As many of you may know, last year I launched a crowdfund for my first real product, " "The Tameshigiri Trainer".
We managed to raise just over $50k allowing us to start work with a professional product development team to bring the product to market. We're not far off launch now, and thought it would be a good place to start the projects side of my blog.
The Tameshigiri Trainer was a project born entirely out of the frustration surrounding my own cutting technique.
As all who've tried it are painfully aware, the process is long, messy, and yet... paradoxically far too short to actually feel fruitful from a training stand point. That's before you even mention the costs involved.
Picture taken from https://www.haidonggumdo.co.uk/ If you're going down the traditional route, first you have to buy the mats you want to practice with which will cost you anywhere between £5 - £15 per mat, of which you need at least 2 per target. Then you need to get a string to tie the mats, and set about rolling and tying each mat. If you can afford to do this all the time, I can imagine you'd get through it fairly quickly, but if you have a lot of mats to prepare this can easily take the larger part of your afternoon.
Now you've rolled your mats, you need to soak them ideally overnight to add a bit of weight to the target and to get a better feel. But even this isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Mats are of very low density float and can take a long time to absorb water. Meaning you need to find a huge container and a way of weighing the mats down so they get a proper soaking before use.
If you don't mind using your bath and cleaning up the mess afterwards you can do this, but most buy a container purposely for soaking mats. How big does this container need to be, you ask ? Well, this really depends on how long you want to train for and how much time you can afford to spend prepping. Keep in mind, 1 mat may only give you around 5 cuts which gives a grand total of maybe a few seconds of actual physical practice, that's if you count the momentary pause you might take before the cut. So provided you want to train for a few hours, you may want to consider preparing over several days, soaking and storing enough mats to make the training session last. OR if you're lucky enough to have a few friends that want to take part, you can split the work over several households.
Finally!! You can start practice, and for all your hard work you get what amounts to maybe 30 mins of physical practice, where the feedback consists of picking up bits of straw and using the skills learned from watching CSI to figure out where exactly your cut went wrong 🥸. Before of course, picking up even more bits of straw and finding ways to get rid of them, using other skills you learned from watching CSI.
If this sounds inefficient to you, that's because it is! I did try substituting mats for the popular water bottles which ended up nearly flooding my garden, and then tried using clay, which I'm still finding pieces of till this day and would rather not talk about 🥹.
See, traditionally when tameshigiri was practiced in Japan, it was simply used to test the sword's cutting ability and was often performed on cadavers or even convicted criminals in place of mats. This was done seldom and by distinguished swordsmen who had already honed from various other methods of training, like cutting through the natural growing green bambu...and people on battlefields I suspect. It later became a popular way of demonstrating skill using the ubiquitous house mats that people had to change periodically anyway. Also you'd potentially have a whole school/organization to help with prep and clean up.
For the modern day man however, this is totally impractical. I actually sat down and did the math one evening after practice. I figured if I could just put a timeline on how long it would take to get good, I'd probably feel a lot more motivated to go through the hassle. I said I'd need maybe 100 hours of practice to become at least competent, and I could probably manage 5 cuts per mat in a minute allowing for time to change the mats, at a fairly casual pace. That meant 6000 mats which on the upper end would cost me more than a deposit on a house, and a combined 30,000hrs of soak time 🥹. Needless to say I was pretty disheartened by the estimate.
This forced me to get serious about a solution to this problem. As a corrective exercise specialist, I knew the only way to get good at physical movement is to rack up as much flight time as possible, with good feedback mechanisms. This could be a personal coach, or an exercise designed to bring attention to good habits whilst inhibiting poor habits.
Not long after I started thinking up solutions, I stumbled stumbled on this vid by pure chance 💡
One thing led to the next and before I knew it, I was reviving skills I learned in technical drawing at college, buying a 3d printer, taking an online course in fusion 360, and doing a combination of harvesting parts from old battery chargers and purchasing laser pointers online. Before long i had this little beauty >>
Which overtime became this >>
And is now in the process of becoming this >>>
The Tameshigiri Trainer is a small sword mounted device used in combination with a reactive target, to get precise and unlimited feedback about your cutting technique. Allowing you to improve with far less effort and hassle than using traditional methods.
If you'd like to learn more about the project or support it, you can find more information on our indiegogo page here
Can't wait to get it in the hands of practitioners world wide !!
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