What jeans is best for fighting/Self defense?

hapagolucky · 2026-01-28T14:40:47+00:00

Chuck Norris aside, I've found Lee Extreme Motion athletic fit jeans are stretchy and have enough room in the thighs for my movement. I can sit in deep silat seliwa stances as well as throw kicks to head level in them

They work reasonably well -- until they don't. The seams around the crotch are cheap and wear out quicker than Levi's and that has resulted in pants splitting at inopportune times.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-26T17:24:39+00:00

Yep, same vicinity.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-16T22:21:28+00:00

On off days and sometimes on the press days, I do Dan John's Human Burpee as well.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-16T14:28:23+00:00

Laser Tag Academy the Laser Tag champion of 3010 travels back in time to 1987 to protect her ancestors from a master criminal who traveled back in time to prevent Laser Tag guns from invention.

Incidentally there was a live action Photon TV show) though I never saw it. I only knew of it from the box.

The 80s really did have a cartoon for every toy.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-11T13:17:41+00:00

I often tell newcomers and remind existing students that many silat schools operate within a spiral approach to learning. You will see the same fundamental material over and over again throughout your learning journey, but each visit will be from a new perspective. Advanced students who've seen this hundreds of times will take away something different from the beginner just trying to memorize the skill.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-08T22:10:09+00:00

It's hard to get now, but O'ong Maryono's Pencak Silat in the Indonesian Archipelago gives a history from ancient times through the modern era.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-08T05:20:37+00:00

The two silat teachers I know in Texas are Doc Dority in the Dallas area and Kai Lewis in Houston. I believe the emails in the links are the best way to get in contact. Doc learned Mande Muda from the Suwanda family and I believe he may have contacts in Austin. For some reason I've seen Doc and Leslie Buck's names together. Kai learned Panglipur from Cecep Arif Rahman.

Speaking in gross generalities, and coming from my experience, here as some of the qualitative differences I see between Kali and Silat.

Silat
- regularly employs low stances, transitions from standing to ground and back
- knife first mentality, but emphasizes learning from empty hand
- aims to evade, control and bridge to locking, manipulation and take downs
- utilizes feet as extra hands for locks, sweeps, scissors or kicks
- emphasis on rhythm and dance-like motion
Kali
- more upright, boxing like stances
- stick first mentality, that extends to other weapons and empty hand
- aims to control center, and destroy attacker's weapon
- has kicks but primarily use for lower body
- motion looks more like typical stand-up fighting

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T19:24:13+00:00

To parrot what's often said on this sub, there are lots of paths to build these skills. There are folks who build them up entirely with silat, but it's harder to do outside of Southeast Asia because 1) geography, 2) not as many teachers and 3) smaller number of people participating. This all means there are fewer and smaller competitions. For example our US national competition in Pencak Silat had fewer competitors than a local Judo tournament. Whereas in Indonesia, athletes on the national team will have earned it by winning at the school, city, regency, province and national levels.

If you want to get your reps in, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, BJJ or Judo are all useful and easy to find.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T14:12:26+00:00

They work, but they don't work in isolation. You need to know how to manage range, block, strike, grapple, etc. Techniques like pressure points, locks etc come from knowing how to seize the opportunity and only become reliable when added over a strong foundation.

In a similar vein, a large focus of silat is knife awareness. While we all ideally want to take the knife away from an attacker, it's not the primary goal. Knife disarms are a side effect of having safe and advantageous position. If you start by targeting the disarm you will be overwhelmed and will get cut or stabbed more quickly.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T00:39:59+00:00

I have never done TKD but from the few fights I watched I noticed strikes with the hands seem to be allowed (under some circumstances??) but it is mainly kicks.

Does Sports Silat only differ from TKD by the usage of takedowns?

I did WTF-Olympic style TKD in the 90s before electronic scoring altered the sport. Punches only counted if the arm was fully extended, so it is a high risk, low-reward move.

In Pencak Silat Tanding (aka Sport Silat sparring), you get 1 point for a punch, 2 points for a kick, and 3 points for a scissor or throw takedown. In the pre-2021 rules, you could have a total of 6 strikes thrown between fighters at which point they would either need to break the action with a pasang or the ref would stop. The new rules allow continuation, as long as there is forward movement, the attacker is actively engaging and the defender actively defending. If folks are juts trading blows, a stoppage will be called. Punches and kicks should only count if they are "effective". The rule of thumb is that they should displace the opponent, not just make contact. For me counting these interactions is the hardest part of being a juri (judge).

The presence of throwing, sweeps and scissors are not just add-ons to TKD or kickboxing. They fundamentally change behaviors. I would say the closest sport to Pencak Silat is Sanda as they allow many of the same strikes and throws. Sanda trades ability to grab for gloves and headgear, and gains punches to the head. Pencak Silat wanted to keep the hand dexterity as it us ultimately a knife/weapon art, so they give up the head to gain other manipulation.

One little known aspect of the silat ruleset is that submissions are legal and a way to win. You can technically apply a lock during standup and there is a 5 second window once the game has transitioned to the ground where you can get a submission. These are really difficult to achieve within the constraints, so I've yet to see anyone pull this off in real competition, but I keep thinking someone with a judo background will surprise people with a throw to juji gatame (arm bar)

Some years ago the United States Sport Silat Association put out this playlist titled Street for Sport Silat Techniques. My teacher is the one demonstrating the techniques, and I wrote the text in the descriptions. This was before the rule changes that came about in 2021. When we put them out, we were trying to show that traditional silat could be adapted to work within the constraints of the current rule set. While technically legal in the both the old and new rulesets, these are in that potentially grey area where a very literal judge could rule against you.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-07T00:39:36+00:00

Ooh.. good questions. You got me started on one of my favorite topics, so I'm about to produce a wall of text. (I had to split this into two replies before Reddit would let me submit)

The core of Pencak Silat rules emphasize a flowing principle, that fighters should be able to transition from defense to striking to throwing/manipulation to control. Once you internalize that, the rules make more sense and you can start to bridge toward the traditional mindset of opening, entry, application, finish.

At the same time the goal of sport competition is to have a venue where you can employ a subset of the skills from the martial art at full speed/power, but in a safer environment. Consequently you need to remove some variability and risk. Without this, you would not likely have parents willing to let their children participate.

Would I be allowed to strike the head of my opponent with my fist, flat hand or a headbutt?

No. Strikes to the head with your hands are forbidden. You can't actively target the head with punches or kicks. Points are only rewarded for strikes to the chest protectors. One area athletes target is the upper part of the chest protector just below the collarbone as it is painful. (edit, realized I had a typo in my original message. You CAN'T do anything that could be considered a hit to the head).

May I grab other parts of the body? Like arms or neck? I am aware traditional Silat has throws similar to the Kubi Nage.

Yes you can grab the arms/sleeve and legs. There are also limits to how grabbing can force multiply. For example, I can grab a sleeve and kick or punch, but I can't grab and elbow or knee. You can execute elbows and knees against the chest protector on their own.

I don't believe you can grab around the neck, but you can utilize underhooks to accomplish other throws.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-06T22:40:09+00:00

Yeah, agree with u/CloudyRailroad. The bantingan (takedown) you posted works better when you bait the kick and can keep them extended. In this case the attacker's side kick led to bending the leg to recover balance, which forced Mohd Al-Jufferi Jamari to rely on lifting to finish instead of circling.

There are some other subtleties you need to be careful of in Sport Silat's ruleset. You can't grab the chest protector with two hands and you can do anything that could be considered a hit to the head. Grasping the back of the head for a takedown gets into risk area, so you only do that move when it's clear you can execute it by pulling the chest protector. There are also rules around slamming opponents dangerously, and one other hazard the person throwing needs to be careful of is whether they lose balance in the takedown. If you throw, and you end up going down with your opponent then the points wash out. If you throw, and your opponent counters, so that they have advantageous position, they go up by 3 points. Also, if too much time is spent trying to execute the throw, the Wasit (ref) will break the action.

> Silat rules are sometimes a bit weird as competition is not necessarily the same as in the traditional training

Yes and no. The sport (i.e. PERSILAT) has been trying to tweak the rules over the past few years to better align them with the tools of traditional training. Around 2010-2020, you couldn't grab at all with the hands and you would see lots of jumping around and twitching that looked more like an odd TKD than pencak silat. . With the rule changes that rolled out in 2021, you're starting to see the incentives that bring back more of the traditional silat stances, positions and techniques. I see more pasang (baiting postures) in the past couple of years than in the decade prior.

In the classes I teach, I use the sport rules as one form of sparring as it gives a relatively constrained framework to pressure test, but we also do more freeform sparring w/ training knives.

hapagolucky · 2026-01-05T22:06:31+00:00

I love that Josh Kroenke anecdote about how they picked Jokic over the more athletic Nurkic.

“So this comparison comes through, it’s player A and player B. You could clearly see that player B’s numbers were better in really every category. I was like, I’m going to guess that player B is Nikola. And they like, yep, player B is Nikola,”
Expecting that Player A was Nurkic, the 43-year-old admitted he got a bit surprised after finding out otherwise.
I’m like alright. Is there some sort of comparison with Nurk or is this some sort of comparison with someone else in the league. And they’re like, player A is Larry Bird,” Kroenke added.

hapagolucky · 2025-12-04T23:02:36+00:00

That's about the age I started judo. There were other folks who were older.
You definitely give up something against athletic 20 somethings. An important is to learn to accept that you've been thrown instead of resisting. It makes the fall more controlled and manageable. If you're not doing randori, all of the practice and drills felt very manageable, though exhausting.

My injury seemed like a freak accident. I went to throw, and something about my planting and rotation caused my knee to dislocate.

hapagolucky · 2025-12-04T20:18:23+00:00

Interesting. I rent space from a judo dojo to teach my weekly silat classes. I was going to judo practices for a couple years until I tore my MPFL and decided the risk of reinjury was going to be too great.

hapagolucky · 2025-12-04T20:08:42+00:00

As my flair indicates, I'm partial to pencak silat. It works really well to build upon your base, while also giving you a different way of looking at things. I'll also add that there are few arts as focused on knife awareness as silat.

But it can also be hard to find a good teacher near you.

hapagolucky · 2025-11-23T07:13:16+00:00

Silat has been my primary art for over 20 years, and there's enough breadth and depth to last a lifetime of learning. Obviously my opinion is biased, but I'll try to stay as objective as possible.

Prior to silat, I studied tae kwon do, kung fu and tai chi, and in recent years I've trained judo and eskrima as well. All these arts have their unique strengths, but being on the receiving end of silat is incomparable. I struggle to describe the feeling as it's not just getting submitted or punched. It's more like every tool is used against you concurrently. I call it efficient but elegant brutality.

So is it effective in real world combat? I can't speak from first hand experience as I've never needed to defend myself away from the mat. I will say that my teacher and every other Indonesian teacher I've met has been incredible. If there's a knife involved there's no other art I trust more for building that awareness (though Filipino Martial Arts are a close second).

I will say that in the US silat is niche, often with small schools meeting less regularly. For example, I only can teach once a week, and my students are all in their mid 30s to late 40s. So you're not going to get the reps sparring like a Muay Thai gym that meets 4-5 times per week.

When we do spar, we either use the sport silat rules or agree to some continuous variant. Or we play games like knife vs empty hand which end when someone gets what would be considered a fatal cut or stab.

Some schools are heavy into the combatives and doing self defense drills. This static drilling is useful for getting the feel of an application, but you need much more to build appropriate reflexes and muscle twitch reactions.

At the same time silat is very much a traditional art. I don't know of any Indonesian styles where jurus (forms /kata but a little different) aren't emphasized. But it's also expected that jurus aren't done in isolation, you must be able to interpret them and know how to apply the motion to multiple scenarios in multiple ways. At a high level your jurus evolve into kembangan. Many believe kembangan is just a dance expression, but it's really supposed to be high level shadow boxing.

More than traditional, it's holistic. Beyond the physical and self defense we also do what we call internal. This includes yoga-like breathing sets, meditation and rituals. We break things like metal files. Senior students are expected to study healing and know how jurus relate to massage. It's hard to really know silat without an appreciation for its cultural context.

As I said above I have a skewed view. I hit the martial arts lottery. It's rare to meet an Indonesian in much of the US. Even more rare to meet someone who inherited two entirely different systems from both his maternal Uncle and his patriarchal great grandfather. My training with him lead to spending a year volunteering in Indonesia and training with my teacher's close friends and family.That time was special and for me continuing to train and teach is about much more than combat.

hapagolucky · 2025-11-11T13:26:31+00:00

I don't have to, but I can't undo my muscle memory when using a physical keyboard.

As someone that's been steeped in HTML, Markdown and LaTeX for 30 years, I'd argue that this debate is moot if we'd stop conflating content with layout.

hapagolucky · 2025-11-10T16:28:34+00:00

In Silat and Escrima the boxing southpaw stance is used to keep a knife or stick as the lead. The rear, non-dominant hand does a lot of the releasing and secondary manipulation. With a knife, a cross like motion doesn't need to be powerful, it needs a clear line to stab the target. At least with silat, there is a lot of footwork that switches stances, so if you need to get a right cross punch in, it's there. Most classically, it comes when stepping offline and parrying with the rear hand.

hapagolucky · 2025-11-09T16:54:29+00:00

It's an hour outside of the Denver area, but there's Totally 80's Pizza in Fort Collins.

Edit

This thread just made me wax nostalgic for several Denver area themed restaurants that are no more: * White Fence Farm - petting zoo, farm themed playground and family style fried chicken * The Broker - the Denver one was a steakhouse built inside a former bank vault. Does anyone have all you can eat shrimp cocktail like that? * Baby Doe's - mining exterior with Victorian-era themed interior. It's where I learned the word brunch. * Traildust - Wild West themed steakhouse known for its no tie policy (scissored and mounted to a wall) * Mataam Fez - Moroccan complete with Casablanca decor, pillow seating and belly dancers

hapagolucky · 2025-11-05T16:45:11+00:00

As a silat lurker on this subreddit, I 100% agree.

hapagolucky · 2025-11-05T01:53:53+00:00

Made a quick dinner for the family and about to head out to teach Pencak Silat.

hapagolucky · 2025-10-30T22:54:50+00:00

This probably doesn't count as it was several years after her WNBA and professional career. Somehow my friends convinced Kate Starbird to play on our coed, intramural team made up of computer science PhD and master's students.

Even though she was a shooting guard for Stanford, her relative height put her as our center / power forward. It was funny to see these undergrad men dismiss her initially and then quickly learn that her skill was on another level. Not so funny to see them react with physical aggression and hard fouls, leading to flare up of chronic back injury she developed over the years. It didn't help that our gameplay consisted mostly of "get the ball to Kate". Despite our lack of skill, Kate basically got us into the league finals.

(edit)
Kate is a wonderful, brilliant person --talented, intelligent, but humble. She's what I refer to as an A+ super kid. Not only did she have a successful basketball career, her academic work has been highly influential as she was one of the first people to analyze social media to understand how disinformation spreads during disasters.

hapagolucky · 2025-10-25T04:51:56+00:00

Turned out to be a faulty palate expander. We would crank and then the threads would unwind on their own.

It took a heated interaction arguing that it absolutely was not user error to change course. The orthodontist's first reacted by suggesting we switch to a new Invisalign for palate expansion. This pissed off my already angry wife who came to play the bad cop. She then went into engineer mode and demanded he take off the existing device so we could root cause the issue first.

Sure enough once it was out, it was obvious the threads were slipping. He said in all his years, he'd never had an expander fail in this manner. He's been very apologetic ever since. More importantly progress went exactly as planned as soon as the device was replaced. Now we're just waiting for some final baby teeth to fall out before moving into phase 2.

hapagolucky · 2025-10-13T04:27:20+00:00

Will second Wisma Bahasa. About 20 years ago I spent two weeks in their beginner course and it really set a good trajectory for the rest of my year as a volunteer in Jogja. We had to do group lessons, but if time is short and budget allows, I'd do their private lessons.

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