Medieval wrestling

[English Warbowman]

Does anybody do this stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfuMYqfmACM

[mikronn]

HI

A lot of what is shown here would be done by a hard-core MMA school or a freestyle martial arts school. In Eastern terms, you see a mix of jujitsu (stand-up and the Brazilian styles), judo, shoot fighting etc.

Some of the moves are shown in Fiore's Armizare and although I've not read anything about about it there was a German school in medieval times (Master Ott IIRC) that covered some of this.

In essence, anatomy is anatomy, and there are lots of ways to take someone's balance and otherwise mess them up

Our WMA club does some of this and we were certainly incorporating the leg lift throw as part of the Fiore dagger workshop Callum ran this last Saturday

cheers
mike

[English Warbowman]

Thanks Mike
It's coming up to 30 years since I took up Ju-jitsu (I haven't trained with a club for yonks though) and I recognised the similarities straight away. Would love to have a crack at it.

[Hawkwind™]

yup we are currently interpreting wrestling and dagger as part of our fiore/vadi curriculum, lots of interesting stuff, and yeah as mike says anatomy is anatomy, there are of course similarities between the eastern and western arts.

One of the things I like about fiore and vadi as masters is that the complete system involves wrestling and dagger work, and the interpretation of them enhances our longsword, and vice versa, not to mention its fun.

[Colin]

I try to include wrestling, be it medieval or later styles, regularly into WSEMA practice.

[mikronn]

Yep Hawkwind has this one spot on.

You can see the progression in the plays and when you learn something new in (say) dagger it translates to all the other weapons

The Fiore continuation from unarmed through pollaxe is one of the things that attracted me to what Callum/Colin are teaching.

It was certainly useful to practice the unarmed/dagger to unarmed and dagger to dagger we did last Saturday, especially with other folk. I learned a bit more about my own balance and 'tells'

cheers

mike

[English Warbowman]

Fun indeed, I still get a buzz just watching this stuff never mind doing it. Been looking at John Clements longsword vids on youtube as well, very interesting.