Alot of martial arts, often give you 100 ways to skin a cat, but often fail to give you one important thing. How do you catch that cat in the first place? In other words, they will give you 101 "techniques" to deal with a telegraphed haymaker, but never a when to use those techniques or how to land the haymaker of your own. They deal with single attacks, in the hopes that your overwhelming response will win, no contingency for plan B, all based on the idea that the attacker is doing the one attack, or often what some will call killing the dead guy.
Yet, the minute you start sparring or fighting, surprise surprise, your opponent followed the single punch with another. Or your opponent didnt leave his arm out and wait for you to execute 50 strikes. Or your opponent wasnt impressed with you super strong well practice single counter. Or your opponent did use the exact same attack that you drilled for time in time out, or "cheated" as some martial arts call it, by not playing by the same rules. So where does this leave you?
One of the strengths of a good Philippine Combat Art, is that while technique is important, it is only the tool that allows you to implement an underlying strategy, or in other words a frame work to deal with conflict. While having the unstoppable powerful technique may work well when you are young, strong, and expecting the attack, as you get older how do you deal with that younger, stronger opponent. This is where having an understanding of the strategy of fighting creates the art, and not having just a bag of parlor tricks to impress cameras and the untrained.
