Sword sparring clip

[stampe]

thought this was interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulakgClp ... r_embedded

[Linda Heenan]

You can move faster with shinai, especially light ones like that. After our last youth tournament, we decided the older boys definitely had to use heavy shinai in the competition because the speed was unrealistic. They train with wooden jian in our practise sessions but we had to use shinai in the comp because the boys would have hurt the girls too much.

[Roland Tepp]

thought this was interesting

It was interestng indeed.

One thing that I noticed though (and I am definitely aware that, it seems all so much easier when you stand outside of the ring), was that there was rarely if any follow-up moves in the fight. Lot of jumping around as well...

All in all - I would love to spar one day with these guys

[Scott M. Rodell]

You can move faster with shinai, especially light ones like that...

That is certainly true, & that makes the play unrealistic in the sense of Historical Swordsmanship, but I was happy to see that these students used some good skills/techniques. Usually, actually almost always, such light weapons lead to very poor quality play. Hopefully we'll see some of them at a TCSL tournament* some time in the near future.

*http://www.swordleague.com/