Month: June 2015

Ability-Ranked Sparring

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Now that Valkyrie has been around for a while, we are starting to see a few things in our method that don’t scale as well as we might of thought. Mostly these are the result of making assumptions. When you start small and grow, you get used to the easy pace of new fighters coming in and getting assimilated into the gestalt of things. When you start to get lots of new people showing up, with different expectations, skill levels, and background things can get confusing. Sparring is one of those areas where things can get weird, and not safe for people. We’ve had a hiccup or two around this recently, and it spurred some good conversation. It also got me thinking about some of my ideas for ranking systems. Generally I’m not a fan of ranking. The problem I’ve found in most martial arts is that the skills learned…

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Moving Past Quit

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She’s supposed to be searching me, but I’m just tired of it. So I turn, with everything I’ve got, and smash my elbow into her face. I try to drive her neck into the wall with my forearm so I can hit her more, but she’s already out and down. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I step forward to do something to her again. I’m grabbed from behind, violently. There might be yelling or commands, but I don’t hear them. It’s the other guard. She spins me around, maybe hits me, I don’t know. I duck under her arm, grab her around the waist. I’m told later that she, being a trained judoka, tried a leg sweep/trip throw on me, but I was having none of it. From my waist grab, I drive my right shoulder into her solar plexus, and slam her into the wall.…

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