Guy Windsor's blog: articles on historical martial arts

In Search of the Grand Salute

8th January, 2026

My friend and colleague Malcolm Fare, proprietor of the National Fencing Museum, would like to know if anyone reading this is familiar with the Grand Salute, as formalised by the Académie d'Armes de Paris in 1888.

As the editor of The Sword magazine, he published an account of the Grand Salute in 1995. You can see the article here:

The grand salute artic — The Grand Salute article, page 2

The article was prepared by the fencing coach Eric Howlett (1921-2015), who translated the text from L'Escrime et le Duel by Previost & Jolivet, 1891, with captioned photos by Nadar of the various moves.

Here's the text in a more accessible format (this may not be a perfect transcription):

The Grand Salute

Before the days of competition, when important displays of fencing were watched by thousands of spectators, an essential prelude to the assault was the salute. Its purpose was to give both fencers an opportunity of showing courtesy to each other and to the spectators, and of exhibiting their own proficiency in correctness and elegance. Practised in various forms by different schools, the grand salute was formalised by the Académie d’Armes of Paris in 1888. It consisted of 66 movements as follows:

Fencers take up position (fig. 1) just out of distance, masks and gloves laid down to the left of their left feet. Each salutes to the left and right, coming on guard in sixte and then momentarily in tierce; immediately the blades have met, the hands turn to resume the guard of sixte.

One of the fencers, usually the elder, invites the other with the words “You have the honour”; the junior replies “Yours to command” and the senior says “Begin”. The junior fencer then executes a flourish to bring the sword arm in line horizontally and lunges, the point falling short of the target by an inch (fig. 2). He then resumes his standing position with arm and blade at 45 degrees in one movement.

Both fencers, acting together, salute in quarte, then in tierce, resume the first position for an instant, then sweep the foils down and back, pausing with the left hand (knuckles down) on the blade and both arms extended downwards (the blade being horizontal and the point to the rear). From this position the foils rise horizontally (points to the rear) till the hands are as high as possible. The fencers then fall on guard in sixte, the right and left hand separating gracefully; the senior fencer then closes the line of sixte, the junior disengages with full extension, and the senior executes a smart beat in quarte. As the parry is made, the attacker throws his point upwards and backwards past his own right ear with a quick movement of thumb and forefinger (fig. 3). While this swing is taking place, he lunges, and as he does so the defender’s foil passes to septime as if threatening a riposte in the low line. The attacker then resumes the on guard position, bringing his foil in line in the horizontal plane to meet the defender’s foil coming up into a bind of quarte.

The attacker then disengages as before, but in sixte, and the defender beats in tierce, lowering to seconde. On the beat the attacker relaxes his grip as before, but turns his hand on doing so in order that the blade may swing horizontally to his left ear as he lunges.

After these movements, the fencers come on guard in sixte, the attacker with foil and arm extended and the defender with elbow bent. The attacker then does a disengage into quarte and the defender covers into quarte. Both fencers make a cut-over into tierce, the defender staying on guard and the attacker falling back on guard as the blades click. Both fencers immediately beat or call with the right foot and come to a stand (bringing the right foot back) with points up at 45 degrees as in the first position.

The senior fencer now in turn proves his distance and recovers position. Both salute in quarte and tierce and fall on guard, circling the blades as before.

The senior fencer proceeds to make his attacks, just as the junior did. It is a point of style that each of the lunges be faster than the last. The cut-over one-two to a stance forward and the cut-over into tierce, falling back on guard with the beat of the feet, again follow the attacks.

Next each fencer falls back to the stance with arm and foil up at 45 degrees and then falls back on guard, making a wide cut-over into tierce out of distance; they beat twice with the feet. Then, still on guard, they make sweeping salutes to quarte and tierce and come up to the stance forwards, blades vertical and guards to the lips, saluting each other. Next they lower their foils to 45 degrees (fig. 4), or cut them sharply away with a swish to the low right. Apart from while the words are exchanged, one or both of the fencers are in movement all the time, the whole ceremonial being consecutive and continuous.

Call for videos!

I'm aware of this apparently authentic but incomplete version of the salute here:

Does anyone here practice the Grand Salute, and if so, could you video it for Malcolm? If you do, let me know either in the comments here, or by email through my contacts page above.

Thank you!

100 Days No Booze Results: What Really Changed (and What Didn’t)

8th December, 2025

I stopped drinking alcohol on August 19^th, aiming for 100 days. In the end, I reached 103 days without booze, and without much effort. This post unpacks my 100 days no booze results, including cholesterol, visceral fat, sleep, heart rate, and the strange mysteries of my DEXA scans.

If you want the background and the halfway-point update, you can read that here — but let’s jump into the results.

Table of Contents

Weight and Waist: The Simple Home Measurements

So what happened?The only measurements I can reasonably make at home are overall weight and waist circumference. Those have both improved.

Weight: 81.2kg → 78.7kg
Waist: 91cm → 88cm

Not bad results, but not stellar. I did once lose 10kg in three weeks…

Two noticeable effects:

•Reflux definitely improved

•Sleep did not noticeably improve

But the most important finding wasn’t from any measurement device:

My wife and daughters all agreed I was much less irritable when not drinking.

That’s definitive.

The two main metrics I was trying to improve were cholesterol levels, and visceral fat. I was hoping for improved sleep and thus more creative juice too.

Cholesterol and Triglycerides

Let’s start with cholesterol. Here are the results over the last year:

Back on 31 March, my triglycerides were so high the lab couldn’t even calculate LDL. After just three weeks without alcohol, everything had improved dramatically by 22 April.

The 100 Days No Booze Results

After the full 100 days:

•LDL: down from 4.12 → 3.53

•Triglycerides: up slightly from 1.24 → 1.57, but still well within reference range

These numbers fluctuate, and any single blood test is just a snapshot — like a photo of a busy street rather than a full documentary. But overall:

The trend is clear: not drinking alcohol helps my cholesterol and triglycerides.

These things are not an exact science: there are too many variables affecting cholesterol levels on any given day. Any blood test is a snapshot of a moment in time, like a photograph of a busy street. But the trend seems positive. From a cholesterol and triglycerides perspective, it’s clear that cutting out alcohol helps me a lot.

A Coffee Cholesterol Surprise

Two weeks before the final blood test, I learned that diterpenes in unfiltered coffee can raise cholesterol. Since then I’ve switched to paper-filtered coffee. This may have helped too.

Visceral Fat: The Most Interesting (and Confusing) Results

Now the visceral fat. It was baffling to me that at my previous DEXA scan in August, my overall body fat was down quite a bit, but my visceral fat had jumped back up from 115 to 136. This latest scan, on November 28^th, was even weirder. According to the weighing scales at the DEXA clinic, I’d lost a total of 1.8kg exactly.

My visceral fat is down to 103 cm2. (Visceral fat is measure in cm2 because it’s a calculation of the area of the cross-section of your torso at the navel. So if you cut me in half with a very sharp sword at my navel and measured the total area of fat, it would be 103cm2 out of a total of about 730)

Here's the pdf of the entire scan results: Guy_Windsor_2025-11-28-report

This is excellent, and what I was hoping. But here’s the thing. A bottle of wine is about 700 calories. I was averaging a bottle a day. So over 100 days, my overall calorific intake was down by about 70,000 calories (not counting the extra food I would have also eaten, because drinking with food tends to increase how much you eat). Fat stores about 9000 calories per kilo, so that’s about 7.8kg of fat.

But I’d lost a total of 785g. What the actual? That’s maybe 10% of what one might reasonably expect.

The rest of my weight loss came from “lean tissue”, mostly in the torso. 1.929kg from my trunk to be exact. That’s obviously not muscle (or at least mostly not muscle). There simply isn’t that much muscle to lose- and I’m stronger now than I was in August, including in my so-called “core”. So that’s either fluid, or organ mass, with perhaps some of it being gut contents (though my bowels were fine both that day and for the previous scan).

I also don’t understand how I can be 1.8kg lighter, having lost 2.631kg of lean mass and 785g of fat. That’s a total of 3.416kg… so where’s the extra 1.616kg? I certainly haven’t added that much to my bones! And I wasn’t bloated during the previous scan.

This was baffling enough that I contacted the company, and after a bit of email back and forth got on a call with one of their technicians. He pointed out that in my previous scans the DEXA total mass measurement agreed quite closely with the impedance scale measurement, except for my August 2025 scan, where it disagrees by just over 2kg. The simplest explanation is that the technician on the day recorded my weight wrong: he put 80.6kg in when it should have been closer to 82 (the DEXA recorded it at 82.298).

It’s normal for the DEXA scan to calculate total body mass about 2-400 grammes higher than the scale weight. But not 1.7kg high. And that 1.7kg is very close to the 1.6kg discrepancy in these figures. So if we correct that weight measurement, the numbers basically add up.

Here’s another mystery. According to the scan, I’ve gained 98g of lean mass (probably muscle) in my right leg… but lost 718g from my left leg! Without any noticeable change in relative strength (and yes, I am right handed and footed, but I do all my training on both sides, and in August, they were basically equal).

So, getting back to the actual point of the scan: it does seem that cutting alcohol cuts my visceral fat, but does nothing at all for my other fat. And it’s somehow fucked my left leg, even though it feels fine.

That was Friday, day 102 of my 100 days. So I had a small glass of wine that evening, and a few more on Saturday (my wife’s birthday), and a lot more on Sunday (my birthday). My reflux did not approve, but it was worth it.

Alcohol vs. Heart Rate: Oura Ring Data

Leaping down off the wagon like that gave me an opportunity to double check alcohol’s effect on sleep, so just for fun I put on my Oura ring and measured my heart rate. If you’re familiar with my Oura woes, I don’t take anything it measures seriously except heart rate, temperature, and HRV. It certainly can’t tell the difference between me lying in bed trying to sleep and me actually sleeping. But I do think it measures heart rate pretty well.

Here’s what the graphs look like. In each case I went to bed sober, and stopped drinking by 7pm, four hours before lights out.

Friday:

Saturday:

Sunday:

So whether I actually feel better or not, it’s really obvious that my heart prefers me to not drink at all. I mean, average HR 45, lowest 42, that’s pretty decent. Generally speaking, any night when I haven’t drunk any alcohol, it’ll average something below 50, and get down to 45 or below.

Just for fun: here’s what it looked like after I got accidentally shitfaced at my friend’s party. Last booze in about 4pm, I think.

What 100 Days Without Alcohol Really Changed

Putting aside the data inconsistencies, the genuine results are:

Positive effects

Major improvement in visceral fat
Lower LDL cholesterol
Overall waist reduction
Less irritability (confirmed by independent household authorities)
Significantly lower resting heart rate on sober nights

Little or no effect

Sleep quality (subjective)
Subcutaneous fat

Negative effects:

None.

So what am I going to actually do now?

I’d like to get my body fat percentage below 18. Here’s how I’ll approximate that:

1. Waist measurement down from 88 to 86cm.

2. Weight down from ~79kg to ~76kg.

Approach:

1. Restrict booze. Generally speaking, no drinking unless it’s a special occasion. Tuesday is not a special occasion.

2. Go slow-carb. It worked very well for me before, let’s try it again. Being careful to maintain protein intake, and continue with weight training, to preserve muscle mass.

3. Cycle on and off, cutting weight (which gets rid of fat and a bit of muscle), and bulking up (which adds muscle and a bit of fat).

4. Fast occasionally. I normally have about 15 hours between last calorie in at night and first in the morning anyway (just because it’s more comfortable for me). Increasing the fasting time to 18 hours is not hard, so I’ll think about doing that more often, with an occasional 24 hour fast, or even longer. I train too much to want to fast too often- I’m concerned about losing muscle mass.

4. Track weight, waist, and strength. If my waist is down and my strength is up, I’ll call that a success, whatever the scales or DEXA says.

December is not the month for this, so I’ll play around with various things as convenient, and get consistent and serious about it on January 2^nd. Another 100 days no booze, with a strict slow-carb diet (no starch, no sugar, lots of veg and protein), will take us to April 12^th. I will probably make exceptions to the no-booze thing, but only for very special occasions. There is a world of difference between two glasses of wine in a fancy restaurant every couple of months, and two glasses of wine before dinner every evening.

Final Thoughts on 100 Days No Booze Results

The headline takeaway is simple: Alcohol has a strong negative effect on my visceral fat, cholesterol, irritability, and sleeping heart rate.

It doesn’t magically melt fat off me, but it clearly improves a bunch of meaningful health indicators.

The basic idea behind all of my training and health related activities is this:

Find out what works for you, then do that.

Both of those components are hard. Healthcare professionals can tell you what the current-ish state of the science suggests should work for most people most of the time, but they aren't much good at targeting what works for you specifically. The only way to know what works for you is to try it, and track the results.

Then, having discovered that doughnuts make you fat, or alcohol is bad for you, or whatever it is, you have to figure out how to incorporate that insight into your daily life. That can be simple and easy, or it can be really hard, especially when it involves going against mainstream cultural expectations. Even if the intervention is simple, it may not be easy. I'm lucky in that this one was both simple and quite easy, but many others I've tried are a lot harder.

My book The Principles and Practices of Solo Training covers this approach in depth and detail. If you've enjoyed these alcohol posts, you'll probably enjoy that book. And we have a sale on until the end of the year: use the code GUYSBIRTHDAY25 for 25% off any digital product, and BIRTHDAYPRINT10 for 10% off any print product, at swordschool.shop.

I share this kind of thing on my newsletter quite often, so sign up below to stay informed.

Holiday Fun: 25% birthday discount on books and courses, and free trainalongs

27th November, 2025

I’ll be turning 52 on Sunday, and we’re celebrating in the usual way with a 25% discount on all digital products, with the code GUYSBIRTHDAY25. This works for all products (courses, subscriptions etc.) at courses.swordschool.com, and also for all digital products (ebooks, audiobooks, print-at-home decks etc.) at swordschool.shop

Digital products are great because they have negligible fixed costs- it doesn’t cost me money every time someone buys one. Print does, so I have to be careful about giving out too chunky discounts on print books. But: You can also get 10% off any print book (including the brand-new dagger book) with the code birthdayprint10 at swordschool.shop.

Also, Christmas is coming up, which is a lovely time for many, and a miserable time for some. And a total non-event for billions of people around the world. It falls on a Thursday this year, which is very convenient. I’ll be running my usual morning trainalongs on Wednesday 24th and Friday 26th, which you can find in the “support sword people” area of the swordpeople.com. That is behind a very small paywall. If you’d like to join us but don’t want to create a swordpeople account, or are short of cash, just email me and I’ll send you the zoom link (no need to justify your request in the email, just ask for the link).

The sessions are at 8.30am UK time. The session opens at 8.25, and we run for an hour, with a bit of time at the end for chat etc. It’s not a formal class, just an opportunity to do some good-for-you physical training. Some folk follow along with what I’m doing, some just do their own thing but in company, and others mix and match. Join us if you dare!

Here's a sample trainalong session. I've been doing these since lockdown, but am very slack about recording them, so this dates back a loooong time:

Such fun!
Newsletter subscribers have had access to these discounts for a week already, so if you want to stay in the loop and aren't already signed up, join us with the form below.

And stay tuned for a 100 days no booze update, expected end of next week.

Lessons from my 7-day data detox: on becoming a cat

16th October, 2025

I spent the first week of October on a data detox. No emails, no whatsapp, no socialz, no scrolling. It’s been a lovely mental break. My initial reason for trying this was to allow my inner visionary to be heard, as per this post.

The single biggest surprise is how little I missed it. I was really looking forward to it, and enjoyed the lack of distraction very much indeed. Days one and two were very relaxing. For reasons I can’t pin down, but which may be related to withdrawal, I was grumpy as hell for days three and four. Oddly though I didn’t have any urge to get online, so I don’t think it was withdrawal exactly. Then things perked up immensely on days 5-7, and I got a bunch of things done that I’ve been meaning to get round to. More on that below.

Table of Contents

Filling the Void

So what filled the void created by the data detox? That gaping chasm of boredom and ennui that our marvellous machines cover up with clicks and scrolling?

1. I’ve thought a lot. It’s actually nice to be back in my own head a bit more.

2. I’ve did a lot more actual sword practice, in addition to my usual physio/fitness/strength stuff.

3. Coincidentally (I think, because these were planned ages ago) I went to the actual theatre, and met friends for lunch in the pub (yes I’m still off booze, 50 more days to go), and been to a talk (given by Roland Allen, of The Sword Guy and A History of Thinking on Paper fame). All analogue, real people in a room together, offline goodness.

I should point out that I was not religious about this. I used my wife’s laptop to print out crosswords, and fired up my phone to be able to navigate to drop off my daughter at a friend’s house for a party (I don’t have a paper map of the area, which I should!). But outside some very sensible exceptions, I’ve kept the phone turned off, and did not check any messaging apps or email when I did turn it on. The computer was not turned on at all.

I finished making my mum’s birthday present, put a new base on my pell so it stops falling over when it’s windy (see the photo above), and rearranged my study such that I could get my point control wall target up (it needs a sturdy wall to hang on, and room in front and to the sides for footwork).

I also planned a new launch, thought about the overall structure of my business, and got a bunch of CEO stuff done. I don’t think my visionary woke up particularly, so I need to think about how to make that happen.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how we have all sorts of social rules and norms around other addictive behaviours, such as drinking and smoking. If someone offered you a glass of wine at 11am you might say “it’s a bit early for me”. Because these days it’s normal to avoid drinking during the day. Likewise smoking. It used to be everywhere, all the time. But now it would be very very rude to light up inside someone’s home without asking, and most smokers would automatically go outside.

But watch any TV show from the 80s and just about every rich person is having a drink at 10am, and everyone rich or poor is smoking indoors at all hours. These healthier rules around smoking and drinking are relatively new, and relatively unconnected with legislation.

I do well with rules if they’re my own. (I do much less well with other people’s rules.) Both phones and computers are incredibly useful. But they are inherently built for distraction. So here are my rules for using my computer and my phone.

Rules for the Computer

1. Be a cat. I’ve borrowed this from Jaron Lanier’s excellent 10 Arguments for Deleting All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Cats don’t try to please people. They just pursue their own agenda, and allow the people in their life to serve their needs. If a cat wants stroking, you’ll know. The computer belongs to me. It’s a critically important tool for writing books, editing video, running my business, and communicating with people.

But it’s been warped by the internet into also being a major source of distraction. So I will approach my computer the way a cat approaches the humans that feed it. I’ve always had all notifications turned the hell off, but that doesn’t stop me from getting distracted.

2. Decide what I want to do before waking it up. That could be work on the next book, or some critical business task like paying a freelancer, or emailing someone about something. Then do that thing first. After my week away I have a long list of things to do, including drafting this blog post, that comes ahead of checking my emails. Happy to report I’m following my own rules.

3. Unless I have a good reason, don’t open any communications app before 2pm. Exceptions include scheduled zoom sessions (running a trainalong or doing crosswords with my mum are both good reasons), or if I’m expecting a time-critical message about something actually important.

4. Turn off all comms apps at or before 5pm. Exceptions as per rule 3. And take at least one full day per week off all comms. I think probably Thursdays, which I generally keep free anyway.

5. Be a cat. It’s worth an extra rule to be reminded of the first one.

What do I want my Fondleslab Distraction Engine (aka “phone”) for?

There are many excellent things about the phone that I want to keep, that I missed during the data detox. In no particular order they are:

Camera
Podcast player
Music player
Sound recorder (when recording videos etc.)
Maps/navigation
Payments
Wallet for tickets, boarding passes, etc.
Calendar
The Sword People app for keeping in touch with my sword people and posting sword photos
Calculator
Notes app for when I don’t have a notebook or pen with me. Rare, but it happens.
StrengthLog app for tracking weights workouts
Family Whatsapp channel. I’d like to move it to Signal, but I don’t think we’d get everyone on board with it (my siblings, their kids, my kids, it’s actually quite a lot of people).
Some friends prefer Signal, so I have that for talking with them.
One dear friend, and my godson only really use Discord, so I have that too.

But other than those excellent things, why would I want to be continually distracted?

Rules for the Fondleslab Distraction Engine

1. Be a really fucking grumpy cat.

2. Delete all addictive apps. No games, nothing that makes me likely to scroll (Ebay, Vinted, Chrono24, etc.). No emails. I have the accounts still there in the system settings, but I’ve turned off the email function. That way if I need to be able to check email on my phone for some reason, it’s easy to turn back on, but it’s not on by default.

3. Turn off all notifications. All of them. Especially badges (those red things that flag the app's icon). I’ll check the apps when I want to. The phone still rings if you call me, but that’s it.

4. WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. are strictly friends and family only. I have SwordPeople for work-related messaging. (Feel free to sign up there if you want to be able to message me outside email.)

5. Switch off the phone completely for at least one full day per week. So e.g. turn it off in the evening, and not turn it on until the morning of the day after next.

Final Thoughts on the Data Detox

I’m also thinking about getting a new phone number, and relegating the current one to a no-data phone, so I can use it for two-factor authentication, and as my “business” number, and keep my other number entirely private, so only people I’ve actually given it to will have it. My current number is clearly on too many databases, given the number of spam calls and texts I get.

I’m not alone in fighting this fight. Useful resources are the aforementioned Jaron Lanier’s 10 Arguments. Also Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and for non-algo-poisoned tech solutions, the Creative Good forum has all sorts of options and suggestions. Once you have all this distraction-free time you'll need to learn to prioritise, so you may find my post about deciding what to focus on helpful.

It's worth explicitly stating that I welcome emails from my students, readers, friends, family, and even some newsletters and other things. Email isn't the problem. It's letting it spill out of a confined space to take over my brain that’s the problem. The same is true for messaging apps generally. I've broken the cycle of reflexively checking for anything new coming in with my seven days off, so now I need to keep that cycle broken. Or I'll end up having a (metaphorical) whisky and a cigarette for breakfast again.

Hi, I'm Guy. Welcome!

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