I've been wanting to bring up this topic for a while myself, but from a different angle. But to avoid the appearance of spamming the board, I'll keep it within the confines of this thread.
I had this conversation with a couple of guys in my study group this past Friday, and we were discussing the level of power used in our usual sparring.
I agree with Will that if you can't take the bumps and bruises, martial arts aren't for you. I get dinged up all the time, and I consider it a matter of course. In fact, I feel like something's wrong if I don't have a few trophies lying around my body somewhere.
And of course, as John says, you can't hit lightly and expect to do debilitating damage. You might get lucky, of course (brachial artery, etc.), but a quick snap cut to the arm certainly isn't a guaranteed showstopper.
The one problem I notice with sparring in general is that many people seem to mistake "full intent," or, in my Kung Fu school, "full contact," for "maximum power." In my mind, these aren't the same thing. There are certainly going to be times when you don't want to "swing for the fences." Maybe you have to get to your opening quickly, and you don't have time for a full-power stroke--but I'm sure that most masters would have taken advantage of any wound they could deliver in a circumstance like this. Even if it weren't a death blow, it would be a distraction, might open up another, more decisive opening, and will cause blood loss, weakening, possibly blood to flow into the eyes (as in a light scalp cut). Note that I'm referring primarily to Blossfecten in this case, since armor changes everything.
Additionally, swinging with maximum power, as opposed to full intent, will tend to (in my experience) lower your precision.
There are a couple of problems I see with the maximum power approach. The first one, and the most important, is that in common practice, it seems to hinder good control. I notice that a lot of people who swing this way throw a Mittelhau that turns flat in the middle of the swing, much more so than during controlled waster practice. Bad edge alignment, of course, is problematic because it's bad form, but also because it's more dangerous, because the target is taking a full-force hit on the very lightly padded flat, which could cause injuries, even if minor ones (broken fingers?) I've taken full force proper edge hits on my fingers, while wearing gloves, and the foam on the sword, plus my lacrosse glove foam (it hit right in the middle of a finger pad, not in a joint) and it still smashed my finger and left me looking at the misshapen swollen thing I'm typing with now. A flat hit, I believe, would have broken it. (Seth--the swollen finger isn't your fault, BTW. You just gave me a full-intent strike. I'm using it as an example of what bad form
could have done in that case.)
Further, using maximum power all the time is actually tactically disadvantagteous. It works well against novices (like myself) because they get scared of getting hurt and don't take initiative and attack or counter. Someone with more skill, I would think, would just get out of the way, and allow the overcommited strike to miss, then pick their opponent off at their leisure. My skill with voiding isn't there yet, but I know that ARMA has many members who
are at this level.
Please remember that I'm certainly NOT saying that we should pull our shots or anything like that. I AM saying that we should probably learn to exercise control and strike with full intent, that is, with the amount of force needed to make that particular technique work. Some individuals (and this occurs in other arts I've seen, as well) wind up every shot for that home run blast, but that slows them down, makes them tend toward unnecessary chambering, plus leads to all the other problems I mentioned above.
I dunno. I'm just a beginner here.
Someone with more experience might have better insight. But it does seem that most arts I've watched/practiced/read about train control , even more so than power, sometimes.
Anybody have any thoughts on the subject they'd like to throw out there
Jason
I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it.--The Day the Earth Stood Still
