Lessons from the Road: Barcelona and the Kali Angles of Attack
We recently had the pleasure of teaching a seminar in Barcelona — a fantastic weekend of training with students who traveled in from all over. Trips like these are a highlight of what we do, and they're also a great excuse to share a piece of what we teach with everyone back home. So in this post, the first in a little "Lessons from the Road" series, we want to unpack one of the most fundamental ideas in Filipino martial arts: the angles of attack.
If you've ever watched Kali and wondered how practitioners move so smoothly and hit their targets so precisely, this is the concept underneath it all.
What "angles of attack" actually means
In most striking arts, you learn individual techniques: a jab, a cross, a roundhouse kick. Filipino martial arts (Kali, Eskrima, Arnis) approaches things differently. Instead of memorizing dozens of separate strikes, you learn a small set of angles — the lines along which any attack can travel toward a target.
A strike coming diagonally down toward your left shoulder is one angle. A strike coming diagonally down toward your right shoulder is another. A horizontal strike, a rising strike, a straight thrust — each is a distinct angle. Most systems organize these into a numbered sequence (you'll often hear about the "five strikes," or cinco teros, and longer numbering systems that build from there).
The genius of this is its efficiency. Because a stick, a blade, an empty hand, or even an improvised object all travel along these same angles, learning the angles teaches you to understand every attack — not just the specific one in front of you. You're learning the grammar of movement rather than memorizing individual sentences.
Why it makes you better, fast
Training the angles develops three things at once:
Precision. You learn exactly where each line of attack begins and ends, which sharpens both your offense and your defense.
Footwork and evasion. Every angle has a corresponding way to move offline — to step so the attack misses. In Kali, defense and footwork are inseparable from the strikes themselves.
Transferable understanding. Once the angles are in your body, they apply whether you're holding a training stick or nothing at all. This is why Kali practitioners often pick up other arts quickly: they already understand how attacks move through space.
For beginners, this is genuinely encouraging news. You don't need to memorize a hundred techniques to start feeling competent. You need to understand a handful of angles and drill them until they're second nature.
Bringing Barcelona home to El Segundo
The best part of teaching abroad is that every seminar sharpens the instruction back home. The questions students ask, the different body types you adapt for, the small refinements that come up — all of it makes its way back to our classes in El Segundo.
The angles of attack are a perfect example of what we love about the arts we teach: simple foundations that unlock enormous depth. It's the kind of thing a first-time student can begin working on in their very first class, and the kind of thing that experienced practitioners keep refining for decades.
Want to pick up the sticks?
You can't really appreciate the angles of attack until you feel them in your own hands. The good news is that this is exactly where beginners start, so no experience is needed.
XTMA Studio is located at 135 Richmond Street in El Segundo, serving students across the South Bay. Come in for a complimentary intro class and we'll walk you through the fundamentals of Filipino martial arts firsthand.
Curious to try it? Book your free intro class and start with the fundamentals.