New Toy

[SimonM]

I won $250 at work yesterday. So I went shopping. I had a choice between buying the entry level CAS Iberia/Hanwei Combat Steel Jian or buying a high quality Boken, a video game, a second controller for the PS/2 and some booze. I went with the Boken because I don't really like that particular Jian. Anyway, I took my wood practice jian and gave my brother the boken and whe had a lot of fun sparring with them (though my knuckles are sore today :P) - booze & wood weapons are a bad mix. :D

Anyway I noticed that some of the moves in the Jian form that my Sifu taught me made more sense when I was actually facing an opponent - it wasn't just waving the sword through the air. More importantly I found I knew the moves from the form. I want to do more weapon sparring but unfortunately we don't do it in the Kwoon to frequently for safety reasons. Does anyone know if Chinese KF schools often include weapon sparring? If so do they use wood weapons or those weak-ass boffers?

[Shaolinlueb]

Originally posted by SimonM
I won $250 at work yesterday. So I went shopping. I had a choice between buying the entry level CAS Iberia/Hanwei Combat Steel Jian or buying a high quality Boken, a video game, a second controller for the PS/2 and some booze. I went with the Boken because I don't really like that particular Jian. Anyway, I took my wood practice jian and gave my brother the boken and whe had a lot of fun sparring with them (though my knuckles are sore today :P) - booze & wood weapons are a bad mix. :D

Anyway I noticed that some of the moves in the Jian form that my Sifu taught me made more sense when I was actually facing an opponent - it wasn't just waving the sword through the air. More importantly I found I knew the moves from the form. I want to do more weapon sparring but unfortunately we don't do it in the Kwoon to frequently for safety reasons. Does anyone know if Chinese KF schools often include weapon sparring? If so do they use wood weapons or those weak-ass boffers?

nice man, sounds like fun.
we do some staff techniques with real staffs. i dont know if you would call it sparring. thats about it.

[SimonM]

Yeah we do partner drills with the staff at my kwoon too. But it's not quite the same as free sparring. That has been allowed a grand total of once and under many restrictions for safety. (Even using a bamboo stick you can hurt your partner pretty easily - especially if you happen to get paired with someone who hasn't done much body hardening.)

[Banjos_dad]

When he taught us yunlong jian, our sifu also taught us twenty separate moves with the Jian...we'd learn a couple every time the sword class met, partner up and practice them. It's great both for practicing the actual sword fighting techniques, and for understanding the form better because you have names to associate with the motions that make up the form. Well, i guess a lot of forms have names for the sections (stick incense in cloud burner, back head to look at moon etc), but that's more like groups of movemnts.
We didn't free spar though.


A wooden jian can give you some pretty sick splinters after getting beat up practicing techniques with classmates :cool: