Thanks to the fun we had playing with a broadsword last week in Kali class, and thanks to the announcement that this month's Kali workshop is going to cover broadsword and double stick... Malaya and me went and got a broadsword today. Behold!
The broadsword is there, with two sticks and a long kitchen knife beside it, for a size comparison. It's made from welded aluminum and is a nice weight and size. It's a practice sword, i.e. it has no blade, though you could still inflict quite a bit of damage with it if you were trying to (or were careless in Kali class) and the point is plenty to skewer someone with. Neither Malaya or I know quite what we're doing with a broadsword yet, but it's a lot of fun to swing it around, and they only way we'll gain the control and precision to use it well is by practicing.
A broadsword has slightly more reach than our sticks, and with the hilt protecting the hand it's deadly against a stick, since you can simply go for the hand of your attacker every time, and outreach them most of the time, hit harder with your narrow metal blade, and you've got a hilt to protect you in case of a tie. The drawback is that it's a bit slower than a lighter wooden stick, and that makes it hard to manipulate with very short strokes or in close quarters. You've got to use the weight and the speed of it (the narrow blade cuts through the air very quickly) to your advantage and keep moving, flowing each swing and cut back up to another one, with circular motions. That's how we do most stuff in Kali anyway, so it all works together nicely. It's also very effective with wrist twisting fencing type motions, since you can stab while rotating your wrist, and due to the curve of the blade the tip will change location by half a foot or more, making it trickier to fend off for your opponent. Broadswords are also very quick to swing and pump over, thanks to the concentration of weight in the handle, and this changes the moves you can make as well.
Of course I'm talking about fighting with the practice sword against wooden sticks here; with a real bladed sword you'd simply chop through the sticks with any hard impact, and pretty well disarm your opponent just like that. In a real fight against a real sword the person with the stick(s) would be on the defensive, and would have to do a lot of jabbing, fencing type movements, while trying to get an opening to get inside the longer/slower sword's range.
I'll likely bore you with many more sword stories in the future, so I'll stop for now. And yes, if we could afford it and knew what to do with them, we'd buy a lot more swords. As the years to come will doubtless prove.
