Box Wrestle Fence

Scary Things

Way before Valkyrie, I had the idea to start teaching people how to teach martial arts. Back in the Scatha Combat Guild days, we put a ton of work into creating a program and booklet to do just that thing. It had a lot of value, and had much of

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Justice

Justice means Equality. Stoicism is on a bit of trend these days. It’s mostly just dropped in as a word though, a vague catch-all for mindfulness, stripped of all of it’s meat. People love to quote Aurelius, and talk about accepting bad things that happen to

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Gravitas and the Rainbow

Moving my regular Thursday night sparring class online represented some challenges for me. My preferred style of coaching is not to present a formal lesson plan for students to receive, but rather to look and analyze my students to see how they are progressing towards the ideals of the school,

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The Deep Groove and Change

My handwriting used to suck. It still does. When I was approaching fifty, I had a new job that I really enjoyed. The company was relatively young and absolutely going places, and my boss was a real visionary. I’d built up some pretty good work habits over my

martial arts

Ecosystems

My neighbour hates my front yard. He’s got the standard yard. Neatly trimmed grass, the requisite boxed hedges, the feature plant by the front window. As you can see above, my front yard hasn’t been mown in about two years. There is mess of plants about.

Covid-19

Hobbit Day

I’ve made some changes to my process lately, and it’s been measurably successful for me. Three weeks ago I was in a rough place, with the quarantine and work. It’s nice to be meaningfully employed right now, but I can’t deny there

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Expectations and Categorizations

If I had to chose one thing I really love about martial arts, it’s that I get to punish people for thinking that they know me. The human brain arose from a some relatively simple biochemical processes, some basic rules that come from the physics of our universe.

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Starting From Scratch. Again.

Hi folks! Been a few years. Let’s get started again. About two years ago I started to have some health issues, and went to see a doctor. Which led to be treated by a cardiologist, and some more fun. It’s all worked out well, now. I

Blog Posts

Fitting everyone into tournaments

I want to talk about tournaments for a bit. Specifically, tournaments and segregation. The ideal of any martial art is that skill will win out over natural advantage. At the hobbyist level of martial arts competition this ideal is reflected in open tournaments, where everyone fights everyone. As long as

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Balancing Reality and Fantasy in Martial Arts Practice

The UFC is the ultimate test of the value of any unarmed martial art. If your art doesn’t stand up in full-contact Mixed Martial Arts practice, it’s of no value. If you train with weapons, then your art and training better stand up to full-contact tournaments,

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Good, Bad, and a Little of Both

Saturday Valkyrie had to deal with an assault in the neighbourhood. We intervened quickly, and as a team. It was an unpleasant interruption to the afternoon’s teaching, but these sort of things happen in life. I’ll probably write more about the incident in a later post,

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In Search Of Real Self Defense

Run away. That’s got to be the piece of martial arts advice I hate the most. It’s so full of smug assumptions about what constitutes a self-defense situation that I feel only envy for the life of people who think it is good advice. Of course,

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Hard Starts

Sometimes I don’t know how my students do it. Fencing is a damned hard thing to learn. It’s demoralizing. You have to be fit, and that’s a process that is quite daunting for some. Especially since the fitness we demand isn’t the

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Fat

There is a current and recurrent thread amongst HEMA and other martial arts disciplines that mocks the fat instructor. It’s one of those things that everyone feels comfortable jumping in on. Five years ago I dropped 50lbs. It was just after finishing my Precision Nutrition certification. One of

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Molar Equations And The Plastic Brain

I wanted to be a science nerd really bad in high school. There was a problem with that for me. With my family’s frequent moves and the differing school systems I’d been exposed to, as well as some issues with no one noticing I needed glasses

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Balancing Skill

Conlan, who is going to be running what looks like another fantastic workshop at Valkyrie weekend after next, asked me a question on facebook today. I’d posted one of my favourite handstand progression videos to my wall and Conlan asked about what my interest was in handbalancing. What

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Stripping Down To The Real Basics

I was looking over an old notebook about a month ago, from back when I started rapier fencing. One day I had taken a bunch of notes after talking to a bunch of the really senior fencers, and watching them bout against younger and newer fighters. One of the things

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Fixes and Changes

We’re coming to the end of another cycle of teaching at Valkyrie, and we’ve already started rolling out a new curriculum. For the coaches, it offers less strict guidelines on what to teach, but more strict goals of what students should achieve. So less direction on

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Change and Mutation

Hopping into the shower this morning, I saw a nice big long-legged spider sitting in the tub. As a life-long arachnophobe, this presented me with a bit of a dilemma. My past response would vary between chucking a number of objects into the tub to try and kill it, gathering

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500 Blows

I’m reminded today that it was eight years ago that I fought 500 passes in two hours. I didn’t do it as a personal challenge. I didn’t do it to prove a point. I did it because my best friend had just died, and

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Devil On Your Back

I read an article about a week or so ago that really bugged me. It was one of those feel good, overcome your failures sort of articles. It talked about how defining a failure can be, and in this case how it pushed this one person on to succeed better

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Red Team: Being a Better Bad Guy

The future of martial arts training should lie in scenario work. I think it’s unlikely, though. I think we will see a rise in scenario based training, but it’s likely that it will be done poorly enough that it will be dismissed as a fad once

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Sex and Swordplay

Not talking about gender today. Had a fun class last Saturday. We are into our Mobility phase of exercise, where we work on assimilating a lot of the new muscle that has built up in the last few months. We reconnect with our bodies, find out what works, what new

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Modern Ancient: Moving Forward with Historical Martial Arts

What’s the point of training with a sword these days? Or, more accurately, what’s the point of training in the use of the sword as a martial art. Opposed to say artistic skill display, stage combat, or sport tournament usage. Why on earth would anyone train

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Protection and Pain: Finding the Balance

In the picture above you can see two Valkyrie coaches going at with Cold Steel plastic Bowie trainers, and wearing partial High Gear body armour suits. High Gear suits are awesome. We are incredibly lucky to have a pair of these suits at the school. Each suit provides a set