Basic training in Stav. In a way it is all basic training, you just do it for longer and hopefully get better at it and most of my personal training is much simpler than what I teach in most classes. This may seem to be the wrong way around but in fact at a higher level all you really need to do for solo practice is work with cutting the lines and there really aren't that many of them to practice. I will go into more detail about that in the next day or two.

When I started working with Ivar we used the Boken as a cutting/attacking weapon and the Jo as a staff. Jo practice was traditional Jo-jutsu basics. After a while I experimented with various designs of training battle axe and that became my main form of training. I also taught spear and the long sword found its way in after a few years. After I moved to Oxford and began teaching there I based the teaching around the axe but found that people with no background in weapons training can find it quite a jump to get straight into working seriously with the axe. So one Saturday morning 14 or 15 years ago on a day course several of us stood in a circle and decided to work out a staff exercise for each stance. Various ideas came up, were worked with and some were obvious from the first time and are still used, others have been developed, changed and updated over the years. What has happened is that there are effectively 16 basic staff exercises, one for each stance. Some have martial application, the rest are just good exercises and another way of working with the stances and remembering them. Then there are another 9 'advanced' staff exercises which do have direct martial application and when the student is competent with these they can work with staff or spear against an axe or sword.

These exercises also provide a good warm-up routine for the beginning of a training session and develop a degree of conditioning and flexibility in the student. At the very least they should help the student remember the stances. These exercises also make it a bit easier to teach a larger group since there is a set of movements with which every student who has been training for a few months should be familiar with. This should mean that they can train safely with a partner and be able to control a stick safely. They can also show beginners what to do since they will have been drilled in the staff exercises since their first lesson.

Having become competent with the staff exercises the second level is to work with the five principles drills with a partner. Each attack or defence uses one of the staff exercises. I will explore the significance of those in more detail tomorrow.

Regards

Graham