Everybody Is Cane Fu Fighting At Senior Centers

Older People Get Healthful Exercise And Learn to Wield a Ready Weapon
Source: WSJ

The St. Leonard retirement village in Centerville, Ohio has a whole new way of thinking about recreation: cane fighting.

Senior centers and retirement communities are looking for new ways to promote exercise in order to stave off physical decline. Older people interested in honing their self-defense skills, meanwhile, are delighted to find that something they already own can be used as a weapon.

“Oh my gosh, it’s a huge hit,” says Lena Mast, manager at Lodges at Naylor Mill, an independent-living complex for seniors in Salisbury, Md. Ms. Mast began offering cane classes for residents in April and says “it’s now the top thing they look forward to.”

Mitchell’s Martial Arts, the school hired by Lodges, says it is teaching cane fighting at five senior centers a week, up from one last year, and also has been demonstrating the cane at local health fairs. Cane Masters, in Incline Village, near Reno, Nev., one of a number of schools that report rising demand from seniors, expects to teach 110 cane-fighting classes around the country this year.

Many credit the rise of cane fighting to Mark Shuey, a 61-year-old tae kwon do and hapkido expert who owns Cane Masters. Mr. Shuey started studying cane moves in earnest about 10 years ago while practicing hapkido, which incorporates stick fighting at advanced levels. At the time, his father was starting to use a walking stick, and he had heard reports of attacks on seniors who carried canes but didn’t know how to use them to fight back. By 2003, the Canadian magazine Martial Arts Experts was calling canes “the weapon you can take anywhere.” Cane fighting, also called “combat” cane or “cane fu,” has been endorsed by at least eight martial-arts organizations.

Cane-fighting converts say one of the best things about the cane is that it’s a legal weapon that can be carried anywhere, unconcealed. “No one will tell you can’t take it on an airplane,” says Victor Cushing, a 68-year-old who teaches women’s self-defense at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania.