How To: Swordchucks

[Hanuman]

What are Swordchucks? They are 2 long slim sword-shaped weights attached to a bit of chain attached to another symmetrical weight, so when one is held it becomes the handle or Held Sword (HS), and the other becomes the weight or Swinging Sword (SS), and you can hold it either in standard sword grip or Forward Grip, or have it held away from the thumb or Reverse Grip.

There are certain techniques unique to swordchucks, the feel, the body movement, the mechanical geometry, but essentially they are a fusion of these 3 things:

• Poi - A new variation of a Maori combat training/music/dance instrument, Poi are now a light or fire/light/dance/juggling instrument.
• Doublestaff - A doublestaff is a shorter (3'-4') single staff used for fire performance, since both ends can be lit doublestaff can make use of 4 points of fire at the same time, strictly as a fire/light/juggling/dance instrument.
• Double Meteor Hammer - A Shaolin weapon, the double meteor hammer is more known for performance rather than combat, the traditional combat instrument would be the single meteor hammer, possibly the most powerful of all soft weapons.

Poi Example
Doublestaff Example
Double Meteor Hammer Example


Because of this fusion, swordchucks (when used 2 at a time) are much more difficult to use than any single one of these tools, so to understand how swordchucks work you can actually build any of these other tools to train with and learn swordchucks indirectly, and since swordchucks use about 4-16 times the amount of fire of other tools it would be good to train with other tools on fire before you try swordchucks on fire.

Poi Section

What is poi? You manipulate a swung weight on a tether, this will help you master not hitting yourself with the swung sword as where the held sword handle ends and the chain begins, it becomes poi.

The BIG difference between standard poi and swordchucks are that the poi is held in REVERSE, which does change the physical body movements and some of the patterns you can accomplish, but not the principle of it. There are about 5 or 6 grips in poi, generally only forward and reverse grip have been useful to me as all of the others generally disable throws and are used for greenhorns so it's easier on their hands and make sure it doesn't fly out. Grip Illustration
Forward Grip


Reverse Grip


New! Real Pictures:
Forward = http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/1667/dsc00051g.jpg
Reverse = http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/1021/dsc00049ja.jpg


To avoid hitting yourself, the ultimate way to avoid this is developing spacial awareness, and general awareness (through developing your ability to feel) as you explore the Poi aspect you'll be able to tell where you are facing at all times (N/S/E/W and exact spaces in between), where both of your poi are, how much energy is in them and where that energy is going, and understanding how long they are down the the millimeter.
Spacial awareness is one of the biggest tools you can get, as it manages pretty much everything, allows you to do all this blind (literally), and from it comes the ability to make your planes clean, which makes it both safer, gives it the ability to be more intricate without fear of tangling, and makes it more visually pleasing. Planes Illustration
Planes, From the Audience's Perspective


Weighting of poi generally follows the guidelines that the weight of the head is heavier or equal to the combined weight of the chain which can vary from 1:1 head:chain ratio for heavy chains on fire poi (with no wooden filler) to around 20:1 for our Mark 4.5 chain mail poi and braided chain mail tether; Swordchucks on the other hand actually have their head using around 80% of where the tether should be, making them more like snakes than anything else.
Distributing weight like this causes a few effects, one is that the inertia of the head diminishes which means that isolating the poi becomes very difficult, the other is that the mass at the head doesn't FEEL as sharp, which means that your timing (which is based on your gravity line-- feeling where DOWN is based on the gravity of whatever you are swinging, which is important because the lowest point in your circle is how you calibrate your sense of timing both poi-body timing and poi-poi timing which a lot of the time work like gears, and since they go all-which-ways around you... while on fire... you generally need to be able to spin completely blind.


Poi Learning Links-

• Poi Community by Yuta http://poicommunity.com/online_lesson/enindex.php

This guide will be ongoing and will be added to to display all information gathered in the future, expect frequent updates.