The Basic Staff Techniques and How to Do Blocking & Attacking Patterns

The Basic Staff Techniques:

Some of the fundamental techniques in order to help you understand on how to use your staff a little better. We'll start with overhead swings. To begin with, we'll start from our forwards stance. And this is a great way to train your stance and your weapon all at the same time. From here, you're going to bring your staff over your shoulder.

Place your left hand on top of your right. You're going to begin by swinging the staff out to the side, bringing it behind you. As you bring it behind you, you want to tilt so that the staff should continue to flow past you, bringing it around that it tucks underneath the arm, pivoting into your forwards stance, and then thrusting the palm out.

And then from, here, you just want to take the staff out, bring it around, and swing it like a baseball stick. And then it just starts over again. So, now do in full speed.The next basic technique is what we call forward figure 8. From here, you're going to have your right hand firmly on the stick. Left hand is going to grasp with two fingers, and you use your thumb to guide it.

As you bring your stick forward, bring it from side to side. You want the stick to travel as close to your body as possible.

To reverse figure 8, for this one, you're going to have your right hand on the stick, and then place your left hand underneath. You're going to start by swinging behind you, and then bringing it up. Now, it's really important to keep your elbows high. Because when the ceiling isn't that high, You’re going to go a little bit lower. You want to use your body with the stick.

Now we're going to take the uppercut and the chop. Again, we're going to bring the stick over the head, on to the shoulders. We're going to do a change step, and release the staff at a 45 degree angle. Let it rest on your left shoulder. Bring it down, letting it snap underneath your arm. You can visualize coming up underneath somebody's head, and then striking back down on the back of their head. Again, up, and then, down. Full speed. And you'll practice these techniques with a lot of repetition, so you can get really good at them.

How to Do Blocking & Attacking Patterns:

Some blocking and defensive patterns from the Tan Tui system. We'll start with a form called the deep leg. We'll demonstrate number one and number two. Part of doing a two person set is the body conditioning. Another part of it is, is developing offensive and defensive reflexive skills. Let’s begin the form. To begin we start with hands up, punch down.

This is the opening movement. Stretch the arm up, step back; reverse forward stance. And now we are going to pivot and block into a forward stance back fist. Continue to a fore arm strike. And now we are going to kick guard and chopping the log. And then it’s going to repeat going in the other direction.

And now to defensive pattern number two. First person is going to execute a punch and Second person is going to block. From here the second person is going to execute a cross over knee kick. The first person blocks the kick, he steps back and now punch toe kick and white stork. And it’s going to repeat on the other side.

Now they are going to do it full speed so you get an idea of how to develop a reflexive timing and skills and distance required to do it. Begin. As you could see, you can go from doing number one, right to number two and right back to doing number one over and over again. Picking up the intensity as you continue. And stop.

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