Best melee weapon-based martial art

>non-competitive HEMA (not sure if that's a thing)

It is, though since the big hema boom its become very unpopular. They tend to focus on the historical side, training the techniques in the manuals and trying to figure out how they work.

sport hema guys might turn to them for interpretations of texts however.

Of course competitive kenjutsu used to be a big thing too, but it turned into kendo once it was standardized.

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Can't you just you know, practice HEMA without attending any competition or competition oriented-training (crazy thinking I know)...? Now I imagine that some clubs gear their practice more towards competition, but I doubt it's the direction of most clubs all year long (don't know that much though so).

Also, gekken is still done in some late edo-era koryu like Hokushin Itto-ryu, Tennen Rishin-ryu, Jikishinkage-ryu and maybe Shindo munen-ryu. Good luck finding most if any of them outside of Japan though, and they usually put you in bogu only later in training iirc. But then there's also Toyama-ryu which is fairly present in the US.

>Can't you just you know, practice HEMA without attending any competition or competition oriented-training
It is still a problem if in general they train with "scoring" in mind. I have no experience in HEMA so I couldn't tell you how people do it, if you try a few different places you might find someone who actually knows what he's doing.
Don't be misled into thinking you need some 164th gen descendent of a gureito worrioru to teach you stuff either. Nowadays there are people who know the stuff without belonging to a renowned ryu, and there are definitely glorified teachers who everyone just assumes are good just because of their name or heritage. Be critical, talk to the instructors you try and see what approach they have.

youtube.com/channel/UCRdamEq6Ij0pRzr3xZDobjw/videos

Oh yeah, there are clubs that mix the two sides to be sure. There are also casual clubs and clubs were a lot of people compete, and clubs that do totally different weapons, so it is a very mixed field.

You're right about gekiken, my point was that it used to be a much bigger thing than it is now, for better or worse.

talks a lot of sense. The real issue though is that everything is broken one way or another. If you don't actually test it and only do forms kool aid leaks in. If you constantly test by sparring, you've got to have points and rules and you're headed towards olympic fencing.

So if you actually care about being effective where does that leave you? Honestly I'd rather tangle with your average HEMA-tard than with your average SCA combatant. Does that mean SCA is the best? No. It's better in some ways and worse in others. And I'd sure as hell rather tangle with the SCA guys than the BoTN guys. And HEMA-tards don't like either of those organizations and will assure you they are better. And that the rules in SCA and BoTN prevent the fully deadly HEMA being used. They're partially correct (no pole axes in BoTN, for safety). But I'd still rather fight average HEMA than BoTN. There's no good answers. And we see this in firearms training too. The FBI squat, the weaver stance, the isosoles, Combat Action Relock. How do you guard against faddishness and kool-aid? We don't have a good way. Ask the best questions you can, practice and try things, and accept that almost any training is better than no training.

Tire machèt

>And HEMA-tards don't like either of those organizations
Can you imagine they forgot all about telling me that in the club back when I did HEMA? It's a good thing the internet is here to fill in the gaps for me.

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fioredeiliberi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=17906&sid=594db7f2c4f759ccfd9565479fb4c61e

try not to catch the cancer in that thread.
in b4
>not my club!

>in b4
>>not my club!
True, that is an important thing to keep in mind with HEMA. There's no central organisation, no one has the rights to the name, or anything like that. As such clubs are free to do their own thing, and there's little standardisation. The thread in a way illustrates this rather mixed approach, as we see some having some worries about BotN, some just shrug, and there's a few cases of people seeing good things with what they do. The closest thing to a consensus there is in that thread would appear to be that it is simply different (not exactly going for the earth-shattering here), and that the report from the BotN captains meeting was an interesting read.

>If you constantly test by sparring, you've got to have points and rules and you're headed towards olympic fencing
I'm and in my martial arts school we spar without having points. You have to renounce the idea that a clear and definite winner will always come out (except some very obvious cases of experts vs noobs), but the philosophy is that it doesn't really matter who wins, what you're doing is learning. If you get hit you'll know and you'll learn something, if you land one you'll know and you'll learn something, but nobody cares about who "wins the match".

The BoTN reports are very interesting.

It's always a mixed bag in any training. As I said in my first post there are no good solutions. I have no doubt that a good HEMA club is better than a bad SCA club, but in general I'd still rather fight a HEMA dude than an SCA dude if it was in earnest.

Take these clips
youtu.be/BICmmSEkAzs?t=169

youtu.be/KPakegAEbhc

picked a high quality HEMA video too. Not one of the fat out of shape long winded idiots. 30 seconds of the HEMA video will give you the entire drill. He talks a fair bit about distance (which isn't stupid, not being in range until your enemy is overextended is a solid strategy). But the SCA sparring is driving that point home much better. It is more "realistic" to an actual fight.

And, again, we have no way to guard against kool-aid anywhere. McDojo and Krav schools alike, it varies so much even when there is an organization.

youtube.com/watch?v=VB3kt3y7EPU

youtube.com/watch?v=PW-e_gt7p5M

>Take these clips
One clip showing one exercise drill that train you in one specific technique/scenario and the other showing free sparring. One is good since it gives you the ability to really drill in one specific thing and learn it in a relatively "noise-free" situation, the other is good since it allows you to test it out in a less forgiving situation. HEMA certainly doesn't restrict itself to the former, and I assume SCA doesn't restrict itself to the latter. Thus I don't see these videos telling us anything much about SCA vs HEMA, though it seems to me that such was your intent.
As for realism, to quote someone who presumably has some understanding of real combat about what many consider a ridiculously artificial method of training...

"Kata, at least for me in younger years, were odious. I always scoffed at the idea of something staged or prearranged. But the reality of combative culture has proven to me that the best way to go to the edge of realism is through a prearranged pattern. /.../ I have found that, with proper mind-set, the koryu kata combined with high-end combative conditioning is the martial skill set closest to actual combat that I have encountered."

USMC Liuetenant Colonel (2002) George Bristol

Oh well. The whole "who would I rather fight" thing, self defence applications and whatnot isn't something I see much point in really. I'm not going to be walking around town with my longsword or a sabre.

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show me a similar pole arm based sparring from HEMA then.

I don't have a problem with kata in general. It's just broken in a different way. You're welcome to show me evidence to the contrary but I'm not impressed. It's become the Traditional Martial Arts vs MMA argument. With HEMA as the butthurt TMA. And I'm not against TMA, there are rules in MMA (BoTN) that TMA (HEMA) would break and have an advantage. But realistically there's a lot of bullshit.

Don't listen to this user. I saw an episode of those two white guy MMA fighters who go around the world doing different martial arts then after a week have to compete against someone of that art.

The MMA fighters went to the Philippines to fight against some Eskrima/Kali guys in the military, and they wrecked the Filipino guys in stick fighting, and did just as good in the knife portion. The Flips looked like LARPER nerds getting in a confrontation with people who actually know how to fight.

As a matter of fact, one of the MMA fighters got so comfortable he even started clowning around by doing silly shit like jumping over the Flips swing at his legs.

Just goes to show, do MMA or a striking and grappling martial art. Once you get good at fighting OP, then learn to use weapons. Every nerd who goes straight to weapons and skips the getting in shape and hand to hand portion is incompetent. Sure it's better than nothing I guess, but why be a LARPER when you can do it the right way with the same amount of time invested? Teach a boxer who's wrestled some weapons related art, and he'll go light years ahead with it.

There's a reason why every warrior culture in the world first taught their swordsmen/warriors how to wrestle/fight for many years before they taught them the way of the sword/spear.

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Just go to youtube and search for HEMA sparring, you'll find plenty of both good and bad. Probably not a lot of polearm stuff, since that's rare to begin with in HEMA and the safety issues means many who do that are light on the sparring. All the sword-based results you'll get should be plenty to show you that HEMA at large does do free sparring though. You can probably find some SCA technique drills while you're there as well.

Sayoc is a joke

>"Kata, at least for me in younger years, were odious. I always scoffed at the idea of something staged or prearranged. But the reality of combative culture has proven to me that the best way to go to the edge of realism is through a prearranged pattern. /.../ I have found that, with proper mind-set, the koryu kata combined with high-end combative conditioning is the martial skill set closest to actual combat that I have encountered."

>USMC Liuetenant Colonel (2002) George Bristol

One of my favorite quotes there.

> I'm experienced with a few open-hand martial arts.

>Just goes to show, do MMA or a striking and grappling martial art. Once you get good at fighting OP, then learn to use weapons. Every nerd who goes straight to weapons and skips the getting in shape and hand to hand portion is incompetent.

t. illiterate

There really aren't many options. Honestly if you can just get decent body dynamics down, it's your preference whether you focus more on HEMA, kenjutsu, escrima, etc. "Best" is kind of hard to decide. Are you talking about putting two practitioners in a ring and watching them beat each other? Are we pretending the martial artist is in a self defense situation with their preferred weapon?

Honestly bros, just do whatever martial art has the weapons you like. At first I was a HEMAfag, but then I got sick of the homosexuality and elitism. Kenjutsu is obscure in comparison, and every good thing you find somewhere is covered in 10 minutes of "well that would never work"(HEMA can have this problem to a lesser extent). Also make sure you spar with your preferred weapon instead of just doing routines and kata. If your weapon of choice is bladed, you better have a sharp one and cut with it. Otherwise you have the illusion of skill without actually being able to use it.

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>ok so there's not really much pole arm sparring in HEMA. We love sparring with swords, ok?

Was that so hard?
I really love what HEMA could be but the more I researched it, the more I was driven to the realization that the crazy ratio was too bad.

Honestly I would love if the massive HEMA-boom over the past couple years just didn't happen. Like it's really cool that it got popular and there are multiple content creators for it, but things got really gay. The easily accessible information as well as cool-guy points for knowing "real swordsmanship" and hating katanas made a massive influx of the lamest people jump to it. I fully believe that 70% of the people who talk about HEMA online do nothing but watch videos, argue over things they don't understand, and maybe collect swords. This unfortunately coincided with LE DOOS VULT getting popular on reddit/youtube and thus a really embarassing know-it-all cringe community was formed. All around the once simple idea of practicing with historical European weapons and techniques.

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Kendo is in about the same state as judo, where it’s mostly competition. That said, like judo, it can make a great base to build on if you’re able to find a kenjutsu school. For sure better than nothing.

For me, the big thing is finding a school, and kendo is much more widespread through the states than HEMA at the moment. Both the national and international communities are very strong.

Is spear combat a meme? What's the most based spear fighting style?

There are Japanese schools that focus heavily on the spear, and also some that include some spear stuff along with other weapons

youtube.com/watch?v=231wpvAzGVE

youtube.com/watch?v=UY2V_akREKw

With Hema there are some groups that do train spear, though I believe there are even more that do not. Partially because its harder to safely spar with.

That's a retarded quote spewed by an equally retarded and attention-seeking tripfag.

Your opinion has been noted, thought about and discarded.

>Is spear combat a meme?
What does it mean at this point?
No it wasn't a "meme" it used to be a long lasting thing both for duels and formation fighting even though it sorta faded away in the 17th c, unless you count pike and bayonet as "spears".

Some japanese ryuha do pretty crazy stuff with their long spears, but Japanese have a tendency to over-sophisticate everything so it's expected of them.
I'm partial to TSKSR's sojutsu, no so fancy but still good.

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>Some japanese ryuha do pretty crazy stuff with their long spears

I'm curious, what would you're example of this be?

So we have Kendo, HEMA, Fencing, Escrima...what about just modern police-style baton training?

Which of these martial arts involves the most actual practical sparring that could translate into real world use? I mean fencing seems well developed but when are you going to have one of those thinned-ass swords?

>Some japanese ryuha do pretty crazy stuff with their long spears

I'm curious, what would your example of this be?

Practical application is going to involve a lot of drilling or kata. Most historical arts in both Europe and Asia involved two man drilling as a primary training method.

That said if sparring with an eye towards history is your thing, hema and certain schools of kenjutsu would be you're thing.

I was mainly thinking of Hozoin-ryu, but re-watching some newer videos, I think this was (badly) informed mostly by an old nhk video I had seen that introduced me to the ryuha and that was very reishiki heavy and, imho, weird in the way it was demonstrated, rhythm was peculiar, etc.
But watching some newer videos now, it isn't as strange as it seemed.

What I was thinking more broadly is those crazy wide strikes done with long spears (10ft and up). Like in this school's kata that start at 4:57
youtu.be/5GJlHxMgbRY?t=297
Giving strikes with spears is nothing weird, it's the way the Japanese do it with their long spears, brandishing it high like a sabre's jodan to strike the face or arms. Not to say it's ineffective, it's just, not the sort of blows I would have thought of giving with such a long spear.

HEMAfag here

>I fully believe that 70% of the people who talk about HEMA online do nothing but watch videos, argue over things they don't understand, and maybe collect swords.
Oh god, tell me about it. There's not one fucking westaboo/longswordboo/spearaboo or any of that shit in our club. I think actually trying to use that shit quickly contextualises things and makes you appreciate everything.
Especially because every melee weapon is practically obsolete, and the most fun/interesting ones aren't necessarily the most effective anyway.

Main problem with polearm sparring is just the inherent danger, anything involving a long pole is just gonna be a problem. You have a choice: Pack yourself into so much shit that you can't do half the shit you wanna do, or lighten the polearm until you're fighting with a floppy noodle, or go slow.
Swords have the advantage that you can take something of full size and weight, made of steel, and be decently safe without wearing all too much shit.

I do think however that HEMA has a problem with weapon variety, as so much good shit with plenty of material to work with takes a back seat to unarmoured longsword fencing, and that does include polearms.

>what about just modern police-style baton training?
Army and police stuff aren't necessary such a good idea for civilians because they almost always assume and/or take into account the fact that police officers and soldiers aren't alone and are operating under a very particular legal background. What a solider or a LEO can and need to do is rarely the same as a civilian so it's going to be most effective in its own niche but might have some drawbacks out of it (though it could be assume that a good chunk of the training is still useful in all contexts).

Besides, I don't think that anything there is in police stick fighting you can't find better in stuff like eskrima or japanese stick fighting.