Just back from 2 days of training with Guro Krishna Godhania and gotta say it was a blast! The training is old school in that it’s one to one tuition on a host of areas in the arts from single stick, double stick, stick and dagger, knife defence and staff. Guro Krishna’s teaching style is very relaxed but structured in such a way as to ensure that the material being trained is covered in depth in an easy to assimilate matter. An example of this would be the division of “drills” into co ordination, flow and combat groups. This allows a student when exposed to a new drill to be able to place that drill in one of the above categories. I was introduced to this concept via the medium of double stick, an area which has always given me problems (I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous). We started with the most common siniwali co ordination drills, and then introduced different variations that brought the drill “alive”. Next Guro Krishna taught a flow drill called “pakgang” again once the basic drill was learnt he gave me the different variations to underpin the basic principle of the drill. The last section was the sparring / combat application, my favourite. Here the co ordination and flow attributes from the previous drills were used in a number of combative scenarios. This progression was followed when dealing with single stick and single dagger. Although I’m biased as I’m a student of Guro Krishna’s I would recommend training with him to anyone interested in deepening their knowledge in FMA and there’s also the fact that he’s a genuinely nice guy.
All the best,
John
P.S.
I don’t wanna sound to “advertisementy” but Guro Krishna has a series of instructional tapes and DVDs on the FMA that are well worth a look. Not only do you get the core drills and in depth explanations on single stick, single dagger, double stick and Pangamut each tape has clips from the Philippines demonstrating their respective arts, some cool stuff a happening.
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