Amir In action

Amir is a good friend of mine who also works at Fuji Xerox Malaysia. Like me he hasn't much time for anything else these days but work and family. He was the Vice President of Persatuan Pencak Silat Sapik Kalo Malaysia at the same time I was the President.

The series of photo's presented below were taken at the Silat Olahraga competition for Majlis Silat Daerah Petaling in 1992 in which Amir won first place for his category. What is interesting about Amir's performance was that the opponent could not deflect Amir's counter attacks. This is all about timing. No matter what technique is employed by any martial artist of any style, if the timing is right and the delivery of the technique is accurate, the effect will be devastating.

The ability to judge the opponents ability and an understanding of the various limitation of the various stances that the opponent employs is important. For example, which leg is in front? Is the opponent hands raised high? Is his stance low? What is the degree of the opponents ability? We have to adapt to the opponent in order to determine which techniques would be safe and effective to use.

Please note that the techniques here have been modified to be non lethal due to the sports nature of Silat Olahraga. The word olahraga itself means sport in Malay. True Silat techniques are not pretty to watch and normally executed at extremely close range(Sepadi). The concept of Sepadi is presented in the first article called Pendekar.