First, most people here know what the sai are.
I have a pair that I bought in the early-1980s when I was barely a teenager, before I had any training in the martial arts. With the sai, I bought Fumio Demura’s book, Sai, Karate Weapon of Self Defense. From that book, I learned two things: how to flip the sai back and forth from a blade-foreword grip to an inverted grip with the blade back along the forearm, and that the sai can be gripped by the blade, and the prongs used to hook a weapon. Oh, I learned a third thing too: that people would carry a third sai that was used to throw at an enemy. Oh, and a fourth thing: the author recommended in the book that a student not attempt to train in the sai until reaching at least the rank of brown belt, to develop a foundation upon which learning the sai would be more successful. So that is what i did with them, flipped them back and forth. And that’s it. I never trained in a system that used the sai, I never got any real instruction in their use. They sit now in a trunk, and rarely see the light of day.
To parallel with my advice in your threads on bo: get instruction from a knowledgeable and skilled instructor, and get his/her advice on what would be a source for quality sai, if you are looking to buy some.
I appreciate your enthusiasm. I’ve been there when I was younger, craving to learn something for which I hadn’t yet found an instructor. But going it alone and trying to figure things out, and asking for information about the weapon in a generic sort of way isn’t the way to do it. You will not progress, you will simply encounter frustration that will likely kill your passion for it, and what you do manage to figure out will be poor quality, inefficient, and largely dysfunctional.
Let’s be honest about weapons: they have a certain obvious intuitive use. Stab them with the pointy end, cut them with the sharp edge, hit them with the blunt part. This is not difficult to understand. Anyone can pick one up and make themselves a hazard to those around them. In that sense, anyone can use a weapon without training, and even do so effectively.
But without instruction, your technique quality will be poor and inefficient and rudimentary, and could lead to damaging the weapon. You will never understand the full potential that the weapon has, will never understand what is capable with it. Also, with guidance you will better understand how to safely handle the weapon so you don’t injure yourself and those around you who are your training partners.
So I say: get an instructor if you don’t yet have one, or if you no longer are able to go back to your previous one, or if your previous instructor is not competent to teach the sai. If Covid is the issue and schools aren’t open, then you might need to be patient.
