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
167 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&
24 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
24 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
24 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
216 April 9 Tournament Wrap-up Valkyrie had it’s first tournament just a little less than two weeks ago. Results can be found on our facebook page, and I talked about the format in
24 Habitus: Or Why SCA Rapier Is Awesome...And Why SCA Rapier Sucks. Clearly I’m a little proud of my SCA rapier background. I had access to a number of seriously talented fencing teachers and dedicated historians, and came from an
24 Blow Calling and Context When I started in the SCA, lo those many years ago, things were great. We had what felt like a unified approach to dealing with how to acknowledge hits from
216 Tourney Time The bulk of my rapier training, before moving into full-time teaching, was for tournament fighting. At my peak, I think in a two year period I hit about 70 tournaments.
23 Double Death Decisions I hate double kills. It annoys me to no end when I see students do it, I hate it when it happens to me, and I find it inexcusable when
24 Ability-Ranked Sparring 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
24 Sword and Dagger Picked my dagger up last night. I’ve been fighting single sword exclusively for maybe three or four years now. I made the decision to stick to sword alone
167 The Cost of Doubt Doubt costs repetitions. The time you spend thinking about how to do something, or what you have done wrong, or even if there is a better way to do something,
167 Leaving the Past Behind I don’t know why Achille Marozzo wrote his New Work on swordplay. I know the result of it, but I don’t know what made him sit
24 Overlooked Despite the lack of time, I’ve really been missing my blog posts here. I’m going to find a way to carve out a little bit of
24 Dying at the Hands of Babes-in-Arms I thought I would start this post off with a link to a funny video or two of people failing at chi/ki/energy flow martial arts, but I got
167 Teaching 3.0 It’s nice to grab a few minutes this morning to write a post. Nothing in mind today, like usual, but I’m in the mood to feel
77 Valkyrie Women The Valkyrie ladies are getting tired of beating up men in class. They have decided we needed to recruit more women, and our current method of reaching students doesn’
24 Fighter 2.0 Now it’s time to get better. For better or for worse, today, you are the fighter you have made yourself into. It’s time to get better.
Blog Posts An Introduction This is my first-ever attempt at a blog post, so bear with me. A couple of days ago, it was suggested that we add the voices of one or more
22 Post Assessment First run of assessments done. Rapier sparring took up our entire night on the previous Monday, and the wrestling assessments completely destroyed the whole class and left us exhausted enough
40 Why Be Fit? Seems like a stupid question, doesn’t it? Why be fit? Why wouldn’t you want to be fit? Sometimes the answer that if given to that question
24 Working with Assessments Finished the first draft of our assessments over the weekend, and applied it to myself, Squeak and She-Hulk. We track thirty-six points of improvement, split over four categories. Each point
24 Cut and Thrust and Step Cutting was next up in our basics rotation last class. The idea was to spend the first five minutes or so of the rapier portion of class just doing a
24 The Long Path of Measure Control When someone comes to our classes with a background in unarmed martial arts, they’ve got a hard road ahead of them. Depending on the length of time they&
