Here's an article by Wim Demeere that illustrates clear thinking. The subject matter of the article is highly relevant, as well. I'm sure lots of people can and will disregard the entire article because they disagree with a particular example, but doing so misses the point, and is a textbook example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Full article: http://www.wimsblog.com/2018/04/how-to- ... -training/
Excerpt
In many Filipino systems (Kali, Arnis, etc.) you learn weapons before learning unarmed techniques. Often, the stick is the weapon you start with (though lately it seems the knife is used a lot as well) and when you are proficient with it, then you learn the same techniques with other weapons and also how they translate into unarmed techniques. The idea is that you have the same movements in all of your techniques, regardless of which weapon you find yourself with, or when you lose your weapon.
There is a lot of validity to this approach. It makes for a structured and consistent learning experience, which speeds up your progress immensely. It also tends to avoid conflicts between the different parts of your brain when you are under adrenal stress, because you basically do the same thing all the time. So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that there is an inherent trap in this method.
You can avoid it if you train correctly and your teacher drills this into you, but Randy noticed this was getting lost. What he explained was that the stick is used as a “universal weapon” as it has the most similarities with the other weapons in the Filipino systems, like knife, machete, sword, axe, etc. You can indeed quickly learn to wield all of them by focusing on the similarities they share with the stick. As the stick is easier to control and more tolerant of mistakes, it makes sense to train with it first. However…
Randy then wrote what I use every day in my own training:The differences between those weapons are just as important as the similarities.
This was an eye-opener for me and I’ve been working for decades to increase my understanding of how this concept applies to almost everything. Let’s first look closer at Filipino arts and then expand from there.
<snip>
One of the ways in which Filipino systems teach is by using numbered angles of attack. I covered that in part in my video on knife basics. If you practice those angles with a stick at first, you can quickly develop clean lines of attack. When you then transition to the small knife, things overall remain the same, but some aspects change:These are the main differences I want to focus on, though there are others. So let’s look at them in more detail.
- You now have a point that penetrates the opponent’s body when stabbing with it.
- You have an edge that can cut both you and your opponent.
- Your range is shorter than with the stick.
This is a big part of why I think it's basically useless to discuss something like "taiji" as if it were one thing, and different styles were merely different expressions of the same core art. The shenfa, approach, and goals differ radically between styles, enough so that I consider them entirely separate things. Yes, there are some similarities, but not necessarily more than between karate and wing chun and white crane, all of which are clearly different, despite a common ancestry. As Randy's Law states, "The differences are just as important as the similarities."
But that's not really the point. The point is that clear thinking and articulation are skills, and skills well worth spending the effort to develop.