Pencak Silat Training Exercise

No training exercise described here is merely an isolated rehearsal in agility or clever movement; each is directly related to some particular fighting tactic. The reader is advised to pay special attention to the textual description of the exercise as well as to the illustrations, for sometimes the limitations of photography have canceled the authors efforts to record as faithfully as possible what was being enacted before the lens, and, in such cases, the written word must be relied on to impact information that the photographs fail to show.

Pencak-silat begins, naturally enough, as we have already indicated, with empty-hand pencak training exercises. The trainee should practice each exercise precisely and slowly until he begins to feel that he is gaining confidence in the technique. When he is satisfied that he is doing exactly what the text calls for, then he attempts to inject into his execution of the exercise first fluency and then speed. It is only constant repetition that will enable him to perform the exercise accurately, smoothly, and quickly. He must repeat each training exercise over and over again until it feels "comfortable"; any other feeling means that he is still short of his goal.

The student will find that many of the exercises given here are in dispensible to correct performance of some of the combative actions described in the following chapter, but not all exercises are directly linked to the action shown there. Some have been given merely because they are obviously useful and may be easily converted to combat. In such cases, it is for the trainee to devise his own applications.

In any case, he must always bear in mind that the soft and silky, yet precise, movements of the pencak-silat expert are the result of many hours of dedicated study and practice. A good share of the expert's training time is devoted to exercises, many of which appear in this chapter. Unless the trainee is prepared to devote himself with similar wholeheartedness to the training exercises, he cannot hope to master the combative tactics described in the chapter that follows.

• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 1
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 2
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 3
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 4
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 5
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 6
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 7
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 8
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 9
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 10
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 11
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 12
  
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 13
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 14
• Pencak Silat Training Exercise 15