Is a nunchuck just a pair of hardwood sticks joined by a chain or cord and used as a weapon? No, not just that. It represents an art, a passion and a history!

Nunchucks can be passed rapidly between hands, between the legs, under the arms, and behind the head, in multiple attack/defense movements. It snaps into the target with a high velocity due to the increased lever arm.

If you see Lee Barden displaying the swings and rotations of nunchucks with the fineness and ease, you might get fascinated with the nunchucks immediately. You can really get a feel of how passionate a nunchuck can be, that Nokia has come up with its advertisement showing a guy resembling Bruce Lee, playing ping pong with nunchucks.

Nunchucks would have remained almost unknown to the world if few great masters like Bruce Lee would not have displayed its fascinating use in martial art movies like feast of fury, enter the dragon etc. Nunchucks are widely believed to have originated from Okinawa, in strife by farmers to protect themselves from oppressive Japanese government officials and local theft and robberies. Its believed that nunchucks are the modified version of the fails used to thrash rice seeds to separate rice from husk.

I myself practice karate and found nunchucks quite easy to learn and practice. As with most hand weapons used in the martial arts, they integrate easily with the body, allowing a fluid dance that makes it most sensual.

What gives an edge to it is that, the rope or chain joint of nunchucks makes it flexible to strike from unexpected angles, and, its rapid and ambiguous motion easily distract the opponent. It’s quite effective in close range fight. But it’s very hard to control. Give a knife/sword/stick, etc who have not touched it earlier, but he will be able to hit an unarmed person lethally with this amour. Give nunchucks, and the person is most likely to hurt himself!!

There are different varieties of nun-chucks like wooden nunchucks, steel nunchucks, foam nunchucks, glowing nunchucks. Foam nunchucks are meant for the beginners, as during learning, one can hit oneself even on skull, joints, and sensitive organs, which could prove to be fatal if these were wooden or steel nunchucks.

Practicing nunchaku will increase hand speed, coordination of the body movement with the mind, and concentration. For the nethusiasts I am putting down few basic steps of nunchaku:

-Front and reverse shoulder pass
-Straight and diagonal back pass
-Neck pass, forearm pass, leg pass
-Waist stops, leg stops and shoulder stops
-Spins, flips and rolling.

Some recent streams of martial arts are mixing nunchuck movements with other strike and block movements. The easiest way to learn is to get a foam nunchuck and start form free video tutorials available on YouTube, ExpertVillage, etc. At least that’s how I learned, and I guess it was quite easy and quick to learn and quite interesting to practice it.

Due to its ease of construction and use, nunchaku have become one of the most popular martial arts weapons in use today. But few countries have banned its possession. So just checkout your local government policies before you can go for a steel or wooden nunchucks. You can always link with some nunchucks associations like World Nunchaku Association (WNA), ITNA etc, for further participation and information.