Research and Discussion Forums

Thai sword fighting and escrima both dual weild. It seems to me, that in the west, sheilds were important, probably due to missle attacks as well as hand-held weapons. And with sufficient armor, a two handed weapon was preferred. But dual weilding is real. Think about pugilism, a fighter can use bot...

While doing various cutting with my longswords and katana, I decided to attempt some phonebooks which where laid out on a table. I have a darksword armory german longsword (not top of the line I know) which is quite a big sword and I had it recently sharpened. When I hit the phonebook, it richochete...

Round in those days(as far as I understand) were knockdowns not time periods. So a 100 round fight means guys were on the ground 100 times and as long as a guy would get up the fight continued. So that is a testament to the heart of the fighters, not a lack of the ability to bring down his opponent....

I don't know about that. One of the reasons for wearing gloves was to make the sport less bloody. Bare fists, especialy when you snap the wrist, cut facial tissue relativley easily. There were reports of early matches where boxers had pieces of skin hanging off of their head. When the UFC was into i...

I also like the cutting of meat and skateboards,but not for the same reason. If someone is going to lay down big money for a weapon, they expect it to have stopping power. If you were to buy a weapon for self-defense wouldn't you be more confident in knowing it would actually kill an attacker and no...

You know one thing that I find lacking in sparring videos is defense. I personally believe our ancestors were better at it and didn't kill one guy every five seconds. To me that is unrealistic. ARMA has come a long way in offense and I think eventually the parrying, blocking and dodging aspect will ...

look up maceball training very similiar but with a longer history

When you talk about the "rougher" techniques of any martial art, you must realize that you cannot practice those techniques at full speed against a resisting oponent, and therefore to a large degree you are untrained. The elbow break strike was brought up as an example of this. Who here ha...

That is good stuff there. Seems like a lot of the techniques would work well with the big two-handers. Does your martial art have a belt-ranking system?

I agree. There is no such thing as a hand-to-hand martial art that is battlefield only. You have control. It's not a bullet that can only fly at one speed. Yes ringen has lethal options but they are far from the only options. Anyone who practices martial arts from this perspective would have to kill...

For some reason people dont want to acknowledge that maybe our forefathers new more about swords than we do! I applaud your efforts to learn more about these fascinating weapons. Maybe people don't like them because there were a specialty weapon designed for stronger, larger men. Or maybe it's becau...

One of the differences between eastern and western thoughts of self defense is that in the west you often see an emphasis to expand your horizons. In the east there seemed to be more, "Study my system and my system alone". Even here in the ARMA or HEMA few will tell you not to study anythi...

Self-defence first and foremost is getting out of bad situations. The best self-defense art is "track and field". Being physically able to move is first and foremost, so stretching; strength training and cardio are important. Modern self-defense should really have focus on modern weapons. ...

If the rules are the same odds are the techniques are the same. The biggest factor that affects wrestling technique is the rules under which competion is done.

the Body oriented bag (BOB) is great fun and works as a pell if your using wooden trainers and it allows you to aim for specific targets. If you wanted to protect it you could put armor on it.