I’d like to share I bit of background I received from frequent reader and thoughtful contributor James:
Hi Darrin,
Thought I’d drop you a line about where I’ve gotten my training. I am always a student, rarely a teacher, and never a fighter.
If you go on Face-Book you can search for Bushido Kai and Celtic Stick Fighting Society, both in Halifax, NS Canada.
Bushido Kai was my first full time school and the focus was on Japanese jujutsu but always with an eye on effectiveness so we had jujutsu, kickboxing, and FMA elements not as separate classes but within the overall style. It’s a great school and if any one is travinling through the area I recommend you give them a call.
I have not been training much in the past two years due to job relocation as well as a back injury but I knew that one of our students was doing some training on the side with other guys from the school so I phoned him up to see what he had on the go. Neither of use being of an age that we can compete on a regular bases with the buff 18 year olds, and we both like working with sticks a lot. Well it seemed like he didn’t have much going on at the time but was excited that I called and we started the Celtic Stick Fighting Society together.
Our goal is to have a 2 year integrated system that anyone can learn. We use T-shirts instead of belts but the colours are more or less the same. Our first year looks like this: White-stick, Yellow-stick+hand, Orange-hand vs stick, Green-stick+ground. So as you can see each 3 month period has a focus but we are training regardless of weapon size or range. The second year will focus on more advanced techniques as well as sparring.
We are also using the Chinese Wand exercises http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MdRX4gvjaM as part of our warm-ups which I think is cool because even our warm-ups pay homage to the stick; and indeed, one figure-8 non-Chinese Wand warm-up we do for the shoulders is actually a 2-hand grip stick strike. We don’t do regular jogging but do triangular jogging which looks like jogging on an hourglass pattern on the floor, this reinforces our footwork angles. We try to have “economy of learning” even in our warm-ups!
It was interesting to find your blog while putting together our program; your creating your own style posts were quite timely.
Big Stick Combat Blog 