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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
Blog Posts Teaching Tempo and Deception My favourite part of teaching has to be those nights when the students figure something out on their own. We’ve been hitting movement a lot lately, discussing tempo
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
263 Growing Power Probably the number one reason people don’t come to our classes is fear of our workout. The language we use to talk about what we do at the
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
Blog Posts April 2014 Student Profile: Danielle Rice The Valkyrie Western Martial Arts Assembly has started a new feature: Monthly profiles of students. Our first one is up, featuring the author of yesterday’s post Danielle Rice.
62 A lesson in exercise and mood. Photo Courtesy John Chan I haven’t been to class for a week, and I’m feeling low. Somehow, it didn’t occur to me until an
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.
