How KOOL would b to fight like a gladiator in today’s society. In my youth, I would had loved to grab a sword and shield and battle it out in an arena if I didn’t have to fear death or major wounding. It might be possible in the near future.
Unified Weapons Master hopes to bring to this sport back to the public. They hope it will be like UFC but with weapons. Their objective to promote a new weapons based combat sport.
“For us it’s about honoring, preserving, and reigniting interest in weapons-based martial arts — arts that have sort of slowly drifted off of people’s radar since the invention of gunpowder and projectile weapons,” explains UWM co-founder and CEO David Pysden. “Since then, there’s been no forum in which to see weapons-based marital arts practiced, and we want to change that.”
There’s roughly 300 distinct martial arts practiced around the world, and of those styles, 96 of them are either entirely weapons-based, or have a significant amount of weapons-based training in their curriculum. What we want to do is bring all of those styles together in a competition, much like UFC did with mixed martial arts.”(Digital Trends)
“We’ve got the historical European martial artists chomping at the bit to take on the various Asian styles, and we can’t wait to see who comes out on top there. We’ll have knife-fighting champions, sword-fighting champions, staff fighters — all those different styles will be able to compete against each other for the first time. What we eventually think will happen is certain styles and certain weapons forms will actually come out on top, but we won’t know that for sure until we start competition.” (Digital Trends)
The method that enables people to fight full on with weapons is a new type of body armor. Technology advancements in armor has increased over the last few year. The UWM founders have spent a lot of time and energy creating their special armor, Lorica~ Body Armor in Latin. It is made from a combination high tech and high performance materials. The outer shell is a carbon fiber type of material which is resistant to impact and penetration. The inner material is an impact absorbent elastomeric and polycarbonate material.
“We deliberately over-engineered the suits, for obvious reasons,” he says. “Our chairman and co-founder, Justin Forsell, has tested the suit himself, and we’ve done that with world-champion martial artists. So in other words, we’ve put the best people available up against guys in the suits and had them attack with traditional martial arts and weapons-based martial arts, and the suits have passed with flying colors. They are very, very well built.” (Digital Trends)
The armor is laced with sensors to detect various blows to the armor. It will measure where the blows occur and how severe of a blow. The sensors report instantly to a a computer that is ring side.
This is still in the development stage. There have been no major competitions for Unified Weapons Master yet. But this Australian based group wants this to be a new global phenomenon. With the chance of major harm being limited, I can see this sport really take off in popularity. I know I will tune in to check it out.
Stay Geeky My Friends!
