> He could slow down a bit a focus a bit more on his form. It's always hard to drill this into people who are new to any discipline. (and the younger and more male they are the longer it takes, speaking as a former young male myself).

>he must have an expensively lax teacher I'd honestly like to see a comparison of how much he's paid his long-time asian martial arts teacher, and how much an average "grievance study" academic pays into publishing fees (including from grants or w/e) over a similar time period. Who is the bigger sucker?

He says in one of his replies that he has a teacher in China who teaches him via video and "aggressively corrects" when they meet up in person once or twice a year. I feel very attacked with my Duolingo Spanish + my one Spanish speaking penpal that I talked to like twice, ever.

That just seems like a weird way to start strength training. He should just start lifting. And lot of 'experts' swordsmen out there. Iirc half the martial arts world is run by frauds. Apparantly bragging about how heavy swords are is a tell, swords are surprisingly lighter than joe average expects. (But i could have been misinformed by the bad martial arts people here btw). Anyway 7lbs is stupidly heavy, that is heavier than a greatsword. e: but I do wish james gets a long an productive carreer in martial arts. Im rooting for him to go full time.

> What do you make of his (limited) claims that it's strength training? He says it's a 7lb sword (properly balanced by expert swordsmen, of course). Should we expect some clumsiness? It's legitimately a traditional training method, you can see a period photo of a practitioner [here](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4e/f9/19/4ef919232e796ae4195e6e0c256510f2.jpg). 7lbs is a bit much even for a big sword like that, generally they're about 4lbs. There is traditionally a "strength training" aspect to the practice, but it is not quite the same as "strength training" in the western sense. Though there is some physical conditioning particularly of the forearms and, with proper extension, shoulders/upperback area. But part of the "strength training" of the traditional exercise is training "skillful strength", in the sense of learning a technical application of force specific to the martial tradition. For example, with a large/heavy weapon, you get a much more evident sense of the line of force the movement of the weapon has, and there is a feeling of a proper cut kind of pulling your body along to where it should be, and in relation to this feeling you can learn proper footwork and alignment. None of this is to say you should expect some clumsiness: precisely because it's meant to train "skillful strength", the point here is not to awkwardly throw around maximally large amounts of weight to increase your resistance training (not really a fair characterization of good resistance training either, but anyway), but rather to learn how to skillfully handle a manageable if exaggerated amount of weight. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StI3c0goM0Q&t=35s), for example, is a form performed with this kind of sword, and it's not particularly clumsy.