Seki sensei talked about this. He did this fast slash that didn’t completely go through the tatami and basically said “that’s plenty”. There was also a video of kendo guys doing these sorts of small cuts with katanas as an experiment and being able to cut pretty deep. I bet plenty of fights ended from these sorts of blows.

I think it gives context to armor like mail.  These light taps are bad for you but would be stopped by mail.  Even if mail doesn't do quite as much to stop heavy blows, you got the protection against what probably are the more likely hits.

Flick cuts to the wrists and forehead/face are present in ancient kenjutsu (not just in kendo).

Had a club member do a demo for us of wrist cuts using small, light, thin shearing/small swords against layered jackets with foam padding underneath. The results were surprising to those that lived in the "must give big cuts to matter" folks.

Certainly they wouldn't sever a limb through bone but it easily cut through heavy wool jackets and did enough underneath to open muscle, sever tendons, and cut open veins, disable hands, etc

Its also a big reason we have been moving away from weighting head/body cuts higher than limb cuts in our tournamnets systems.

Great video.

work the flick is the HEMA version of work the jab.

A guy near me makes a water bottle cutting stand out of PVC pipe. It’s genius. The bottle is held upside down. A PVC fixture is just the right size to receive the bottle cap.

Hi Matt, this video proves an important point: you will manage to do what others claim doesn't work, if you're good at doing it because you've been practicing instead of claiming something doesn't work.

That shamshir looks so scarry being swung around lol. Intimidating.

Would be interesting to see you talk about:
-The phasing out of brigandine
-In-depth history of Bucklers
-Scimitars vs Sabers

It's the follow through that's contentious for me.

A true flick strike wouldn't have you rotating back into your guard stance.
A flick in my mind, is a strike followed by a subsequent reversal of momentum back to the original stance or plane of the blade.
By putting your weight into the strike regardless of windup, you're leaving yourself open briefly to counterattack by following through. That said, it's also what's required to make the cut.

I'd like to see the damage done to similar targets, but just with a tap of the blade instead.

I feel that the objects may not be severed, but the equivalent damage to a flesh and bone person would still be very debilitating.

This reminds me of some of the stuff I've seen with jians. The sword is very light, but with the centre of mass being far away from the hands, despite people sometimes calling it the Chinese rapier, it doesn't control the same. It's still nimble, but in a different way, and that way (as I've been shown) may been revolved around a similar sort of flick motion as here. Instead of keeping the point on-line like a rapier and pushing the blade forward, it was sort of dropping the jian from a more vertical position and pushing forward, letting the sword fall into a thrusting position, and then pulling it back afterward. One of the things mentioned in this showing was that this not only allowed for using the blade's centre of mass to enable quick thrusts, but that it could also be altered very slightly to deliver reasonably damaging, quick cuts, in more or less the same as seen here. Can be tricky to defend against, as the same motion can used to deliver a thrust or a cut.

I'm just glad that some of us are prepared for the water bottle apocalypse.

Can we just acknowledge the fact that Matt has some beautiful technique! Like, I am no expert, but the way he handled each of those swords was just so beautiful! What an inspiration!

Even though the raiper cuts less thsn the others, i still think its the most scary sword shown here. That reach and point is absolutly super scary. The fact it can cut rather well is icing on the cake for sure!

Matt, with respect, I think that your instincts for good cutting are making it difficult for you to test the kind of thing that people are complaining about about. Look at 6:04-6:06 for example, your "flick cuts" are going through nearly 90 degrees of motion.  That is not the kind of action that I complain about as invalid.

I don't know if they still make them, but Cold Steel used to have promotional videos in which they, usually with shorter blades, often demonstrated "snap cuts", same as your "flick cut", in pig and cow carcasses.

When i was learning Jian there was a lot of flicks used

The sticking point when it comes to quick flicking cuts like this isn't so much the damage you can do compared to a stronger committed cut as it is the speed and accuracy. Skallagrim did a fantastic video about this same sort of topic where he was astounded that the light rising cut with the false edge completely destroyed the ballistic bone set hand that he propped up to test on (which actually disappointed him a little because he wanted to do more cuts). I used to attend a HEMA school where the entire focus of the instructor was hand snipes and what he called "stop thrusts". Where you deliberately aim for the hands. The techniques revolved around moving offline while aiming at the hand during your opponent's slash/thrust, or quickly flicking the hand before and after a slash/thrust. And he wasn't forgiving about the edge alinement either. "you can't just flail your blade at the hand and hope for the best." We also had hyper flexible plastic trainers with heavy duty gloves to practice with safer stuff then steel. But even that resulted in swollen knobby fingers. God forbid you duel without gauntlets with a bastard that can snipe with a real blade of even passing sharpness. If his edge alinement is good the fingers won't be. And of course Matt brought up the fact that any of these snipes connecting with the head, neck etc. No thank you.

but yeah at any rate great video Matt. Real shame that it's for real that hard to get tatami mats in England, but with how expensive everything is now I don't blame you if I'm honest.

I'm gonna show all the people who constantly tell me that power is everything this and then listen to them call the antique sword dealer a buffoon lol.    I used to larp a lot, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how similar these strokes are to the "cuts" we threw on each other all the time.

Great video and its nice to see these type of cuts showing effectiveness. Though someone who use to do Olympic fencing (OF) I was a bit mislead by the terminology. In OF we just call those cuts and flicks are something different. Flicks to my knowledge is an exclusive OF technique where you whip the blade in a way to cause it to bend and this allows you to reach around someone's guard similar to how a flail works. Since blades are more flexible than real swords and you don't need a lot of for to get the hit it works extremely well. Their are different style of flicks for each  weapon.

Epee with the blade which is the stiffest you mainly slam your blade on the person's bell guard in order to make it bend and stab them in the forearm. I think its the most realistic of the 3 because I've seen people get injured by it.  

Foil is where flicks are king. There is a blade made by Leon Paul (not the guitar company) call the "Flick Master". It looks like a scorpion's tail on how they use it and its impressive how they can stab you in the back while facing your front. I would love to see one of those foils get a sharpen tip and test to see how much penetration can actually be done with it.

Sabre is interesting because before 2000 the blades were super flimsy and it looks like they were fighting with silver pool noodles. They changed the rules to where they couldn't bend that much but they still have some flex along the flat. I've seen some fencer hold the sabre sideways and strike with the flat in order to flick.

Anyways I would be interested and seeing how effective they would be if they were real weapons (especially the foil). You would probably need to have an actual OF practitioner as flicks are not that easy to do and needs a lot of practice to use reliably. I don't think they would be very effective honestly but I do see some potential which is why I think its worth trying.