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 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 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.
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 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.
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,
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
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
Blog Posts Aeschylus, the Turtle, and Arwrology Taught the third class in our four class self-defense series last monday, despite being sick as a dog. It went well. Six hours in and I feel like everyone has
216 I Saw This Happen... Sometimes people don’t take the right precautions. They leave the house without thinking of their defense, and they pay for it with their lives. I’ve seen
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 Cultivating Awareness When I demonstrate a technique, I do want you to perform it the way I do. Last night we did wrestling, and explored some pinning movements from a couple of
167 Grinding and Forgetting Some of my favourite moments in martial arts are when the whole class is pushed past the point of exhaustion. During last night’s class, I looked up during
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,
