by Tiga Pukul on Fri May 18, 2018 12:48 am
I think there are a lot of misconceptions on the kerambit. One thing is that people love to look cool with them and spin them around or do all kinds of nifty stuff with it.
But i guess same goes for longer edge weapons, you see the weirdest stuff performed, even throwing them in the air and catching them.
Apart from that you see a lot of longer blades on the kerambit with the blade being almost 15 cm long, which is not what a kerambit is meant for. It should be a small tiger claw, a couple of centimeters long, protruding from outside of the fist. Inconspicuous, and very direct in application. When you see all these fancy slicing and dicing it is for a very big part to look cool yeah. Sparring with a kerambit blade looks even more silly.
A kerambit is not meant for stabbing, it's meant for piercing and slicing open. And with that you can almost immediately implement it in your system, if your system is using the correct principles. It should be incorporated in the hits immediately. And therefore it should not be a completely new routine to learn. Since it's a very short weapon, your application should also be short. No use to stay at a distance with this one, then a longer blade is much more useful.
It has it's time and place and can be a formidable weapon, but just training it for the wrong reason or trying to do some semi-twirling with it is next to useless.
Some people say kali/escrima and silat are very similar, also if you look at the knive/kerambit. I think one big difference is that in Indonesian Silat you always start to learn the unarmed way (like in many kungfu styles) and then you learn the weapons, not the other way around which is quite common nowadays in FMA. First you need decent control of yourself and the other and have the required motor skills to move on to weapons. My teacher always says, when you want to train with a knife your mind has to be as sharp as a knife. No use learning all these twirling, curving and other fancy stuff when you are dealing with a weapon to kill. One mistake and you are dead.
Last edited by
Tiga Pukul on Fri May 18, 2018 12:50 am, edited 2 times in total.