Escrima / Kali / Arnis 

Escrima, Kali and Arnis all refer to the same thing which is the Filipino arts of empty hand, stick and knife fighting. The Philippine culture adopted the fighting methods of every culture that ever set foot in the Philippines. The art contains elements of Spanish Fencing, Indonesian Silat, Western boxing and native Filipino stick and knife combat. every well rouded martial artist these days has studied some of this.

Pretty well all of the Wing Chun clubs and many other styles of combat around the world, have incorporated Filipino Martial Arts as part of their curriculum. Wing Chun also has weapons which consists of the long pole or the spear and also the Butterfly knives. These weapons do have things in common with the Filipino weapons. For Wing Chun the weapons provide a training method for quick footwork, which is not contained in the other Wing Chun forms. I will write a separate article about that.

Since day one in 1982, our club has been involved in Filipino stick combat as well but of course not to the extent of a real Filipino Martial arts club because our art is Wing Chun and not Arnis, Escrima or Kali. Eventually we would like all of our advanced students to also be good at stick and knife combat and if we were in the USA, I would add gun combat to the list as well. It’s the modern world now and these things are just practical. Learning some basic ground techniques is also a good thing to know, so we teach all of that too and where we don’t know something, we invite some expert in that particular subject to teach us. When Reza and I grew up, wrestling was our sport. His wrestling was formal Iranian wrestling and mine was learned from TV.

A good friend of mine, a police officer, by the name of Wayne Unger, is an expert Judo teacher with Olympic caliber Judo. He volunteered to teach us what he thinks Wing Chun people should know about Judo. He studied Wing Chun with us for several years and can sweep all of us to the ground. So definitely we want to do that.

I have met various Masters of Filipino fighting arts so I have a high respect for their art. I learned useful things from all of them but we are a little rusty from not training that for many years, but now we are into it again.

One person I really like is Grandmaster Bobby Taboada. I notice some Ontario Wing Chun clubs have also connected up with him. Here is a short video about his kind of art. He has many video clips on Youtube to look at.