What’s your favorite weapon? 🗡

Your tactic on the knight was spot on. Ground and pound. There's a famous story from the Battle of Agincourt where a group of Welsh longbowmen rushed a French knight, pulled him to the ground, then ripped off his helmet and stabbed him in the face. When your opponent has superior arms and armor, you need to fight dirty.

I really love the fact that Jesee dedicates his life to giving us knowledge through mixing different arts and their respective philosophies. Truly puts into perspective that though there are many ways on top of a mountain, the top provides the same view for everyone.

"It's not about East vs West. It's about who can move the best. A weapon is just an extension of the human body." That is really poignantly put. Beautiful.

5:34 the way he turned his head and say run😭

I have been practicing HEMA for 10 years. It's nice that a great martial artist like you makes such a video. It must be said that HEMA is, as a martial art, at a stage of development that we could define as "embryonic". Historical sources are available, many associations and gyms were born, however each of them is based on its own methodology. This is a necessary logical consequence given that there is no tradition handed down to us to point to and the historical sources (treatises and manuscripts) are often confusing. Personally I believe that the fussiness about martial forms is our thing to do as HEMA practitioners, many times it is the low interest in the guard and the movements, the superficiality in the martial approach, which keeps the HEMA at a low level.

Watching Jesse in unarmed combat with the knight I was reminded of the impetus behind judo/jujitsu in the first place. Once weapons are discarded on the battlefield and you still have a massive armored samurai in front of you and you need to throw them down onto the ground.

Surprised that there weren’t double kills, that’s usually what happens when fighting new opponents with radically different styles. Also light gloves against a poleaxe is just plain crazy.

I bet you and Skallagrim would make amazing videos together, he's a pretty good HEMA youtuber who discusses historical weapons from all over the world and even tries out unorthodox weapons too.

just when i thought Jesse-san had reached the epitome of martial arts content....he goes medieval in all the best ways 🤣

The back kick against a knight is something i wasn't expecting to see, but definitely needed it

What I love about Jesse is that he actually tests his techniques and skills against live resistance.

0:05 *tick tick* -My turn! That happy voice made it even better)

This is great to see, so often this sort of east/west comparison is done by strictly HEMA guys. It's great to see someone properly trained using these weapons. I was wondering, will there be more Taido content? That stuff was seriously awesome.

Skallagrim did a video on historical sickle-fighting a few weeks back. It'd be neat to see kama go against European sickles.

Being of Okinawan descent and a martial artist as well, I appreciate and respect what you do Jesse Sensei! 🙏🏽

Thanks so much for doing this collab Jesse! Everyone learns so much when doing this type of cross training, and I continue to respect your ability to improvise on the fly when things ‘do not go according to plan’. Great showing for both HEMA and Kobudo

That was an amazing video and quite a bit of fun to watch. I'm really glad your final boss didn't use the polearm to full effect, your armor was nowhere near stout enough to take a solid hit from it. It would be a fun follow up video to have YOU get suited up in full armor so you could get a feel for just how much protection the guy had. Thanks for this treat.

Always happy to see more Kobudo and HEMA! Awesome to see its getting more attention from traditional martial artists too like you and Sensei Seth. Awesome as always, Jesse. Keep it up!

this was very interesting. One thing to consider is the damage each weapon does. It is much more realistic for a sword to take someone down in one hit since it is a bladed weapon, which is why it makes sense for sparring with those weapons to go only until the first hit. The bo and nunchucks are blunt, however, and the force transfer by the nunchucks is a bit inefficient due to it not being rigid, so it is unlikely to seriously injure someone down in one hit. the stabs from the staff would also not do as much damage, so it is less threatening than a spear for example. when u were fighting the knight, you really must get in close to grappling. you would also have a knife to stab in the gaps.

As a hema and combat sambo practitioner, I loved this video. I almost never see hard sparring with the kinds of weapons you used. Keep'em coming. Well done.

We want a collab between Jesse and Skallagrim/Shadyversity. Will really appreciate how Jessy's knowledge about japanese weapons will compare to hema, since apparently a lot of hema nerds tend to ignore how traditional eastern weapons are used. Edit: Matt Easton could be an even better choice!

HEMA is my favorite martial art and seeing a proper kobudo practitioner like you, Jesse, spar with them is so cool!

Glad everyone had fun. First instinct was a hot take defending the honor of HEMA, but that isn't in the spirit of your video. I enjoyed the interesting and unorthodox combination of weapons. I think it mostly shows that in an unfamiliar context, a master with a great concept of distance has an advantage over less experienced opponents. That isn't to disparage the HEMA athletes, but to compliment Jesse. He has spent years honing his craft, traveling the world, treating it as a full time calling. His skill and adaptability really show here.

Seeing you amazed at just how effective the plate harness is was great. Sengoku jidai armor is also impressive, but European plate armor is a superior marvel of technology for its time

Your bo staff skills are really impressive

3:58 Problem is that with that kind of shield you are not supposed to parry or block, the buckler is mainly to defend your hands once you go in, not to protect the body. You are supposed to use the sword to change the direction of enemy's weapon.

Jesse's past trainings in staff fighting come in handy during this duet. Impressive

As a HEMA and Karate practitioner, I - to little surprise - really enjoyed this video. I'm a bit sad though, as a german, that we didn't see the long sword used. 🙂 I can recommend my teacher Adrian van Bronswijk from Fechtschule Asteria - or maybe you can have a collaboration with Matt Easton from Schola Gladiatoria - for something like that. Would also like to see you try HEMA.

Could this be the impetus to show that the weapons of the East can actually be sparred with safely? Could be perhaps even see some Kobudo sparring on the regular, in dojos across the world? One can truly hope!

What a great experiment. I’ve trained in martial arts for almost 50 years (black belt in taekwondo, 10 years in kempo and kickboxing, several years in jujutsu), plus I fenced in high school and college, and coincidentally I have a PhD in European history. That gives me some perspective here. What I took away from your experiment was something that I think all good fighters, including you, come to implicitly understand. It’s not the style or the weapon, but the tactics you employ. You instinctively executed a leg sweep to take down the knight, which incidentally is a component of jujutsu that samurai developed to fight their armored opponents if caught themselves unarmed. One additional point that I would add: when European knights fought each other they knew their armor was impervious to most bladed weapons, so they attacked the head for concussion (because even in a steel helmet your head will bounce around inside if hit hard enough) and the legs. Even as a young black belt I didn’t have the speed or flexibility as many of my friends, so I realized on powerful, low side kicks to take my opponents down. Same thing here against an armored opponent. Take out his balance and he’s going down. And don’t forget to grapple. Then finish him off on the ground. This link gives an idea as to how knights were trained in tactics, and to use their whole bodies as weapons. www.google.com/search?q=knight%20training%20manuscripts&tbm=isch&tbs=rimg:CWrdeJMYT1zLYUo4DkNEkUOD8AEBsgIGOgQIABAB&client=firefox-b-1-m&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0QuIIBahcKEwiYor7z5_j5AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQDA&biw=1121&bih=820&dpr=2 Great post, Jesse.

Funnily, grappling is a big part of European martial arts, especially against armored opponents. So, trying to get a knight on the ground isn’t a bad idea, it’s actually exactly what you’d want to do against one, since while medieval armor was very mobile, you’d still have a little difficulty getting up. But, the tricks are mostly done with assistance of levers, aka your weapon. It was also interesting to see the adaptation to your strategy. Though, it’s not terribly surprising to me that the generally shorter weapons failed against much longer weapons, namely with the sidesword vs kama, but that’s a general issue you’ll find in all weapons. Longer blades generally have a greater advantage since they aren’t as reliant on getting close, I’d recommend Skllagrim’s own video on a similar weapon to the kama about sickle fighting and his spars to test it out. Now, in a realistic scenario outside of sparring, if nunchaku were put up against a rapier and parrying dagger, even with the tonfa in the off hand, nunchucks aren’t very good weapons in general and don’t do well at carrying the energy of a blow when compared to a normal stick, but seeing it in sparring getting namely used against the hands is actually pretty insightful, it does show a bit of a strength they could have, and it’s being able to hit targets that a straight blade would need more effort with, and I admittedly disagree with the assumption that a shorter opponent is faster, it’s normally the taller ones in my experience that are faster. Though, smaller opponents are definitely much harder to hit because they’re small. I admittedly don’t have much to stay about the quarter staff because well… it’s a staff. Staves are historically rather effective weapons, especially if made of thicker and stronger wood, though some techniques you employed were actually also done in medieval Europe, so that underlines a similarity between philosophy in regards to these styles of weaponry. Of course with the armor duel again, what would have been done is that the weak spots in the armor would be exploited or the visor lifted up for visored helms or the helmet completely removed if it was close faced. But with the style of armor, it looks to be about 14th century from my perspective, so the helmet is likely a bascinet. But that’s only my observation from watching this.

i like how both of you are so respectful and open-minded about each other's preferred discipline. just sparring and comparing skills

Awesome to see you dive into the HEMA community Jesse! I love fighting in armored tourneys. I have often used my training from RyuTe Renmei to compliment my swordfighting.

6:20 - Any last pice of advice for me? - Run!

Kama against the fencer would not have been my first choice. Honestly, I would have taken something with equal or greater reach, such as a bo stave. The fact Jesse won with the pair of kama is actually quite impressive.

I love how the bo was so effective. Especially the nuki tsuki is such an underrated technique in my opinion. So difficult to react because you don't see it coming.

This was really cool. The Kama worked much better than I thought they would, and the Tonfa and Nunchaku were like a flail and parrying dagger! As per facing the armoured opponent - that's what Jujutsu is for. Take him down and then use a dagger in the joints of the armour.

WoW! Beautiful video! Loved the exchanges you had and the unorthodox mach ups of weapons. Plus you fought with great mastery Very well done Sensei!

Thank you for this! It was a lot of fun. Bringing in the person in armor was brilliant. If you ever do another one, it would be interesting to see some matchups where they get to select their weapon second. You always got to choose the one that you thought would be the best counter to their choice, and I'd be curious to see it turned around.

this man has nice skills with the bo-staff, the way he used it. you could really see that he used real strategy and speed to win, thats really cool. and his karate skills is incredible. the way he managed the knight when he threw away his weapon was insane!

My favorite weapons: - Western - greatsword (other than the Scottish claymore; too heavy/clumsy) - Eastern - naginata (arguably the overall best hand-to-hand weapon ever designed)

Love the video Jesse! Thank you for helping fencing arts come to focus. As always you are showing main thing - HEMA is more hobby then a sport, and you as semi professional sportsman will have an advantage no matter what weps are used. It would be fun to dance with you, both karate ruleset and HEMA 8).

I've always found myself very impressed with your knowledge of application for these ancient weapons. If anything you demonstrate just how effective these weapons were and still would be today if used in combat. Awesome video and the experts in the video who demonstrated their talent with European weapons was equally impressive.

Nice to see some HEMA on your channel ;-) Cool video!!!!

Should have done a Top Gear style intro for the armoured knight xD "Some say, he once fought a moose by ending it rightly, and he has been credited with being the only martial artist to ever be so impressive at blocking, that his opponent ran away. All we know is, that he is called the Knight!"

This is such a great idea for a video. One of my favorites so far. The enemy knight was great too. Was really cool to see the nunchaku/tonfa combo, and that staff sparring was top notch. Had to rewatch those rounds 3 or 4 times. Big fan of the Bo as well. Always really liked staff and spear; but my favorite weapon will always be the guan dao/glaive. (Nagamaki's are pretty frickin cool too though haha). Thanks for another great video Jesse! Love to see more Eastern vs European mashups... Maybe Icy Mike isn't too bad with a sword? haha

Excellent video! Really love the philosophical perspective in combat towards the end. I really enjoy your content, it's fun, informative and your approach is very humble which so many people forget in their journeys through life. Keep em coming!

Good fun. Nice seeing different combinations of weapons. Regardless of the type of weapon controlling distance and timing are still the keys to success.

AWESOME!!!! Every traditional martial artist dream scenario, watching medieval fighting styles duke it out 🔥🔥👍🇺🇸🇵🇭

5:34 The way the armoured person turned, said "run" and immediately snapped back to face forward was so funny xD

Always love to see the mighty stick. Very interesting! Love when the conversation is educational and fun.

Actually, in circles of historians distant weapon well-known for it's advantages. If you can chose a weapon - grab spear. You can hold the ground against enemy's cavalry, when you stay in formation, you can keep enemy far from you and attack him before he'll even get able to harm you. As for close quarters... Success of medieval battle depends generally of how successfully cavalry destroyed formation of enemy and how successfully this enemy keeps his formation. And spear fits for this role just brilliantly. For close quarter fight infantryman and archers were using cheap and practical falchions and Messers.

What I find most interesting is that I could basically predict the outcome of each bout: kama vs sidesword: hm, could go either way, depends on which one understand best how to exploit the weakness of the other (better reach/bettter weapon control) rapier vs tonfa/nunchuck: rapier wins (although long play (dagger closer to the body) would have been more efficient imho) sword and buckler vs bo: oh the swordman is screwed armor vs fists: uh... unless they count any hits on the armour as valid I don't see how he could do anything... (and they did) As they said, it is not the style but the skill that is important... and choosing a weapon that efficiently counters the other's!

One of the most fun videos you've done, Id love to see more of this type of content!

I recently started learning karate and at the start of this year and your videos keep inspiring me to continue, you are amazing!

You should've done a bo vs halberd match; they both had reach advantages that would've been neat to see against each other. That or bo vs quarterstaff.

Merging HEMA with Martial Arts of the Orient? Hell yeah! 👊🥋

you killed it bro well done!

Love to see cross-pollination of combat ideas. Excellent video! I'd have loved to have seen kama vs sword and buckler, or bo staff vs longsword, those could have been fun.

I was very impressed with how well he dealt with the sidesword using kamas, and the bo skills are terrifying. It's very interesting for me who does HEMA but doesn't know much about kobudo

Finally both my favorite martial arts have been represented on this channel. Not only Kobudo, but HEMA also! Oh yeah!

Fascinating! Wish it was longer like best out of 10. More people need to do this!

I love this!!! We do this in our club too! Mostly HEMA vs FMA because that is what is most available but we also have teammates who practice kenjutsu/kendo, wushu, and more and we spar cross styles a lot. It's the closest thing we could get to playing For Honor in real life!

This looks like a lot of fun. Very impressive. That heavy plate is from the late Middle Ages. At that point in history, armor technology had finally outpaced sword technology. The key was to bring the knight off his feet and finish him on the ground with a bludgeoning weapon or with a piercing weapon specifically designed to poke a hole in a helmet or to fit through an eye or neck gap. If you look at warhammers from the period they had what was called a "Crows Beak" on the back side for that purpose. And knights all carried a heavy dagger (not unlike the sai) to poke through face plates. Check out the movie "The Last Duel" for a pretty good representation of this. I thought you did exactly right in the end. Close range. Footsweep and finish.

I absolutely love seeing how insanely fast some of the Knight's strikes were with a weapon as large and unbalanced as a poleaxe! I love training and fighting with a sword and shield, but my absolute favorite is the poleaxe, and seeing fights between poleaxes and eastern weapons and techniques is always super fun. All in all, great video!

Dude your videos are soooo good that whenever I have got nothing go do then I'm like ah let me watch a Jesse enkamp video!

Wow I really enjoyed this, definitely subscribing.

As some one with an interest in both medieval combat and eastern martial arts...this proves what ive always thought....it's not the art it's the application

Really instructive video. The only element I'm missing here is the difference in degrees of damage that these weapons are capable of inflicting. For instance, they're treating a blow with the bo the same as a rapier stab or a dagger thrust or a nunchaku hit. That might be a good way to grant points if you're fencing for sports. However, if you're simulating a real combat scenario, that simply won't suffice, because a blunt strike with a relatively light wooden staff won't really do anything to an armoured knight, whereas a thrust or a cut to a vital area (like a gap in the armour) will most likely do some serious damage. Another point I noticed... after the takedown, the knight seemed to have sort of stopped fighting. He was just lying there. In a normal combat situation, I would expect even someone with very limited ground game to struggle, grab your head, try to cover up with their arms, punch, kick, shove, push with their hips, try to either pull you close for a grapple or push you away. Here, the knight just sort of took a breather as Jesse was going to town with his ground-and-pound. Other than that, it's interesting to see the change in technique and strategy based on the weapons available.

Brilliant vid! Thanks Jesse!

this is the best video i've seen all month, amazing fighters, clear marking of the hits AND an explanation afterwards

My traditional Japanese weapon of choice against an armored medieval knight: Tanegashima. Armor-piercing, easy to use, and longer-ranged. Plus, it's a GUN. Yeah, I don't think I could take an armored knight in anything resembling a fair fight...

Something more about the final conclusion. A point and an edge are also very nice. I think outside of sparing you would not want to be hit by a sword on the wrist, while you might shake a blunt hit from Nunchakus (or even a staff) off. I think that is poorly represented in sparing with weapons (and not just here, it is a general problem). Touch == Point(s)*, which of course is not true, especially if armor gets thrown in the mix. I mean that is like thinking it does not matter where you get punched (or how hard). *Some rules give different amount of points for different target areas (e.g. head vs torso vs limbs).

Fun video. Love the respect and sportsmanship.

Wow!!! Jesee-san got some skillzzzz in kobudo fighting!

What I learned is how important your own individual mastery is. I don't think anyone outside a master like yourself could use nunchucks against a sword or brass knuckles against a pole arm, and it's really cool to see that your karate mastery translates across to other combative arts.

This was a really cool matchup. Gave me serious Soul Calibur or Samurai Showdown vibes,. I love the idea of Eastern Martial Arts vs Western Martial Arts. That's a huge part of why I'm so obsessively fascinated with Martial Arts in the first place, the diversity of it all. There's such an immense amount of different combat disciplines from all over the world from all throughout different periods in time and there are as many that are similar as there are ones that are vastly different from one another.

Your content is great you are my favorite KZfaqr

This was very cool. I enjoyed this style of video.

I believe that HEMA would improve immensely if it included wrestling or judo as a basis for learning weapons, kind of like karate does with empty hand and kobudo, not necessarily because you will use it much when weapons are involved but because it really teaches you what it's like to fight a resisting opponent really close up

love the videos bro! got into kyokushin because of you

That was pretty awesome I loved it and it was pretty scary especially with the types of weapons they were using but I think that bowl you had was probably the best one to keep distance

We need a rematch for the second body guard, cause if this happened in the street, his wooden baton would not have gotten stuck

You had the right idea about closing in for grappling, that is how knights took each other down when they didn't have maces or poleaxes. Do you think it would have gone any different if you had an Eiku for the knight fight? Seems to have the right length and heft.

if this teaches us anything, is that confidence is master in combat. Jesse, youve earned my utmost respect for your combat skills. youve also disproven several youtubers in the effectivness of several martial weapons.

On other channels this type of video is 20 minutes of talking 1 minute of fighting, but here it's straight in with about a minute of solid explanation, keep up the good work Jesse

Yall having too much fun, Part 2 plesae.

This is your best video! I really enjoyed it

I actually appreciate this video I think this kinda stuffs really important for martial arts as a whole

Thanks you've convinced me to wanting to join SPIFF!

just love it, thank you very much, huge fan of your work

loved the bo staff fight and awesome video love it

That's a great way to train and measure your interaction with the weapons. Awesome centre by the way.

So, I stumbled randomly on this video. I’m somewhat familiar with karate and HEMA, probably a bit more with HEMA. I didn’t know what to expect from a karate practitioner versus weapons and techniques from a completely different age. I was impressed. Jesse did some things that I wasn’t expecting and I was surprised with the effectiveness of the Okinawan weapons. I’m used to seeing martial arts weapons in a very contrived setting (classes and learning) so to see them used in a free spar against things so different taught me a new respect for them.

Thanks Jesse, this was beautifully done (and entertaining as always)! ^_^

Interesting experience and thank you for sharing this.

Love your videos man! Just subscribed. I have about 13 years of training in American boxing, 12 in Brazilian jiu-Jitsu, some wrestling, Muay Thia, and even Krav Maga. Mixed martial arts is the fun and the best way! I spent lots of my time sparring with people with all backgrounds, best way to learn! Especially if you’re humble and willing to learn.

I really enjoyed this video because it's clear everyone is having fun.

This video was amazing I've never ever woulda seen a knight and a martial artist fight with weapons before, and when he threw his weapon away and he used like kicking and tackling, my mind was blown because this is the first time seeing something like this.