LESSON #1. How to win a match in KENDO

[AsahinaKimi]

itai! itai! itai! itai!***

*ouch

[HopeHoops]

1. That's the dark side of The Force.

My daughter is rather proficient with a sword and she'd call that a dirty trick.

[SwissTony]

2. My karate instructor was also a kendo exponent

and he said his instructors ALWAYS went for places like the armpits. They knew how to hurt.

[AsahinaKimi]

3. I took up kendo as a kid...

One of the worst places to be hit, (which I learned from painful experience)is on your hands and fingers. Despite the small guard, being wacked by bamboo stings like hell. You get hit there often enough, you can't even hold your shinai well enough. That turned out to be an advantage for me, as I used that trick several times, and beat my opponent, because they had a hard time holding on to the shinai, once their fingers went numb. I also learned to tape up my fingers, so if I got hit, it wouldn't be as bad.

[sakabatou]

5. Ah

I only took kenpo.

[sakabatou]

4. Thank goodness they have face-shields.

Then again, never try and strike the groin, as, I think, it's an illegal maneuver.

[MilesColtrane]

6. The shortest distance to an object is a straight line.

I kept finding that out the hard way when I took fencing classes.

My instructor was a bad ass.

She went on to compete in the Olympics, and she could always tell which ones of us had watched too many swashbuckling Hollywood movies as kids.