Share experiences! Cross-discipline sparring

[Stacy Clifford]

As for sparing with mok-gum, we can't without real armor, it's simply far too dangerous and deadly to use at anything approaching the real speed of our cuts. We will spare with anything safe, shinai is our preferred because it's cheap and readily available. As it is, even with shinai we can't use full power and full technique, it's too dangerous and damaging.

If done with proper control then it shouldn't be any more dangerous and deadly than the sparring we do with wooden swords, and we don't wear full armor. We can't use full power either and have to limit some techniques, but we still manage to spar with pretty realistic speed and we're not hitting lightly with those hickory sticks. Both arts were intended to be deadly, so if we can find a way to spar safely unarmored with ours, I think they should be able to as well.

[Chris Ouellet]

Stacy, part of my interest in HEMA (and ARMA more specifically) is of course to spar with people from different backgrounds and see how they do things and learn from them.
I personally, today, cannot consider sparring using straight wood at realistic speed, even with good control, without serious armor. Testing techniques, in a controlled setting with wood (and blade) is done but sparring involves testing your timing against another person's timing and that can't happen without the fast motions of realistic speeds.
The bokken/mokgum that we use is effectively a well crafted club and even glancing blows, say when a person incorrectly deflects or walks into a blow that hasn't been fully stopped can lead to serious edema, bruising and breaking of small bones (firsthand experience on all counts). An accidental direct hit by someone well trained would maim or kill, flat out. By well trained I mean someone able to pick up a mokgum and cut twice as fast or more than someone just starting and able to properly focus force into the blow. In this art that means ~4 years regular training or 250 000 cuts, give or take.
Recently (~7 years ago) the world federation started using a lighter mokgum as standard (mostly to distinguish themselves from the Japanese but that's a long story), however even with a light mokgum it's still damn dangerous to actually spar with.
I'm open minded of course, otherwise I wouldn't be here.

[CalebChow]

I feel like there's a balance when it comes to armor.

One extreme: No protection at all.
As important as learning control is, sometimes a person's sock or shoe fails, a waster becomes defective, a little sweat on the floor causes a slip, and the like could easily end up with a person killed or missing an eye. Having to worry incessantly about these things detracts from training.

Other extreme: Decked out.
Full armor affects movement, perception, flexibility, and even gives a false sense of invulnerability that one should not have in combat.
Blossfechten should be...well, blossfechten, not blossfechten in harness. The "extremely skilled" people should also be skilled enough to know to swing at full speed but still maintain a relative amount of restraint on contact.

Likewise, however, combat training should not be at 50% speed all the time for safety in no armor training situations.

Personally, I think elbow/knee pads with gloves and a mask is a decent balance of being "unarmored" and maintaining level of safety. With numerous factors depending on where and how we train, leaving my exposed eyeballs to probability does not end up in very good odds.

Airshows require amazing skill, and mistakes are often fatal on a massive scale. But they still persist to this day and they're still watched.

Question for Chris:
Are katana (well, in Japanese arts) in ancient times supposed to be swung so hard that a wooden/bamboo counterpart would do such maiming and fatal damage? I handed a $4,000,000 five hundred-year old specimen that belonged to a private collector in Taiwan once, and I think that kind of force is ridiculously excessive. It's not like swords were meant to bash through armor, least of all ones with legendary cutting edges.

[Jonathan Newhall]

Personally in my sparring I use a (now well-padded!) fencing mask and very well padded gloves with some decently padded normal clothing (two layers of shirt and a jacket of some kind normally) and even properly aligned I don't think I have too much to fear in the way of broken bones from a waster hit. Assuming, of course, that there is proper control in the intent to strike. Perhaps some slightly more padded normal clothing would be a good investment, but otherwise I think I'm fairly safe. Then again, I'm not exactly facing a skilled swordsman of seven years, either, but I'd assume that the blade cuts both ways in that regard in that the skilled swordsman can also control his action a lot better, so while his actions may be more potentially dangerous they are also more under his control enabling a similar level of safety to be used.

But, again, different people have different levels of safety equipment. I would personally still prefer a bit more solid of a helmet (one of Hunt's from the Dwarven Smithy would be spectacular, but also about 200 dollars over budget!) but I think that this provides an acceptable level of safety personally.

[Stacy Clifford]

Chris, a wooden waster is equally deadly a club; there is no doubt whatsoever that you can kill with one, but in sparring we find an important distinction between speed and power. Speed is about getting to the target, and power is about following through the impact with strength. You can hit with high speed and relatively low power, and the more experienced the practitioner, the more control they should have to modulate their power appropriately. Of course accidents happen with us as well, people walk into blows and move in unexpected ways, and I've had a finger broken myself, but in my 9 years here I've seen lots of hard sparring and very few injuries, so I have no doubt that all sword arts should be capable of the same success we have. You know from plenty of discussions on this forum that we do advocate a certain minimum of safety equipment, mainly helmet and gloves, and people can wear more if they feel it necessary, we just don't believe in overdoing it because you should retain a certain fear of pain in order to fight properly. And of course modulation of striking power is a skill to be learned and practiced like anything else, so we don't expect everybody to be instantly comfortable facing down a waster in a sparring match. Some moves may only work with the safeties off, but plenty enough can be done at high speed without applying deadly force. If Gumdo practioners only spar with full force, I think it's because they choose to, not because they have to.

[Chris Ouellet]

Wow, lots of good replies, I didn't think it would generate so much interest.

Stacy: I agree with your description of speed and power as being two different things. In practice with shinai we can never use full power, that is to say the wrist must remain loose and the impact must remain elastic. We never cut into the opponent as we would cut into a target.
I'm sure you understand exactly what I mean and I think I understand you correctly.
We never "choose" to spar with power, it's completely the opposite, we're forced to spar without power. Understand our sparing: the technique of gumdo is necessarily broad - (very) large arcs with lots of momentum carried through the body using stance. With shinai and kendo bogu we simply can't execute the techniques correctly because to do that, even with the strong air-drag of shinai, the damage becomes too great if accident occurs.
Ben has 4 years training, he nonetheless miss-judged one of his cuts in the videos and the fencer reels in pain. The technique he uses is correct, conserving momentum in the elbow joint with the rise and sharply reversing it with the shoulder joint with the fall. It's good sword fighting technique, what we train to do, but bad sparring technique because the end momentum of the cut is very high and hard to control.

That being said, with a very experienced student I will spar with full or nearly full technique, my perspective is that it's a useful exercise but the risks are generally not worth it. Better to suit up in real armor. In real armor we can spar with wood and good control or with shinai full out.
Wood without armor really steps out of my comfort zone, it is a bias. Though I'm of course open minded and very interested in seeing it in person.

[Chris Ouellet]

Question for Chris:
Are katana (well, in Japanese arts) in ancient times supposed to be swung so hard that a wooden/bamboo counterpart would do such maiming and fatal damage? I handed a $4,000,000 five hundred-year old specimen that belonged to a private collector in Taiwan once, and I think that kind of force is ridiculously excessive. It's not like swords were meant to bash through armor, least of all ones with legendary cutting edges.

There are several competing opinions on this subject, I'm not at all an expert, if you want a good reply then I suggest you join e-budo as they're probably the best online community on the subject of Japanese swordsmanship. The answer heavily depends on what period of their history you're looking at, both the techniques and the katana itself vary considerably.
I know of anecdotal evidence: in the muye dobo tonjii there is a passage where they describe how the Japanese train by repeatedly beating straw with great force to develop speed and power.
I've never heard of a koryu that will teach you this. Many koryu that teach armored fighting will tell you to aim for the weak points in traditional armor, some however don't.
There are traditional "kabutowari" or helmet cutting tests that were performed to judge blade and swordsman quality. Recently Obata Toshishiro (shinkendo) performed a spectacular cut on a period helmet. http://www.shinkendo.com/kabuto.html
My own opinion is that it's safe to say that swords were not intended to cut "through" armor but it did occasionally happen, either through existing fault of the armor, quality of blade or swordsman, and more likely a combination of all with random chance.
However armor (western or eastern) is not an invincibility suit, you're a brave man if you're willing to give me your fully armored head for a full cut (and as long as you don't sue me after the fact, I'm game!). I may not cut through the helm, but I'll guarantee you're not in good shape.

[Martin Lysen]

Different people have different comfort zones. This in time leads to different groups having different comfort zones. Back in the bad old days, skills such as these were a a life and death matter, and hence training was harder and more injuries accepted. Some sports use armour and sword simulators such as shinai and modern rapiers to reduce the risk of injury. Other groups that have more of a martial (rather than sports) intent, such as ARMA ande the Dog Brothers are willing to accept a higher risk of injury.

This is one more reason to do cross-discipline sparring - you might encounter groups doing sparring very differently from your own experience, and it might teach you something.

[Sal Bertucci]

That's a good point.

[Tom Reynolds]

Caleb Chow wrote:

Personally, I think elbow/knee pads with gloves and a mask is a decent balance of being "unarmored" and maintaining level of safety. With numerous factors depending on where and how we train, leaving my exposed eyeballs to probability does not end up in very good odds.


Tom Reynolds wrote:

When I first started sparring, I found myself scared very badly at the idea of having my hands busted up. As a result, I simply couldn't concentrate on what I was doing without the comfort of at least reasonable protection to my hands. Mind you, even with gloves I still got swollen knuckles from time to time. But nothing I couldn't survive.

So I agree that the question of how much protection is one of balance. Enough "armor" that you feel safe enough to proceed, but not so much that you forget where you are and that what you are doing is inherently dangerous.

Part of this forgetting where you are and what you are doing, it seems to me, would be an obscuring of the art itself. The effectiveness of a strike is not entirely determined by how hard it is delivered, as Stacy suggested in a later post in this thread. Plus, different strikes seem to be designed to have different effects, and the same strikes might have different effects on different targets/parts of the human anatomy.

Excessive padding would, I think, tend to encourage striking for the sake of striking, and obscure this "finesse" element of the art.

[Tom Reynolds]

PS -

"On the one hand, there is the skill needed to use the proverbial wrench properly and efficiently, on the other the judgement required to use it for right and good purposes."

- Tracy Lee Simmons, 2007, "Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin"




Caleb Chow wrote:

Personally, I think elbow/knee pads with gloves and a mask is a decent balance of being "unarmored" and maintaining level of safety. With numerous factors depending on where and how we train, leaving my exposed eyeballs to probability does not end up in very good odds.


Tom Reynolds wrote:

When I first started sparring, I found myself scared very badly at the idea of having my hands busted up. As a result, I simply couldn't concentrate on what I was doing without the comfort of at least reasonable protection to my hands. Mind you, even with gloves I still got swollen knuckles from time to time. But nothing I couldn't survive.

So I agree that the question of how much protection is one of balance. Enough "armor" that you feel safe enough to proceed, but not so much that you forget where you are and that what you are doing is inherently dangerous.

Part of this forgetting where you are and what you are doing, it seems to me, would be an obscuring of the art itself. The effectiveness of a strike is not entirely determined by how hard it is delivered, as Stacy suggested in a later post in this thread. Plus, different strikes seem to be designed to have different effects, and the same strikes might have different effects on different targets/parts of the human anatomy.

Excessive padding would, I think, tend to encourage striking for the sake of striking, and obscure this "finesse" element of the art.