Martial Arts Myths 9 of 12

The Hits and Myths of Martial Arts – Myth 9
by
Chris Hepler and Jennifer Brandes
A Role Playing Games Perspective

Myth 9: Weapons are heavy.

Call it the bigger fish phenomenon. Somewhere, fantasy writers started calling swords eight or ten pounds of steel…or even forty or eighty pounds of steel. Where did this idea come from?

If you pick up a sword at a convention or the local knife-collector’s place in a shopping mall, it may feel like ten or twenty pounds. But how do you really know? How many long pieces of metal do you pick up on a daily basis?

I thought my backpack full of gaming books weighed forty pounds until I put it on a doctor’s scale and found it weighed seventeen. I then put my hand-and-a-half sword on it. Ten pounds? Twenty, you say?

Four point four.

My katana? Three point two without the scabbard.

A rattan escrima stick? Seven ounces.

These weapons feel heavier in the grip than they actually are for a number of reasons. The first is the lever principle, which is based on the phenomenon of angular momentum. If you swing a sword in an arc, the end of the sword is covering more distance in the same time as the handle. This is why it hurts: if you hit them with the far end as you swing, it will be at a greater velocity; velocity squared times weight equals impact divided by a very thin surface area (a blade), creating a much greater energy transfer than if you’d used your hand.

But doing so also creates more work (in the physics definition of the term) than if you’d done the same motion with a shorter object. For instance, if you pick up a five-pound hand barbell and roll your hand around a little, it will seem pretty light. If you pick up a four-foot-long, five-pound sword and make the same hand movement, it will be more work, because some of the weight you have to move is distributed over the length of the blade. Each time you turn your wrist, you are moving the tip several feet. What you are feeling is the work, not the weight.

Weapons, if they are the real thing, are used quickly, especially if it’s against someone who has one or two of their own and is trying to beat you to a hit. The heavier the weapon is, the less chance you will have to get it in position. Now apply this over the course of a war. Were you a soldier in a medieval army, which would you rather carry across forty miles of marching; the four-pound sword or the eight-pound sword? Which would you rather swing for a battle when you don’t know how long it will last or how many opponents you’ll face?

Rest assured that fighting with even light weapons tires you out. My first escrima seminar was three hours of working with a pair of one-pound generic hardwood sticks. Though I had worked with seven-ounce sticks before on my own, by the end of the seminar, I experimentally flicked my hand downward and the stick fell to the floor. I didn’t even know my numbed fingers had given out. Absently, as I was listening to the guru talk, I did it again. This is not the result you want on a battlefield.

There are a number of reasons for my fatigue; first, while the rest of my muscles were in reasonable shape, I’d rarely used the ones necessary for fencing or stick-fighting. The closest thing most modern Americans get to it is yard work with axes or sledgehammers, or perhaps a tennis game. Even so, more body motion goes into both activities. Add to this the difference between doing exercises in the air and making contact with a partner’s stick. Exercises that make contact make you tense and exhaust you much more; it’s why it’s not out of the question to do three hundred kicks in a kung fu class but sixty good ones against a heavy bag leaves people weak.

This brings us to the question of how heavy a weapon has to be to crack armor.

The answer is, not much. The Society for Creative Anachronism today slugs it out on weekends in full or partial armor. They “only” use rattan sticks, and injuries are still reasonably common. They can’t use metal weapons because most of them are dangerous enough to injure even through armor.

Take the historical “battle axe.” The axe that Robert the Bruce used was not a two-handed, double-bladed monstrosity. It’s actually more like a long-handled hatchet. But the physics of a few pounds at the end of the stick, combined with a wedge-shaped blade at a right angle to the swinging shaft means it can get most of the way through thin steel, and if it can’t, it’ll break collarbones and skulls with concussion. Even if the helm remains intact, a knockdown puts the opponent is on the ground. If the assailant sticks around, the next shot isn’t likely to be the “glancing blow” the factoid books say metal armor could deflect.

So what good is a knight’s plate armor if it doesn’t stop swords and axes? It stops half-hearted blows from inept knights, tired knights, and incidental cuts from crashing into someone with an edged weapon. This allows a knight to dominate the peasantry and defeat many of them without bleeding to death.

Other Myths…

1. Taking a martial art is the same as knowing how to fight.
2. Self-defense is the same thing as fighting.
3. My martial art can make you unbeatable.
4. There’s no difference between “fighting” or “kicking butt” and killing or maiming people.
5. Fights last ten minutes or more, at which time the hero can make an impressive comeback.
6. A fight only concerns the combatants.
7. Martial artists don’t need or use weapons.
8. Fighting with two weapons is difficult or confusing.
9. Weapons are heavy.
10. You can mash someone’s nose bones into their brain and kill them with a single mighty palm strike.
11. All martial arts look like Tae Kwon Do.
12. A style is a style.

The Award Winning Multiplied Force Fighting System (MFFS) 5 DVD Set.

Recommended Reading

• martial arts
• Bujinkan Seijitsu Dojo Ninjutsu
• Krav Maga In Peterborough
• Bujinkan Ninjutsu
• Aikido in Peterborough
• pressure point training

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