Shielding of the Upper Body
One of the main features of Pencak Silat is the often abstract flowing hand movements. Most martial artists fail to understand the function of this. The flowing movements are to act as interceptors to the attackers strikes and to work as a decoy by funnelling the attackers strikes into a certain chosen target area for the defender to deal with either with by hit trapping, hard blocking, locking or with his own series of strikes towards the attackers hands, wrists forearms etc...
There are 4 main interception patterns that the persilat uses
1) The triangle (marked in red)
2) The figure 8 (mark in Yellow)
3) The circle (marked in Green)
4) The square (marked in Black)
The diagonal black lines represent the open hand decoy opening position one high and one low
These patterns allow the silat player to create a shield in front of his body, in much the same way window wipers are use on the car windscreen. Do they stop all strikes, no but they will connect with 70 - 80% of all strikes delivered towards the defender. Once intercepted the defender learns to destroy the attacker limbs so he cant use it again. This form of training helps students to learn to keep their hands up so they can protect the upper parts of their body.
You may notice the shielding describe here has no protection to the legs, that is another topic, which we deal with in another post, but in Pencak Silat the hands protect the body and face and the legs protect the lower body. If you look at the patterns you will notice very few parts of the body exposed.
When learning this at start practise slow and flowing, getting your body to move, add in your decoys, than when comfortable add in your strikes coming from the shield. We be working on this over the few weeks in class and feel free to ask questions if needed.
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