When a sword meets the spear

This weekend officially marks the start of the Chinese New Years celebration on the chinese calender. Yay and boo. Yay because its about 8 weeks worht of partying and eating (great after the American holidays!). But it is boo because as a lion dancer the majority of my next the next two months will be lion dancing, sometimes whole days at a time. If anything this would be considered my tird sport season because the amount of time i put into this will conflict horribbly with everything else. Well enough of my pain time for physics.
Today's post is about what happened while I was practicing my sword/spear dueling set. I was teaching it to someone else the sword pat of the routine this weekend and hoping they will learn the set. I would normally play the spear part,but I know both. So as I was going through the set, actually about five to six strikes in, the sword is suppose to do an upper block against the spear's strike coming down. But the person who I was practicing with, needless to say is kind of lacking certain gray matter, whipped the sword out as a strike and came in contact with the wooden part of the spear. Normally you would never block a spear strike with a sword stike for two reasons. One the strike will dull your sword. Two the spear could break off and end up hurting you. No one was hurt, but the large amount of force behind the small area of the blade ended up combing with the initial strike of my spear ended up damaging the shaft. The resulting pressurenearly snapped the poitn right off.

This demonstrates first hand with physics why you neve block with the blade.