The Six Blows, Part 2 - Training The Blows

Last time, I wrote about the six blows of the sword, based on di Grassi's wrist-elbow-shoulder classification.  Other writers classify them based on origin (Fiore, Figuereydo), targeting (Yagyû) or technique (pick a German).  However, di Grassi's classification has a couple of advantages to me - it allows development of exercises to strengthen particular techniques without relying on repeating the technique itself, and the truth is that if you can hit someone in one spot with a technique, you can hit them in another with it.  Its weakness is that it is much easier to train a fighter, for instance, to throw a mandritto fendente than to know when in a fight to use the wrist and when to use the shoulder, and that training a fighter to target the head, or to know when to go around the sword rather than try to beat through, is easier to see directly than the blows of wrist, elbow, and shoulder.

For all that, though, di Grassi's conception is probably best for developing specific musculature exercises - as opposed to drills, sparring, et cetera.  The reason for this is that focusing on the specific mobilizing joints means that you can identify which joints to immobilize to maximize training effect.  The basic idea is that it is nearly impossible to immobilize a joint closer to the sword than the one you are working, but you can remove the ones above that point from activity and focus effort on the joint you want to work.  Sometimes this is easier than others: I have yet to figure out how to isolate the wrist from blows of the fingers, for instance, despite having figured out how to drill at least the armored-field version of that.  Isolating the wrist and fingers, though, is easy - you brace your elbow, as, for instance, at my desk.  Same with shoulder - you simply do it sitting down, so that hips and core cannot engage.  The blows of the hips and feet, meanwhile, are not only impossible to isolate fully, but should not be fully isolated.

So, starting from the hand, I typically practice by relaxing the last two fingers, holding my practice stick between index finger and thumb, and then snap the last two fingers closed while releasing the first two.  Then, to return it to start, I release those two fingers, and snap the first two fingers closed again.  The thumb stays engaged against the grip the whole time.  The range of motion on the stick is about an eighth of a full circumference - between 30 and 45 degrees depending on how well I've isolated the wrist - and between twenty and twenty-five repetitions is generally sufficient to activate the forearm muscles that control the fingers until they protest and quality starts to slide.  Remember, as with all exercises, quality is what matters.  Throwing a thousand bad blows quickly is less useful for training purposes than throwing ten good blows slowly.  If you can throw twenty of these without losing control of the sword, then bump it up, but if you can't, quality matters.  Because I'm basically dividing the fingers into two "super-fingers," I think of this as the Ninja Turtle.

The wrist is the first place where I wind up running two variations, based on the two axes in which the wrist can rotate relative to the forearm.  For this, I maintain a good, consistent grip on the sword, what I think of as the shinkage grip with fingers curled and thumb engaged, without worrying too much about opening and closing fingers as in the Ninja Turtle.  I brace the elbow on my desk - I do most of these in my office - and point the thumb as far back as it will go, then snap the wrist forward as far as it will go.  This is the first variation, and again I typically run twenty to twenty-five of these.  Then I roll the hand 90 degrees and let the stick fall to the outside, and then repeat the same motion horizontally related to the wrist rather than vertically.  This one doesn't get a silly name, it's just the wrist exercise.

The elbow, meanwhile, is a little tricky to isolate the shoulder.  I typically do so by pushing down on the shoulder with the free hand, to keep from mobilizing the shoulder too much.  That's not an ideal solution, but again, I'm doing this in my office, without partner assistance.  At this point, you will start to notice a pattern in how I do things - I extend the arm to its full range, immobilizing the shoulder as best I can with the opposite hand, and throw a slow shot, including mobilizing the wrist and fingers as required.  Because there are multiple shot geometries and arm paths, this is where "do twenty-five" becomes a lot more complicated.  It is typically twenty-five cuts to the left, twenty-five down the center, twenty-five to the right, and twenty-five thrusts.  Given that they are again being executed consecutively, slowly, and deliberately, if you are not feeling it in your arm, you're doing it wrong or you're more advanced than I am.

To be honest, there is not much difference between the shoulder drill and the elbow drill.  I simply quit immobilizing the shoulder.  The difference is that it is easy to damage the shoulder in armored combat, through repeat impact and poor load transfer, so it is important to learn the feel of a shoulder-driven strike, what its upper and lower limits in terms of impact are, and to learn when it is the right move and when it isn't.  There is a good deal of muscle mobilization here, but because the work is being done by more and larger muscles the closer to the end of the chain you get, the less physically demanding it feels, and the more the exercise is more about correct movement than about strength gain.  There is never a point where it is not about correct movement, but large-muscle movements, because they can mobilize more force, both against target and against the joints they support, are even more critical than small ones.

The hip is a similar story, with the exception that because strikes can be powered with both hips, and can be powered by both dropping and rising actions, my twenty-five iterations include one rotation left, one rotation right, one dropping, and one rising, for each shot.  It is vital that you engage the core on these, and, as the movements become more natural, the rotational radius should shrink and the rotation get faster, so that with practice the hip mobilizes quickly across a very short arc and the entire muscle chain from thigh to wrist becomes one rigid object.  For these, for the sake of time and simplicity, rather than trying to exercise everything in the chain in every manner possible, I typically use one specific type of strike per day - snap, wrap, hammer, or thrust.

Finally, there are blows of the feet.  These are better just called "footwork," and the trick with blows of the feet is not to engage the long chains for training purposes but rather to put the sword in a fully-struck position - extended for thrust, or at the end of its swing - and play tag with a target or series of targets.  If you can use nothing but the feet to get the sword in position, you can guaranteed get the sword in position using a combination of the feet and the muscle chains that go into hip, shoulder, elbow, wrist, and finger.

This all sounds terribly boring, I know, and to tell the truth, it is.  The focus has as often been on not knocking my monitor over, or on hitting the light switch stepping in with a thrust, as it is on proper technique.  There's a ton of boring that goes into learning any set of magic tricks, and sword fighting is absolutely no exception.  Literally every aspect of it will be intensely boring in training at some point... and this is just blows.  This isn't footwork, balance, timing, measure, or any of the other skills that go into it.  Those are a separate series, I suspect.


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