Viking Combat?

Tsafa,

I never really put too much thought into the particulars of my group. Generally, thick leather gloves(the thicker the better, I've got kevlar-reinforced motorcycle gloves, they're AMAZING) and fencing masks are what we use most of the time, and we do all our sparring with either PVC boffers(a sword made from pvc pipe with insulation foam on it with a wooden core for strength) or wooden wasters.

We do A LOT of 'suburi', or 'practice swings'. Usually 100 of each mastercut on each side(left and right) as well a other more basic variations on the standard 'oberhau' and 'unterhau'. On top of that we often drill for things like extension/reach, and speed, i.e. getting your sword out there as quickly and with as little telegraphing as possible.

We also do a lot of work with a pell, usually using either wasters on our tire-pell and suburi bokken on the wooden pell. Again, emphasis is on form(you can tell from the sound of impact if it's a good hit or not) as well as speed. Trying to get each set of suburi done as fast as possible is a good way to speed up your strikes.

Proper breathing is important throughout all this.

What this does is make us feel very very natural with our weapons. I know it's cliche, but they're literall extensions of our body, as much a part of us as an arm or a leg. We've done this enough so that we can spar very quickly, while still being able to pull our hits somewhat. It still hurts like the dickens when we get hit, but it's not bone-breaking force. Every training practice results in very sore muscles, and a lot of bruises.

As for grappling, nobody is allowed to grapple in sparring unless they've done enough grappling drills so we know how to safely avoid permanent damage. If the weapons are dropped and the grappling match goes on for more than a second or two, generally one person QUICKLY gets advantage of the other, 90% of the time within just a few seconds, and it's clear enough that someone got the point, so they break after that. If it goes on longer(particularly regarding chokes and some locks) then it goes until someone taps the other one or says they give.

As for what's allowed or not, it really depends on what's agreed to before hand. Sometimes we want to be able to practice certain things in a sparring situation and so that's agreed upon. Other times it's just a free-for all sparring system where both combatants must use an honor system, and there's almost always a 3rd person(a judge if you will) to offer an objective opinion on how the combatants are doing.

In the most serious sparring senses, we go best out of 5 points, i.e. first person to 3 points, where a point is any hit which would kill or severly cripple the opponent(hand shots, good arm shots, strong strikes to the knees, hamstrings, thighs, etc). A won grapple counts as a point. Smaller hits, such as would wound or lacerate, but still reasonably allow for a fighter to continue count as a point when 3 such hits are scored, though these aren't what we go for, sometimes someone doesn't completely void a hit and gets one of these 'minor hits', etc.

A couple of times we've gotten our fencing masks on, put on thick/heavy/padded clothing along with some beefy gloves and fought all out with shinai, though really we try to focus on good application of good technique, which is best brought out in the previous situations.

Anyway, so far we've yet to have a serious injury. Once we had a guy take a thrust to the neck with a wooden waster, but he was fine(looked awful though). The worst we've had is bruised bones in the hands(particularly fingers and knuckles - about a week to heal fully, only occasionally more), and some rather deep purple bruises on the arms and legs, but nothing like the huge welting bruises i've seen on some SCA guys(which they wear like vain little trophies). Those guys are really rough, i'm not sure how the SCA is over where you're at.