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
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
Blog Posts 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
167 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
Blog Posts 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
24 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
Blog Posts 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
167 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
Blog Posts 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
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
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
Blog Posts On Making My Martial Arts School a "Safe Space" This post originally appeared on the author’s blog, Kaja(s)words. Kaja Sadowski is an instructor and co-owner at Valkyrie Western Martial Arts Assembly. I’ve been
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
22 Fighting Fear At Valkyrie we make it no secret that we’re owned and run by women. We constantly, actively recruit women as students. When the subject of women, fear, and
Blog Posts Best for Self Defense: Sport or Traditional? One of the favorite arguments amongst martial artists is to compare the relative values of a sport martial art like Muay Thai to a traditional martial art like Wing Chun,
Blog Posts Daily Work at Valkyrie It was a late start today. We all overslept a little. After puttering about and getting out of the house, we all arrived at Valkyrie about Noon. By the time
167 A Change is Gonna Come Valkyrie is now open. It took us years to put in the base work, and six months of headaches, tension and bureaucratic fighting to get the doors open, but here
Blog Posts Full Time For the second time in my life, I’m going to be a full-time martial arts teacher. It’s a privilege and a responsibility, and not a thing
167 Bullshit and Lies Do you want to be an eagle or a crow? Common sense and admiration are fantasies. We look at the eagle, the hawk, and the falcon and think of the
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
167 Moving Past Quit 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
167 Assembly Been sick for over a week. Missed a lot of work, which is going to suck when the next payday arrives. But at least I’ve managed to catchup
