Be One With Your Weapon

You need to find the balance of letting the weapon move itself, and you controlling when and where it stops.

I always loved training with weapons, and over the years I’ve gotten the opportunity to train with a variety of weapons (knives, bo-staff, short sticks, swords, etc). As a Tang Soo Do practitioner originally, one of the weapons I unfortunately never got to try is the rope dart. It’s usually associated and learned within certain styles of kung fu, which if you’ve seen the most recent Marvel movie Shang-Chi, you’ll see a lot of. 

One of the characters, Xi Xialing, mainly uses the rope dart in her fighting style and takes out multiple opponents at once constantly! After seeing the movie I followed the actress, Meng’er Zhang, on Instagram and found videos of her training with the weapon. She doesn’t have a martial arts background, but in one of her video captions, she stated something that I was always taught about training with weapons. 

She wrote, “When I first started my rope dart training, I had a hard time controlling it. Overtime, I realized my problem was that I was only trying to tell it what to do, but I never listened to the rope dart itself. It was only when I began to listen to the rope dart, that I had finally gained control of it”. 

We have a similar saying when we begin weapons training; we say that the weapon is an extension of ourselves. If you want to be one with your weapon, you have to consider this; if your technique isn’t strong empty handed, it will only be wild and uncontrolled with a weapon. You need to find the balance of letting the weapon move itself, and you controlling when and where it stops. 

Make sure when you begin to train with weapons, you take the time to not just get familiar with the weapon, but also its weight and energy. Take it from me, or better yet Xi Xialing: your goal is to become one with your weapon. Take the time to listen.