Tovak Kali

Tovak Kali is the combat fighting system developed by the people of Cavite, Philippines. Cavite is the birthplace of Philippine Independence, and the home of the last resistance created by the Filipino people against colonial rule.

The fighting spirit of Tovak Kali was started by Zacarias Aquino in the late ‘1880s. Aquino was a well known Panday or sword smith. He is one of the official pandays or sword smiths and created the official knives and machetes that were used in the Filipino – Spanish, and Filipino - American revolutions. He was also known as a brilliant sword fighter. He was always sought after to teach the military men on how to use the blade. He was known as Tovak, a colloquial term for a Filipino fish with a lot of thorns or a “matinik” fish. In the Cavite colloquial, “matinik” means skillful, thus Tovak Kali simplified means “skillful swordsman”. Zacarias Aquino is also known locally as the founder of Tovak Pandayan (Tovak Blade Makers Company) which still exists today.

The Tovak Kali system is generally composed of three parts that are correlated.

1) Tovak Pananandata: the first level of training where the student is exposed on the use of the weapons (usual blades, sticks, and flexible weapons like chains, or latigos)

2) Tovak Pangamut: Once the student is comfortable with weapons, the student learns to transcend the weapon movements to empty hand drills

3) Tovak Pandayan: Teaches the student to transcend the 2 systems in the world he revolves in. (eg: transforming objects to lethal weapons)

The Golden Years

The spirit of Tovak Kali became a known and practiced fighting system among the locals of Cavite. It flourished to become the system of choice among local soldiers of the 1st and 2nd world war era. Countless stories and anecdotes were told of its effectiveness and supremacy.

Modernization

Industrialization and modernization in the previous decades has greatly influenced the 2nd and 3rd generations of would be warriors and keepers of the art as they moved on to become more focused on scholarly and professional careers that efforts to preserve, improve, and develop the system were ignored, and thus bringing the system to near extinction.

Revival

Vincent Aquino, a member of the third generation keeper of the system (the systems keeper is never exclusive to one person, there are usually 8 keepers per generation) had a vision and mission to spread the system to the world, for it to compliment the martial art world and vice versa. He made his students cross train on other weapon arts, not limiting themselves to machetes and knives, and he made them compete internally (with Tovak Kali students) and externally (with practitioners of other weapon arts) to make the system more battle tested and thus more practical and effective. Thus, Tovak Kali became and continually evolves into a battle tested system with its students gaining championship wins, and honorable titles in the local and international martial arts world.

His vision is also to maintain the quality of the system by refusing to go commercial, and spread the system to selected and worthy students around the world if possible for it to be an ever changing, improving, and growing fighting method.

Tovak Kali Today

Keepers of Tovak Kali today (8 of them mostly from the Aquino clan in Cavite) continues to spread the system, nationally and internationally with a vision of contributing to the general world of martial arts to someday help save lives of people around the world through quality learning of martial systems.

Tovak Kali Training

Tovak Kali training starts with developing forms and energy by exercises similar to Yoga and Tai Chi called Tenaga Sayaw. After a student has learned to master and focus energies and proper forms, the student is led to exercises of empty-hand techniques and weapons techniques. After exposing oneself to the system, the student of Tovak Kali learns and appreciates the following uniqueness of the system:

1) Concept Based Learning - Tovak Kalis learning system is unique in the sense that it doesn't teach through methods, but through concepts. The system believes that specific methods are irrelevant. What is important is that the practitioner survives a fight and wins a battle.

2) Ladderised Concepts - Tovak Kalis system employs a step by step system that can be interchanged. The student starts with learning to focus energies and efficient postures. After that, the student learns to transcend these learnings to applications using weapons and empty hands. The amazing thing about this is that the student later discovers that the concepts are all the same, and only the application is different. The student then discovers that he / she eventually becomes like a state of the art aircraft bomber wherein any types of ammunition and weapons can be fitted, upgrades, and revisions can be made, but knowing how to fly the aircraft is the same all throughout the journey.