Up Close and Personal

[Guest]

Jay wrote:
So, in this broader sense, wrestling supports and supplements the sword rather than forming a foundation. That grappling was important to the ancient warrior, however, cannot be disputed. Otherwise, you would not see arts similar to kampfringen emerge elsewhere in the world (i.e., jujutsu to support the katana).

---Yes. Excellent way to put it!

Keith

[BengtAbrahamsson]

Keith,
Where does it say that Ott was a student of Doebringer?
Bengt
EHCG

[Patrick Hardin]

I love to grab blades and close whenever I get the chance. When I encounter novices and grab their blades, they invariably back up and try to get away while I am still holding on to their sword, which naturally puts them at an absolute perfect distance away from me for me to cut and kill them. I've never encountered a newbie who instinctively closed inside the effective range of my weapon and wrestled with me, once I grabbed their blade. This certainly shows how integral grappling and wrestling skills are to Western Swordsmanship. Our art just isn't complete without them.

Patrick Hardin

[Jay Vail]

<<When I would begin training a cadet at USMA, if they had extensive training in either boxing or wrestling, it seemed that they picked up things a lot faster than folks coming in without extensive combative sport training... but the wrestlers were always faster on the uptake than the boxers. The wrestlers seemed to adapt to the different ranges faster than the boxers.>>

Tim, that’s an interesting insight. I personally believe training in a wrestling type art (such as kampfringen or judo) prepares you for close combat better than standard training given to karate practitioners and those of other striking arts. Wrestling can be a pretty all out contest, even if there are rules that limit the techniques you can use for reasons of safety. Such an all out contest against a resisting opponent is invaluable. It sharpens the technique and prepares the mind in a way that other arts can’t quite seem to match.

Now that I think about it, perhaps this is what the old masters meant when they said that wrestling is the foundation of fencing. It prepares you mentally for combat.

[Guest]

For many years I tipped my nose up to wrestling. Being in eastern martial arts as a stand fighter I felt grappling and wrestling had no place. Several years ago I was teaching karate for a school's youth club and the owner, 6th Dan in Aikijustsu, cured me of my dislike for grappling and wrestling. I soon discovered that once I was on my back I was useless. Joining HACA, now ARMA, I discovered the manuals with wrestling, grappling, and dagger fighting and it opened my eyes to true art form and self defense. I swore I would never get caught feeling helpless again. <img src="/forum/images/icons/grin.gif" alt="" />

Todd

[Shawn Cathcart]

There are few aspects here that I've always thought to be true. As John says, to incorporate unarmed techniques into your armed repetoire, you must have an implicit knowledge of your armed tactics and techniques, and vice-versa. They do not necessarily lead easily one into the other, like all things they must be worked at. I don't know that I buy into the idea of teach unarmed first and the weapon will then become an extention of the arm/hand what have you. What do you teach a knew recruit first? The very basics, which means the most effective and simple techniques. In Medieval times it would have been a weapon of some sort, long sword, spear, etc. Why? Because its the quickest, and most effective thing to teach a new recruit to make him battle ready. You wouldn't waste precious initial training time teaching him unarmed arts only to throw him into a battle that is entirely armed. Teach him his spear and his longsword basics. And,as has been suggested in other posts here, follow that up later with more advanced sword techniques, including grips and seizures, and then yes, unarmed techniques. A weapon gives you advantages of reach and speed, over unarmed techniques, if you could kill an opponent easily without closing to grips you obviously would. I think disarms and seizures are very much an advanced tool of the experienced swordsman. They are very lethal, and I think end a fight very very quickly. But they are dangerous as well. Without an unerring sense of timing and distance, most of even the basic disarms and seizures are not easily done. And if you fail to execute them...heh well it usualy bodes poorly for you. With that said we do a lot of drilling and practicing of unarmed techniques here. Its amazing to discover and be able to show such a rich western unarmed martial heritage.

[Guest]

In trying over the years to come up with the best way to train modern soldiers unarmed fighting techniques, IMO one of the principle mistakes has been trying to adopt the training methodology from various eastern martial arts. It never occurred to anyone that these methodologies grew from a circumstance quite different from our own. If you were the master at arms in charge of training the next generation of fighters from your clan in feudal Japan, how old do you think the recruits would be? I would suspect that they would be quite young and that you would have years to train them before the training was expected to produce competent fighters. Therefore attempts to make the training methods that grew from this sort of circumstance fit into the training situation of a modern Army, which has weeks at best to train fighters, have mostly been analogous to shoving square pegs into round holes. All of this is to say that we must consider the entire context of the training in order to understand it.

On that same note, I think that to produce truly competent fighters your training must address all of the ranges and circumstances that your fighters are likely to find them selves in, in a way that ties the techniques of the various ranges together seamlessly. I think that we have evidence that it has historically been done either starting from grappling, or starting with the weapon. One of the useful things we can do is experiment with which way is best suited to our current circumstances of training, while realizing why that answer may be different from what was used to fit other circumstances.

Matt Larsen

[Shawn Cathcart]

That's a very good point Matt. The order and extent of training would depend on circumstance. The amount of time you had to train soldiers, and also the prevalent weapons of the time.