Thrand's Overarm Spear Vs Christopher Matthew's Underarm spear! A Storm of Spears!

Hey, I'm Thrond here. Hey, this is Eldgrim. And this is the Thang Thrond channel. Yo! The overarm throwing slide that we're speaking of is where you actually throw the spear with tension. You don't allow it to fly out of your hand. You allow it to slide through the hand. And the thing about it, it's loose. It's not you going out there and gripping tightly and planting the legs and using the body to drive it home. You get more reach with it. Plus, you can find it closer with it if necessary. But, I mean, you get extreme reach and can just pull it right back. So, it's a beautiful technique. It has a lot of power. And it has more penetration, initial penetration, when you're trying to penetrate layers of armor, let's say, be leather or gambeson or what have you. Most of these techniques here, the cast blow, the throwing slide, this was used for a long time, according to a lot of the depictions that Roland sent me. Later century was still used. I believe it was used in the ancient warfare. When you go back to Bronze Age, I believe they were doing the throwing slide. I think the javelin and the spear were very hard to distinguish. Now, look at my hand. See here, if you look at my hand, I'm letting go of it. So, keep my hand that way. I let go. And let's see what you got. That was just me throwing my arm. I wasn't using any body. I wasn't pushing the spear. I let the spear. You've got to hold directly into the stone. As you can see the blood coming out, right? Might not have as much blood. We have a hole directly into the stone. That's almost no effort whatsoever. We have one more blood now. And we pierce the skull again. That's my opinion. Both of those are kills. And it took minimum effort to pierce the skull. This was actually a head that we had already decapped in another video. So, you just all know that. But that is our standard head from the neck up before I cut it. So, all we did is put a little attachment to hold it up. It's not even on there very good. But that's what this kind of spear with that kind of force would do to a skull. And we believe these are harder than human heads. That was the punching method. That wasn't really all that impressive to be honest with you. I don't think so. Ha ha! And that was back. More penetration. Oh yeah, you hit the back. It's coming out the back. That's awesome. Through all that gambeson. That was sweet man. Freaking awesome. I hope there's enough left in there for me to get a good throw in there. When I did the punching style technique, I was unable to get through easily. Yeah, I know man. That was pretty cool. Let's see what I can do with a throw. Oh yeah! Oh, that's the best yet. Now, grant you that's not a kill. That still made a hole in the armor. I'm guaranteeing the shock would be quite devastating to the person you hit. They'd feel that. It's the best piercing we've got on this thing so far. And a sword could not do that. Okay, we're going to try a two-handed sliding technique. Where I try to throw it through here. On this, it didn't do much better. Let's try again. I didn't get my power. Heck, the overarm seems to be doing better than the slide on this thing with a spear. That's me putting my body into it and everything. And that's from a pike style or two-handed thrust style without a slide. We're getting these. The one with the slide, we're getting a little better. And then the actual throw was the deepest. So actually, we got the best penetration for the overarm throwing slot. Not something I would have expected. It's not quite impressive. Go ahead and try a throw on that. The full out throw. And this was our overarm slide throw. This is the full out throw. It's a hair more penetration. We actually got into the gambeson. And it dented the armoring quite a bit. So I mean, you might have actually made the guy bleed. Hey, you know what? Our one deadliest warrior said that a bronze spear would bend on a Japanese breastplate. You know what? I don't really think that would happen. It didn't. It actually made it through. I need to resharpen it slightly. But we actually have a hole in the gambeson. I'm quite impressed. Deadliest warrior, we may not be done with you yet. That's my throwing slide technique. And we pierced 20-gauge steel. Now, I know we've done this in another video. People argued that it might not be 20-gauge and that bronze wouldn't cut steel and that you couldn't pierce it. 20-gauge steel pierced and tests show that it has to be thrown to go through according to Christopher Matthews' book. So he immediately assumed, well, something's wrong there. Somebody had to be rushing into somebody and it was braced or something. But that's the initial impact from acceleration. And this bronze spear easily pierced this hood. That's what it did. It'll walk up to a car and stab into it, which is kind of amazing because there's an old bronze weapon. But these things were lethal. All right. In this technique, it's held up under the arm and I can pull it way back in the idea. This is so I can kind of cradle it to hold it. They don't have any trouble holding it up because it's kind of like holding a lance out here. And that's one thing I don't like about it because somebody could come in and easily see it's telegraphed where you're aiming and a headshot's coming up. No matter what I do, my headshot's pretty much kind of coming up. And even if I try to, I lose power when I try to come over the spear, it's balanced like a pool cue. But let's not worry about that. Let's just worry about how much power we lose. So what I want to do is try to bring it way back, get more power, put more hip into it and make sure I'm within range. So if you look how much distance the spear is actually traveling from target, I don't have a lot of distance to get acceleration going. So for this to work and me getting anything through this, it's kind of like punching a dagger at yourself. I have to use my body and my hips to twist into it. So let's see what I can do. Try to give this everything I got. We keep getting the same kind of things. We've been playing around with it and we keep getting, I don't know what you'd consider that, maybe a quarter inch of penetration. I don't know. I just, I'm not seeing the same kind of power coming from that. So I do agree that throwing motion is probably the only way to get a major penetration or an enormous amount of force on the initial impact. Because this, I mean, of course, you know, everybody wants to bring up the idea of pushing it afterwards. But if somebody gets stuck in metal or some kind of armor or protective covering, a lot of times you're not going to push it through afterwards, you're just going to push the guy back and away from you. And as Demoman Chaos had assumed, we got a pretty nice hold, didn't we? Well, that's very difficult to do and it takes a full range of motion. All right. I'd like to explain the motion. The one that everybody keeps talking about out of Christopher Matthews' book, which I don't want to put down Christopher Matthews so much, is just that it's over the top of the asbestos, however you hold your asbestos, but it's over the top and you have to open up. Pretty much you're drawing it, you can draw it way back or have it just clutched under the arm, but he's seen it as a thrust with the body and the hip and just boom, you know, and you might have to open your shield up to do it, which I don't picture them actually doing that. And the shield would be in the way, even if you try to come up, you lose more and more power as the arm comes up here. So that's just to explain that one. This one that I just did is more like the overarm slide that I'm doing. I'm bringing it way back and I'm finding a balance in the spear. You cannot do this with soft balance at all. It'd be very difficult to do even if the spear's balanced here, way back here. It's very difficult and it takes up so much room under like this. I see as a single combat technique. I mean, if I'm drawing it way back and try to come under like this and hide it behind my shield possibly, this is a totally different motion. This is me like throwing this out there. I can even get more reach and let it slide just like I do with the overarm slide. It is a throw, not a, I don't know if y'all can tell what I'm trying to say. I'm just doing this very lightly, but that is a throw. And it's the same thing. You're trying to throw underarm. Underarm is a lot more difficult than throwing overarm. Anybody can tell you this because of mechanics. And yes, if I were to have my arms straight out and throw like I'm throwing a javelin, I could possibly get even more power. But the problem is you get this weird arcing motion. And we've seen holes in top of helmets like that. Who knows? Somebody might have got carried away and tried to do it that way and throw it directly into the guy that way from above directly on the top of the helmet, which we see holes like this. They say they were axes or something else, but I mean, it makes sense to me that they could have thrown power and like that and drove it over a shield or the top of somebody's helmet, depending on how thick it is. But I'm just talking about ranges of motion. And this one, as you can clearly see, has a lot more range of motion that the spear goes through in a throwing motion than if I were to take it like this and just bloop, bloop. This is just my shoulder and my body. That's it. No matter what I do with it or how I twist it. And if I try to come over, I lose power trying to come over like that. It's just kind of awkward. So just my explanation. This is a underarm slide is what I consider. It's just like my overarm slide, but bring it way back and straight out. That was a throw not hitting the same spot because a lot of people had said that we had the same spot and it wasn't that impressive. But a full out throw is even more devastating. That wasn't hitting next to right next to a hole. It's more devastating than the forearm or underarm slide, but it's because there's no control. You're not controlling it. You're just giving full force and acceleration. There's a hoplite behind us and he's ready to go. He's got his spear here. Somebody will be behind me. I've got a target over here to actually thrust at. It's within range that everybody would tell you, you know, is, you know, where I can get a good thrust with the underarm, you know, and actually get it out there. And supposedly out of reach for this thrust. I mean, we, I mean, everybody pretty much knows this has no range. You know, if you're here and it's right by your head, you know, this, this just doesn't have any reach according to the myth there, but we're going to go ahead and test this out. We're going to test him behind me. We're going to try the two different grips and we're going to have a variance of other tests, testing power, if we can pull that off today. But I believe this is very close to a historical door, a pipe wall, and possibly wasn't used like pipes. At times it might've been, but I don't think it was at all, at all given times. I'm sitting here at the two foot mark, approximately the two foot mark that they talk about. I guess it could be balanced better. I'm over the top of the shield. So I'm trying to stay in here tight with this and try to put my head down. This is one problem. I can't put my head down with this out of the front without pulling me in. Second thing, the serrater, if I'm going to stab out, watch where it's going. It's going to my arm. It's got to be in a comfortable position where I don't get it back under my arm. If I have this thing where it comes out too far, even if it is balanced, I can bring this right back into my own arm or get it driven into me. You know, I don't think anybody would want that. So it's got to be at least about the two foot mark, which everybody pretty much agrees on that. And you thrust out over the top, but if I'm coming back and forth, I'm sorry, look what just happened. I'm sitting here and he's behind me with a shield. And I'm trying to control it, but it's very easy for me to come back and hit this guy instead of come over his shoulder. I'm trying to stand here with this spear coming over. You know, it's possible if I aim over, like everybody says, all these ways of doing this, you can come back and do this. You can get him right in the throat. And the serrater, if anybody doesn't know about this, is not short like this. It was a long shape. It's shaped much like a rondelle. It's got to be right in the grip that everybody's advocating that they use and over the top. Unless they lower something lower, it's probably about, I don't know, about here at this overlap. About here is all I want to know. It makes me right on his shoulder if I try to thrust here. I can thrust up, but most of my shots, if you're watching, they're going to come up. No matter where I'm at, they're coming up. So unless I hit him in the top or top of his helmet to skip off, I don't really have any shots. But let's just say we are using this and we keep it out there. We're not going to worry about them rushing in between the poles. Maybe somebody in the back row, because we don't know what these guys are on like, he's grabbing and pulling it away from me and he's trying to pull back. He's going to pull and just rush in between and attack us in a minute. So that's what's going on. I have it and I'm going to try to thrust with it. Let's see if I can get a spot where he can hold. Come on, bro. Give it all you got. Let's see. I want to go over the top. Oh, I just hit my guy behind me. Yeah, you just pissed off your comrade in arms. Yeah, but I hit his pole. That's possible. But I'm trying to come up and this I don't get here. If something hit this and they pushed it, it'd be like, oh, oh, let's try something. Let's say they're coming in and have a position. I have it in and you know how far that is out there. Let's see if we can actually. Oh, I hit a spot with no nothing. Let's see, is he safe back here? Are you okay, buddy? Did it hurt you? Nah, he says he's okay. Hit a helmet lightly. What's going on here? This gives me more ideas here. Wait, heck, I could be standing here and decide to take a pot shot at somebody over here. Everybody saw that. I just took a chunk out of the tree, but it could happen. I just hit that over there. There it's again. I'm going through. That's a good thing for y'all. You're all a lot of force and no one's injured behind me. And if I need to pull this in, I've got it in. I can duck my head at any time. So I'm in a position where I'm trying to hold and people behind me can kill. So that's what I was trying to explain about. I think it's a much better idea when you have more range of motion, not less. So I'm sorry. I'm just not seeing that as being so hot in the phalanx trying to stab over like this. What if this got pushed right on in while they're coming in after I hit a shield or something? I have my arm out. I'm exposed. I can't get my head down. This doesn't look so hot to me. The other way, at least I have options. This thing comes out. I can be pulling my arm back and see how much reach I have. Still in the same position. Standing right here. I'm still okay. My arm's back. As y'all can see. I think he assumes that the entire fight is fought back here and noticed it. They can see me, correct? Yeah. I think he's not noticing my arm position. This is not only for range. This is for close in or even hiding. The spear could be hidden behind the shield. Y'all can see he can't see my spear. I can even change positions and come into an underarm position if I want. But the idea is it's back here. So if he has a shorter weapon early in the period even and he rushes in, I'm still in here. I can still attack him and fight a battle without drawing back. I'm already drawn back. But at a distance, I can reach him if I so choose. And with him looking directly at it, trying to bat that out of the way is going to be dang near impossible. He's going to have to worry about staying offline with it. I can attack his foot from here. I mean, heck, he also said you can't redirect it. I can pretend I'm going to do that and just stab you directly in the foot if I wanted with the same technique. Just like I redirected that pencil skill of the user. Very true. And the other thing he was saying, it would stick in the shield and so on. I mean, it stuck, but I pulled it right out. But the recoil is helping you recover, too. I don't see it as a major problem. Yeah, but when you think about the recoil health. Oh, yeah, I'm getting it right back instantly. And I have to push the shield into it. Even though it's stuck slightly in there, I was able to retrieve it. If I had to, I could use my shield and whatever, yank it back. But that's why they had swords for as well. Something went wrong. You would never aim at the shield. But if you did get stuck in a shield of armor or something or a person, you'd switch to your shorter weapon. Right, and still the same principle applies behind the shield. But that's like, say, the cast blow with the sword or the cast blow with the spear is the only technique you use the whole thing. That's analogous to saying that the thrust kick and the side thrust kick and the lunge punch in karate are the only two things in karate. Right, and you're starting in this position. You basically are starting off where you can use the spear this way as close as you possibly can. Just like in unarmored fighting, you start off in positions where you can use those big attacks. Or you can do something like that and reach out and get him and bring the spear right back as he tries to close. Yeah, but again, those are big attacks. Change grips. You got all your little jabs and sticks. Hide behind the shield so he's not sure exactly where you're coming out or if you're going down or you're coming back up. They don't know if you're going to jab, you're going to thrust, you're going to throw. You'd probably see something more like this in single combat, not knowing what was going to take place. True. So what we're trying to say is, no, it's not the standalone technique. I'm sorry you compared it to all the other techniques, but you can't compare it to the other techniques. It sits right alongside those techniques in your entire martial discipline. We just don't think the lance grip was used as much as Christopher Matthews has said, because first of all, you have to be up here the entire time. The guy can move in, and I'm kind of in a bad situation. He's going to rush in quickly with a sharp weapon. Even if it's down low for single combat, I have max range. He gets in, I have to try to choke up. If I'm in this kind of position, he really doesn't know what's taking place. Oh, now I'm scared of him. Yeah, you've got all this kind of stuff going on, which changes the entire fight. I don't have to open up much, and I can just utilize the spear to do the work. But if it does come to the necessity, I can either be in this close, utilizing the spear this way to stab him. I'm not using any kind of slide. I'm just stabbing him, trying to get a body shot or something. So in theory, it's a technique. It's not necessarily my technique. Everybody keeps calling it, but it's a technique we believe was used in antiquity, during the Viking Age, throughout the whole use of one-handed spears and shields. We see it in depictions. And we believe that's what the big missing link is to why overarm is valuable. It's not here, like a lot of people assume, and not just a body shot or holding the spear balanced like this and trying to stab down. It's like boxing and stuff. You have your hands cocked up to fight. You don't have them out here. You have them cocked up and ready to go. But it's the same concept. Damn. That was with the throw. Our sarator is not tapered like this. It's tapered like a rondelle. But this is about 18-gauge steel, mild steel, which I know bronze would be a hair weaker, but not by much. And if you also notice the impact on that, how it kicked back, that kind of impact could damage the neck badly. Someone whiplash knocked them out. And that would just be hitting the helmet, whether it went through deep enough to actually go into the skull or not. After testing both over and underarm spear grips in the context of Spartan phalanx, it is clearly evident that the overarm grip was the grip of choice for phalanx and other similar spear and shield formations. Our experiments conclusively demonstrate the flaws of using an underarm grip in tight shield formations. For obvious reasons, the underarm grip is dangerous to both the wielder and his comrades in arms. As previously shown, the underarm grip has a higher probability of unintentionally striking soldiers in the rows behind the wielder. It can easily be manipulated by the enemy. And it is a slow telegraphed attack. Additionally, the results of our experiments illustrate how the underarm grip hinders mobility. For example, thrusting over the shield is both sluggish and diminishes power, among several other physical limitations caused by using the underarm spear grip in phalanx formations. Our experiments with the overarm spear grip confirm our hypothesis that not only was it used, but it was used with great efficacy in tight shield formations for a variety of reasons. We prove incontrovertibly the overarm grip with spear and shield has power and control by demonstrating the gigging method of thrusting, which is throwing the spear without letting it fly from the hand. Using the gigging method of overarm spear grip in a shield formation greatly reduces the odds of striking others in the rows behind. It also reduces the chance of the enemy manipulating the spear. And it is swift, making it more difficult for the enemy to anticipate where the thrust is aimed. The overarm grip using the gigging method provides the wielder greater mobility, a long reach, and allows the warrior a wide range of attacks. We believe that the Spartans and other spear and shield warrior cultures used the overarm grip with gigging thrusts. In summation, our experiments speak for themselves. And they affirm our contention that the overarm grip in phalanx formation is superior to underarm grip. Thank you for watching our video. Farewell.