On July 15th, Coach Paul taught a six hour seminar devoted to the Messer. The first half of the class focused on fundamentals. Students then sparred with the weapon. The second half consisted of focusing on disarms, wrestling, and some techniques used just to show off! We ended the day with more sparring. Despite the heat, everyone persevered. Attendees have asked for additional seminars with this weapon, so stay posted for the next one.
Coach Paul just released a video of one of his favorite new drills.
Captain America Challenge
Fight Day on June 23, saw Coach Paul return to his birthday challenge. For the challenge, Coach Paul fought a 2 minute round for each year of his life. In addition, his challengers got to pick the terms of the fight, weapons, no weapons, and even when in the day they would face him. As always some challengers came up with some very interesting contests including a Captain America bout and a Kiai fight. In 3 hours, Coach Paul successfully fought all 48 fights. Thanks again to all who participated and those who came to watch the fun.
The List of fights!
Sierra in the Etherblades Tournament
The weekend of May 27 Coaches and students from the Tosetti Institute returned to Clockwork Alchemy, a steampunk convention held in Santa Clara.
Coach Melissa’s self defense class
Coach Melissa and Sierra Cirimelli-Low taught a self defense class using parasols, hat pins, teacups and various weapons available to the Victorian woman. Coach Paul and Kevin Gibbons presented a class on the Bolognese pole arms.
Coach Paul’s Pole arm class
Sierra Cirimelli-Low also competed in the Etherblades tournament and for the second year in a row took second place!
Due to Internet gremlins, a lot of time has gone by without an update. The Institute has been plenty busy though and here are some of the highlights.
Coach Paul Tosetti
Fight Day
Fight Day has continued to grow and become a favorite event at the Institute, so much so that a few changes have been made. First we now have an EMT on site for the event. Thankfully, he’s stayed bored. Second the event is now held every other month and the time has been extended to 3 hours.
Coach Tim Anderson
Coach Tim Anderson came back from Virginia and taught a weekend seminar on Knife and Tomahawk. His seminars continue to be very popular and we look forward to having him return.
Professor Nicolas Saignac
Professor Nicolas Saignac taught a game changing Savate seminar that left everyone exhausted from the movement drills. Like with Coach Tim, we look forward to having Professor Saignac return.
Coach Paul
Coach Paul held numerous seminars this year including:
• Flexibility & Stretching
• Kicking from the Basics to the Extreme
• Four Night of Pole Arms series
• Attacking Intelligently in Unarmed Combat
Coach Fred Kaye
Coach Fred Kaye taught two seminars this year devoted to the use of Indian Clubs for the Martial Artist. We hope to create a series of these events to get people to even more advanced uses of the clubs.
Coach Tom Badillo
Coach Tom Badillo taught numerous seminars this year from Rapier and Dagger to lightsaber training. Tom is an integral part of the Institute.
Coach Jeff Lin
Coach Jeff Lin taught an Intro to Grappling series for those interested in trying out the sport.
HEMA Tournament
The Institute held its second and third HEMA tournaments. Our 3rd HEMA tournament saw the addition of a new division, the Partisan which was far more popular than we anticipated.
Wheel of Doom Tournament
The Wheel of Doom!
This year saw the unfortunate passing of Ken Pfrenger, a HEMA and Martial Arts Instructor. In an effort to help his family, we held our first ever Wheel of Doom Tournament which utilizes a random weapon selection. This was a very silly and popular event which will rear its head again.
Women’s Longsword Tournament & Rookie Longsword Tournament
We held our very first Women’s Longsword Tournament in conjunction with a tournament for Rookies to help introduce HEMA tournaments to new competitors.
Fitness Challenges
The fitness class held three different Six Week Challenges. The results were impressive with students increasing their fitness by 30% or more. Look for the next fitness challenge starting soon.
Competition
Many of our students and coaches competed this year in a variety events of from HEMA to Grappling and even Half Marathons. Congratulations to all who participated!
Saturday, March 4, 2017 12 pm – 5 pm
Sign up Information: Coming soon
3 Events : Longsword, Partisan, and Sidesword and Secondary weapon
There will be minor modifications to the rules this year they will be announced soon.
The first Fight Day of 2016 was held Saturday, January 23 and it turned out to be one of the highest attended ever. There were over 50 fighters involved in the event as well as quite few spectators. As always with fight day there was quite a lot of variety in the fighting that took place, wrestling, submission grappling, MMA, kickboxing, boxing, knife fighting, tomahawk, dagger, longsword, sidesword, saber, spadone, halberd, and more. It was truly great to see everyone trying out different things and meeting new people.
