Beat sticks

So I lost the nail of my right index finger. Not that this is terribly surprising. It got whallopped quite soundly by about ten pounds of metal. Fortunately, the X-rays showed no damage to the phalanges, so I'm all good. Broken fingers are no fun, and it really would've sucked to break one of 'em.

That's one of our riskier two-person fighting forms that we do. Spear vs. halberd is a challenge at the best of times, and there's a little less of a margin of error on that one. But I have it on reasonable authority that it looks pretty darn good.

We also do a less nerve-wracking fighting form where the worst-case scenario is a bad bruise. My buddy picks up a 6-foot long staff, I pick up a pair of 2-ish foot long clubs, and we try to beat each other to death with them.

Now let's take a minute to talk about these forms. Yes, they're choreographed and planned out (we do do free sparring with weapons, but that's neither here nor there), but that doesn't mean that it's not real. You screw up in these forms and you get clobbered. Yeah, you know what's coming, but we're not pulling our strikes, and I have the bruises to prove it. I came close to being knocked unconscious by my partner when I was a little slow on a block. My fault, really. And the bottom line is that if you can't accept the reality that you're going to pick up a few bruises doing this kind of activity, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

The form in question is a little more anxiety-causing than some others, at least for me, for one simple reason. Those clubs are short. If you want to strike at someone holding a long staff, you have to be well inside their strike range to be in any way effective. If you're not careful, a guy with a staff can knock your head off of your shoulders before you're able to close in enough to get on the offensive. So it's in your best interest to know where both ends of that staff are at any instant in time, and not be where they are.

Suffice it to say, you learn to read someone's body posture really fast. You learn to move quickly and keep light on your feet to avoid getting clocked. Trust me, even the light end of the staff to the head is no fun.

Now, while these forms are the ones which are most likely to cause injury, they're also the ones that you learn fastest. Getting clubbed in the ribs is often a strong motivator to not make that mistake next time.