[Wilhelm von Wankenstein]

*bump*

In an ideal situation, of course, a weapon should be made to conform to the warrior wielding it as closely as possible. That said, what are we aiming to achieve by training with weapons? Is it to use a particular weapon well? To use a particular family of weapons well? To use all - or nearly all - weapons with a reasonable degree of proficiency? To learn more about our own movement and bodies so we learn to move better and use our own bodies well? Or some combination of the above-mentioned?

If one is training with weapons for the sake of using a particular weapon, then, ideally, coming to possess a weapon personalised to one's physical and stylistic characteristics should be an eventual goal. For the purposes of self-defence, it may not be a very practical goal, but I would assume that someone training in the use of a single weapon for its own sake isn't all that worried about hard practicality so much as the polishing of a skill for its own sake. That said, any weapon art is an exacting, technically-demanding process that requires a great deal of practice and refinement before one can even begin to comprehend one's own personalised style. It is for this reason that I have never gotten very far in swordsmanship, nor probably ever will - I have the attention span of a goldfish Most swordsmen that I know are content to spend their lives practicing with training blanks (wooden swords, unsharpened spring steel blades and so forth), many never owning a live blade. To paraphrase TTT, the sword is in the mind, not in the hand.

If, on the other hand, one's primary concern in weapon training is self-defence or any other field of actual combat, one ought to give heed to Musashi's advice to aim to be proficient at as many weapons as possible and not unconditionally dislike any weapon, nor over-specialise in any weapon. In actual combat, entropy rules - weapons break, are dropped, lost, stolen, wrenched away or quite simply may not be carried on one's person for a variety of reasons. In such situations, the first object to hand and the very environment itself is often pressed into service as a weapon. Of course, one cannot possibly master the intricacies of every weapon extant, but one can develop the state of zanshin, or total awareness. Different people may understand this term differently, but I am speaking in this case of a physical and mental state of uninterrupted flow and sensitivity in which one comes to use any wielded object as naturally as a part of one's own body without concern for technical orthodoxy.

From my own study and experience, the way to develop this state of being with regard to weapons usage is by training with highly generic weapons - various lengths of stick being a good example - and treating them as tools - simple machines - and eliminating the idea of them being weapons from the mind as much as possible. This removes the obssession with the perceived power of a weapon in hand - which is antithetical to the state of zanshin - and enables the student to focus on learning and applying the universal mechanical principles that cut across all classes of simple machines. As TTT suggested earlier, weapons are ultimately tools, which in turn are simple machines, which act to enhance the action of our bodies.

There - novel over