We’ve tried it with ink pens. We’ve tried it with training knives from Soft-STX. There’s no way to do it, not when a man is attacking you wild and crazy. It’s all in how the attacker attacks you. If he attacks you with a thrust, like some karate fake pseudo thing, you can do anything. But if he attacks you like a wild, crazy prison escapee, you can’t go for his eyes or groin because you’re going to get cut and bleed out.

The only thing you can do is dive six inches off the ground and tackle him. Then you smother the knife and start biting. He’ll have multiple opportunities to give you tiny pokes and cuts, but they’re not death shots. When you dive at his ankles and start biting, there will probably be only one chance of receiving a death shot, and it’s on your way in. I would give myself as a martial artist who’s trained for 30 years, a 10 percent chance. If anybody tells you differently, they’re lying. Ten percent is better than 0 percent.

Biting as a defense… is there any particular way to it?

There’s a whole Philippine are called kino mutai. It teaches 144 uninterrupted bites. By uninterrupted, I mean that you’re grabbing the opponent while you’re biting. If you just bite, he’ll pull away. While you’re biting you tear. There are 18 different ways to tear. It’s a very complicated art. I augment my kino mutai with Brazilian Jujitsu. People ask me “Are you worried about getting blood in your mouth?” Of course I’m worried about getting blood in my mouth, so the only situation that I would ever use kino mutai is in the life or death one that we are referring to.

What are some other realistic ways to train with a stick?

All real world training has to be base on defanging the snake. It has to be based on the honor system because the person who gets hit first has to drop the weapon. You and your partner have to have that agreement. Once you do, you can defang the snake with a stick or a knife using the same drill. Or you can grab a baseball bat and do it. Just use a rubber bat and protect your hands.

Defanging isn’t like learning a technique. Martial artists can learn a technique and say they’ve got it. Learning how to defang the snake is like flying a plane. A pilot talks about how much flight time he has. If I have a student who’s been with me for a year, he might have 10 or 15 hours of flight time with defanging the snake. Then I might have a student who’s been with me for 25 years - like Tom Cruse, who’s probably logged thousands of hours doing that one move. When he spars with any of my other students, he always goes 10 to 1, not because he has a better move but because he has more flight time with that one move.

The drills you talked about required a partner. How can a person train solo?

Carrenza, which means “shadowboxing.” You get your stick out and work your follow-up. A good drill is to use your stick to make giant letters in the air and go through the alphabet: A, B, C … Doing the whole alphabet hits every angle.

Should a martial artist practice a specific follow-up after defanging the snake?

When you do your follow-ups, there are stroking drills that you do with the weapon. Stroking drills use various weapons and angles to promote body mechanics. Somebody who wants to learn boxing starts throwing punches but doesn’t put his body into his punches; he just punches with his arms. As the person improves, he learns how to put torque into his punches. When he turns pro, he becomes very lethal with those same punches. The difference between a pro and a beginner isn’t the punches; it’s how much torque he puts into them. The stick is the same. All the drills we have are stroking drills that enhance body mechanics so that when you hit something, you can really hurt it.

There are names for the follow-ups. One means “fan,” one means “thrust” and one is named after a fish in the Philippines that swims goofy. The moves all have the same theme of getting the whole body involved. They’re like a hook, an uppercut or an overhand; they’re all good for knocking out the guy after you jab him a few times. Which one do you want? Man, I don’t know. They all work. It’s the same thing with the stick.