I recently got some grief from an admin of a facebook group purportedly about Chinese sword fighting, who took issue with the real-weight Nihonzashi weapons I do continuous sparring with being padded. The irony here is not one other video I have ever seen in that group had continuous weapon fighting, weapon free sparring, or any real weight weapons being used to spar with in that group. The best case scenario was:
Just because something is marginally better than Olympic Fencing doesn't mean it is good. It appears the fighters are mostly nonreactive to the other fighter's weapons, they can't feel when they are getting hit, and it shows with their flashy fighting style that gives very little thought to defense. The weapons are very light weight and flimsy. Worse yet it's still stop-and-go fencing/point fighting.
Point fighting is LARPing because it is pretend:
- It's not a real dual-until-first-blood, because no one is drawing blood.
- It's not a real fight because you aren't allowed to hit hard enough to impact what the other fighter is doing.
- It's not real free sparring because they are not sparring continuously.
You could make an argument that point fighting like you see in Olympic Fencing or Olympic Karate is a helpful drill like Tai Chi stationary push hands. But it's really not appropriate to compete in drills, we don't have pad hitting drills competed in Boxing for example. The reason why point fighters do not care about real weight weapon sparring is because they aren't training to fight so much as they are LARPing.
