Overappreciated Historical Weapons: NUNCHUCKS are STUPID!

so before anyone says that this is just some armchair expert talking about something he has no experience in let me just say that i used to do martial arts and i actually do have experience in this so hear me out okay [Music] greetings i'm shad and please do not download this video without watching it at least hear me out okay because i know there's going to be a lot of people who at the outset are probably going to disagree with me because the nunchucks are honestly a beloved martial arts weapon and even in pop culture like look at their teenage mutant ninja turtles they really helped increase the popularity of the nunchucks and bruce lee kind of really did his best to introduce these weapons into pop culture and in film and things and so nunchucks are beloved and as you know i've shown in the intro to this video i have loved them quite a lot in the past as well going through martial arts and everything learning how to use them okay so it's not like i i don't sympathize with the appreciation people have with this weapon now one of the reasons why i think they have become so popular is because they look so cool okay the methods and ways in which nunchucks are developed to be out of use right looks flashy looks cool like so when you're getting ready and you're there and you can look around and just look at all that stuff okay it looks flashy and you're there and you can hit here like that you know look i get it these are flashy weapons but are they really good in fact in my opinion it's only because i've taken a step away from such traditional martial arts that i've been able to look at these more objectively and in actual fact because on my channel one of the main things i like to do is have a look at pop culture weapons and figure out how practical they would be in real life that mindset has just caused me to naturally gravitate towards real weapons not just weapons and pop culture and have a look at them in a more objective standard and as i have a have a look at nunchucks there are a lot there are problems with them so please at least hear me out i get it if you like them and i'm not saying you know they shouldn't be a martial arts weapon but what i am saying is that for a weapon for self defense they're better than nothing but a good old-fashioned stick is way better i like tremendously so on many levels so now now please just as i mentioned let me explain the first issue i want to address about nunchucks and yes i'm just saying nunchucks i don't care if you say nunchaka or nunchaku or something look just standard common language for the layman all right uh nunchucks right first issue is about transferal of force now i'm actually being fairly consistent with my criticism here because it's the same criticism i've put against the medieval flail medieval flail in my opinion is a bit of a rubbish weapon its historical validity is dubious at best and there are many valid questions about if it was even used like very prominently at all in the medieval period and their inherent problems if you're wanting to know what those inherent problems are please watch my video on over-appreciated historical weapons on the flail and one of the points i mentioned in the flail applies directly to the nunchucks in regards to transferal of force people sometimes assume that with it being on a you know a loose chord that when you swing right this action here makes the actual striking end hit with greater velocity than it would if it was just a stick that's actually incorrect because when you go to hit now i'm not actually going to be i'll step forward so i don't hit him in this one when you swing with nunchucks so if i'm getting into the position and go down and swing that motion right here there is no lever action like that it becomes straight and it swings as if it was a stick and so there's actually no greater velocity on the actual striking end when you swing to hit than if it was actually a stick so if i go down and i just go like that all right now that wasn't even full power but something happened that i'm going to touch on again and i'll just point it out but then we'll go on deeper dive do you see how it bounced off and actually hit me here now i'm wearing armor so it doesn't matter but if i wasn't that possibly could have hurt now this is one of the big problems with nunchucks even over flails you see a flail is like if they're designed properly is made so the actual head when stretched all the way down does not reach the knuckles so it can't hit your knuckles nunchucks by their very design is there like no matter what unless you have a really small end and it becomes a flail they are always going to be long enough to hit your own knuckles they are very dangerous to the wielder i'm going to expound on that a bit more later on going back to that initial point and so when you swing with nunchucks it becomes essentially a stick anyway and so we can compare this to another stick of similar length which i have made right here this stick is of the same length as in fact it's a little bit shorter than the nunchucks stretched out and i will show you will compare the amount of force i can generate hitting with this compared to hitting with this but first i want to finish off my point about transferral of energy because nunchucks are connected by a cord there is no rigidity to the actual striking end and as a result when you hit with them like that well what's going to happen okay it's not a rigid stick it's gonna happen exactly what we saw before where the actual striking end can bounce off completely now that means you're actually losing a very large amount of kinetic force that you've thrown into this strike you have your own mass and weight going behind it and if you know how to do kinetic linking where you ground yourself with your feet and you're pushing off with your feet and using your body when you're throwing yourself into it the amount of additional force you can put behind a blow is quite large actually depending on your own size yeah like the big you are the more force you can put it that's why in a lot of you know boxing and other competitive things the uh the combatants are divided by weight category not strength capacity it's actually your weight that very much determines the amount of force you can generate for a point of reference i've brought in sir ben now sir ben say you like say hi into the mic hi into the mic there we go uh so just let you know i'm not actually short ben's just a giant okay how tall are you i'm six foot four six foot four all right now not only is ben stronger than me like look at the thick how thick his arms are okay like i just just come on charlotte like he's a he's a big boy okay not only is he just naturally stronger he has a much bigger frame and he has more mass in his corner so ben is going to be out of hit with way more force than i will so as a point of reference we're gonna get bishop ben to do a strike with the wacky stick a bit later on oh and also if you want to see more of sir ben he appears regularly on my other channel game night so anyway so he'll come back in later thank you so as i was saying the more weight and technique you put into your strike the more power that there will be but if there's no structure to the actual striking end as soon as it hits there's nothing to drive the force home and it just bounces off compare that to a stick a good old like this is a plain simple wacky stick when you hit it okay you can drive that force through to a far greater business complete structure all the way through and you go so it's profoundly more effective in actual fact in my video on medieval flails i even proposed that a regular mace would strike with not only just much force but more force than a flail would because of this reality this actual physical reality okay and then an awesome youtube channel called wushu engineer had the equipment to test it and so he made a rudimentary flail and a rudimentary mace and tested the striking force between the two and the mace hit with as much power if not more so i'll link to his video in the description below it's worth checking out because that you know physics tests relates directly to nunchucks they simply will not be able to hit with as much force as a stick a basic stick of similar mass and same length now when i say similar mass my wacky stick is made out of the exact same piece of wood as i made these nunchucks unless i made them myself but by the very nature of nunchucks by the fact you have to have a cord or chain connecting the two so there's no wood here and to get better control and better feel usually taper them so you can grasp easier they're always going to have less mass for the same length another problem is where you hold nunchucks okay usually especially in a lot of the nunchuck forms you are holding it right here okay this gives you far more control it's a little bit safer because when you hold down here there's greater velocity that can whack into your own knuckles but here hopefully only the cord gets hit and it's because of the cord you can do fun roll over knuckle kind of things right now just to note on this nunchucks are mostly used to show off well let's just admit this okay they look phenomenal in cutters and things like that but a lot of the move sets that you're doing even these fun fancy things that i you know i'm doing and all that stuff though they look good do not work very well when you're actually striking something solid because it's much harder to control where it bounces after you strike and you might say ah but a master can handle it shad not nearly as much as you assume okay like seriously get a master and get them to do every single strike set that he does in a cutter against something real and do it consistently and regularly without any cuts or anything and see how often this bounces off at an unpredictable angle and i'll show you some examples but because you're more incentivized to hold the nunchuck closer to the cord or chain it lessens your reach okay look at that like there and remember if you hold it down here like i said it's far more dangerous you can and i'll also do some demonstrations to show you but when i do i'm going to be wearing safety equipment because i actually know how dangerous these things can be i've trained with them for years back in the day all right and yes when you're training with him you hit yourself a lot okay even when you start to become fairly competent yes i think i was knocked out a tooth once with these things anyway not these ones but the ones i had so let's break down quickly just what we've covered so far less power because there's no structure holding the force to drive it through less reach because you have more control and safety holding them up than lower down less mass because there's missing wood in between and you're less incentivized to do to a handed one like an actual big old strike you could okay it's more dangerous but you know with an actual stick it feels natural and normal to two-hand this sucker so with those things covered that puts down just on a technical way just like you're the math on the paper to to show that just these things will not be able to perform nearly as well as people think or assume because transferring something that looks fancy in a cutter do something real life when you actually need to hit something is actually a very you know different thing and now i will show you okay apologies if the audio is a bit muffled now but just to demonstrate how much force nunchucks can actually produce compared to a simple stick right uh but also how potentially dangerous they can be and watch what happens when you know you're swinging through now i'm going to be losing a bit of control uh over this so i'll get it underneath the arm and i'll do a swing up strike where i swing around and go all right it bounced and hit my arm again if i wasn't wearing a thick gambeson that could have really hurt okay so now i'm just going to do no wind up just a complete hit and i want to try and get him on the ends so first let's look at power but also watch where this bounces when i strike hit me right there with a considerable amount of force that time all right [Music] again if i wasn't wearing a thick gambeson that could have really hurt it has the potential to do some serious damage because of how unwieldy and dangerous these things are in reality yeah you could be like look hit me again i'm sorry you can try and do the whole you know where you go out and stuff yeah there again hit me on the arm so now i'll hold it down and let's see about the power okay that oh did i knock it over all right so i actually got borrow me to fall over then though i actually don't know if it um if you was leaning a bit back helping in or if uh i hit with the cord of the nunchuck which wrapped it around like a hook and then pulled him down but looking at the footage while editing it's actually clear to see that boromir was already off balance from the previous hits and this last hit doesn't actually knock him over because he doesn't fall over right away it just knocked him that one bit further off balance so much so that he just fell over from being on unstable ground we're gonna compare now to a stick and a first strike i'll hold it closer up to where say i'd need a hold with a nun chuck and just do a big old hit right borrow me there almost fell over then um so now all the way down to the end right there and i'll try and wind up to me it's hitting with way more force but if you really want to see what a stick can do you obviously use two hands and hit like this i think that that says it all but now to really drive the point home let's bring in sir ben to have a go on the wacky stick and see how much damage he can actually do one-handed knockover ah that was in the chest and he still fell over [Laughter] two he's a big boy now i'm suspecting a lot of you guys are going to want to see sir ben do with the nunchucks the problem is we don't have a gamers in that he can that fits him at the moment and the nunchuck bouncing off and hitting me in the shoulder and the forearm is actually legitimately dangerous so unfortunately we don't have time to get ben to do the nunchuck hits but i think that at least demonstrates the point that someone with or granted is stronger than me too but much greater size as well and mass can produce greater force because even on the one-handed strike he was able to knock old boromir down and like i'll i'll see if i can i don't think i can i'll try a big lined up see all right strength mass plays an important role in the amount of force you can generate at least i can knock him over two-handed now that was actually a really good demonstration because it showed something that i wanted to demonstrate as it hit okay i was able to just continue pushing all the way through because it's a straight rigid shaft and i can just drive the force home through it you wouldn't be able to do that with nunchucks stick plain old stick way better than nunchucks look at on top of it there's one point i didn't even mention defense okay because the stick is rigid i can actually hold it out and defend you can kind of almost use it like a sword keep that bay and look you can actually still strike with a lot of power just even holding it like that you know so you have reach you've got defensive capacity because you can hold it out and you can still hit using it like a sword essentially and so it's a more versatile devastating weapon they're nunchucks because seriously like the defensive capacity on nunchucks is garbage okay like you know are you gonna block a sword with nunchucks on on the chain most of them they were just cored and so i just get chopped in two if they'll cord and your fingers are fully vulnerable and so if you're nunchucks are garbage man like seriously they're like they are utter garbage weapons they have been inflated in pop culture so much so to a level that they do not deserve they are not an effective combat weapon they're better than nothing granted like you'd be able to hit someone harder than with a bare fist but how hard is it to find a stick just get a bloody baseball bat which is essentially what we've been using and you've got a weapon that is so much more effective okay and look you can do all the fancy martial arts things you know with uh all those things and stuff you're like oh marshmallows stick moves and seeks you know so it's interesting having come from a place that used to love nunchucks when i take a step back and really consider them from an objective lens how utterly garbage they are in reality am i wrong i don't think i am i get the feeling that there's going to be a lot of martial arts puritans that might be uh you know upset with this video but if not look i'd like to think that people are more reasonable and i'm not saying you can't enjoy them because they're flashy they are fun okay and when you get a really complex cool cutter going they can look phenomenal but they're not good weapons all right they can look fancy still have fun with it and i'm not trying to take away that from any of that you can still enjoy them but i am saying very clearly that as i've mentioned multiple times they are stupid weapons [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 1,279,342

Keywords: nunchucks, nunchuku, martial arts, test, weapons, Asian, medieval, weapon, flail, mace, stick, staff, bow staff, karate, kung fu, gongfu

Id: pUWoUM4Wttc

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021