Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Archives for August 2020

What to read? Some healthy suggestions

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I read a lot. Most writers do. You may think I spend most of my time reading sword books, but it isn’t so. Probably the most important books I’ve read in the last year or so are entirely sword-free! My home is filled with books- and about half of them are in boxes in the loft- clearly we should have made one of the children sleep in the cupboard under the stairs and used one of the bedrooms as a library.

As you can see from this photo of one bookshelf in my study, I read on a wide range of topics, and I clearly have no idea how to organise a library. My current approach is to find a space on a shelf in which a new book can physically fit, and let my visual memory make finding the book possible. 

Much of the non-fiction I’m reading at the moment is to do with health in one form or another. As I see it, there are three pillars to physical health: sleep, movement, and food. Movement explicitly includes breathing.

Far and away the best book on sleep I’ve ever read is Why We Sleep, by  Matthew Walker. It’s a thorough description of the current scientific research on the subject, by a career scientist in the field, and includes a lot of actionable advice if you're having trouble sleeping. (Let me note here that all links are affiliate, which means I get paid a small fee if you buy the book, which costs you nothing but helps me keep the lights on. If that bothers you feel free to just search for the book by title and author.)

When it comes to food there are so many conflicting views on the subject. Some people still believe that dietary fat is bad for you! Probably the most important book I’ve read on the health implications of food is Personalized Medicine. It has lead me on a fascinating quest into the way my body reacts to certain foods. You can read more about that here. While on the subject of food, the best cookbook my wife and I have used in a very long time is Ian Haste’s The Seven Day Basket. Almost every recipe we’ve tried so far has been a family-wide hit: my younger daughter declared that the beef rendang we had the other night ought to be our Christmas dinner this year. 

Regarding movement, I regard all exercises as breathing exercises, and have done for a very long time. James Nestor’s new book Breath is an utterly unmissable overview of the subject, with in-depth examinations of a huge range of breathing styles and their effects. For a more complete review, see here.

And on the subject of health, ageing is becoming a more urgent interest as I near 50. The only book I’ve found worth reading on the subject (because it dives deep into the science of what’s actually happening at the cellular level as we age) is Lifespan, by David A. Sinclair. It’s excellent. If you want to know about rapamycin, mTOR, fasting, metformin, NMN, and a badgillion other ageing related things, read this book. It might literally add decades to your life.

Alright, a couple of martial arts books for you. 

Fear is the Mind Killer by Kaja Sadowski is essential reading for anyone running a club or teaching a class. It is an extraordinary resource, especially in the areas of creating the club culture you want, and in how to train for the real thing. I cannot recommend it too highly.

The Book of Martial Power by Steven J. Pearlman is also unmissable. It’s one of the very few martial arts books that goes deep into principles, and as such anyone training literally any martial art should read this book. It’s awesome.

And finally: a friend of mine is writing really fun thrillers starring an ex-porn star called Butch Bliss. I could describe the books at length, but why bother when you can get a free taste by joining his mailing list here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/pyx8j9tgfm If you like the novella he’s giving away, you’ll love the two novels in the series so far: Hidden Palms, and Snake Road. Just the thing for a long flight (back when aeroplanes were a thing) or indeed for taking your mind off the plague. 

If you're enjoying reading my writing about books, then there are many more such posts on this blog! Here are all the ones I could find, there are probably more. My command of “topic” and “tag” is not what it could be.

7 great martial arts-as-a-path books 

My top 3 non-fiction books of 2013

5 essential non-martial arts books every martial artist should read 

Fiore scholars, you must have this book. A review of Flowers of Battle

Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War (Book Review)

A Gentleman’s Guide to Duelling: Review

Making History review of my father's More Sherlock Holmes than James Herriot

The Ill-Made Knight, well made indeed.

Let’s illuminate Invisible Women this lead to me starting a podcast

How to Sharpen Pencils: an Appreciation

Awesome fiction: Traitor’s Blade, by Sebastien de Castell

The best book on armour, ever?

14 good reasons why you should buy the new I.33

Book Review: The Essence of Budo

 

The Sword Guy episode 10: Tomas Suazo on armour, HMA in South America, and the perfect sword for Marozzo

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My guest this week is Tomas Suazo, a historical fencer and armourer from Chile. I first met Tomas when he came to train with me in Finland in 2014. He did a Grand Tour of European historical fencing clubs, before returning home to run his own. He's a professional maker of protective equipment for HMA, as well as what I think of as “proper armour”. You can find his work at Broken Anvil: https://www.facebook.com/brokenanvilarmourshop/

You can find our conversation here: Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts from.

Book Review: Breath, by James Nestor.

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I’ve been practising various forms of breathing exercises for about 30 years now. They are the foundation of all my training, to the point that literally every exercise of any kind is always first and foremost a breathing exercise for me. You can see that in this recording of last Friday's trainalong class: the topic is hips, but it's all breathing really:

I’ve written a short training guide on breathing (which is included in Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, and created a whole online course for it (bundled in with the Solo course). And I still learned a lot from James Nestor's Breath. Go buy it, read it, it’s one of those no-brainer must-reads. (All book links are affiliate, so I get a small commission if you buy them. It costs you nothing.)

In essence, the book covers Mr Nestor’s odyssey through the sometimes strange, sometimes wonderful, always interesting, worlds of breathing practice, starting with that age-old question- nose or mouth?

Of course you should breathe through your nose. Practically no exceptions, if the nose is available. But he has his nose plugged and does mouth-only breathing for ten days to find out what the consequences are- and they are really, profoundly, horrible. This is in the best tradition of self-experimentation. He has suffered so we don’t have to.

Unlike most books on the subject, and unlike most practitioners, Mr Nestor also looks at sinus and airway architecture and its importance for good breathing. He takes his study into dentist’s offices, the catacombs under Paris (looking at old skulls), and goes into detail about why our jaws and palates are smaller than they should be, and what to do to change that. Fun fact: though it’s often stated that you can’t add bone mass over 30, you absolutely can add bone mass in your face at pretty much any age. Nestor proves it by actually doing it, with medical scans before and after.

I won’t go into all of the breathing practices he does cover, suffice to say it’s a lot, and some I’d never heard of before. He highlights the work of people like Katharina Schroth, and Alexandra David-Néel, who have been mostly forgotten now but did amazing things with breath as recently as last century. Most interestingly for me, he goes in depth into Tummo breathing, the origin of the Wim Hof method which I practice most days. 

I do have three minor caveats. 

Firstly, he does the classic page-turner trick of getting half-way into a story then switching to another story, before circling back. It’s annoying to me, because I didn’t need the extra incentive to keep reading. This is a generally a well written, well researched, and utterly fascinating book about one of my core interests. It didn’t need the help. I understand why editors insist on such things but I found it intrusive.

Secondly, though he does describe a lot of anthropological studies and a lot of European, Russian, Indian, Tibetan and American breathing experts and practices, he skips right over the Chinese! Qigong gets a passing mention on page 188, but that’s it. It’s an odd lacuna. It feels to me like there’s a chapter missing.  Perhaps he’s working on a follow-up volume dedicated entirely to qigong? 

Thirdly, and most importantly, you need to watch out for the condition I think of as “popular science-itis”, which can be summarised as a) making unverifiable claims, b) imprecise use of language leading to misleading statements, and c) overstating the evidence.*

For examples:

a) describing a breathing technique as “a calming practice that places the heart, lungs, and circulation into a state of coherence” (p 221). What, exactly, is that supposed to mean? And how do you test it? There are similar descriptions of unverifiable effects elsewhere in the book, but to Mr Nestor’s credit he usually sticks to more verifiable/falsifiable statements. 

b) “The body has switched from anaerobic to aerobic respiration”, when what I think he means is that specific muscle fibres have switched: the body as a whole (and especially the brain) would have been generally respiring aerobically the whole time. 

c) Extrapolating more general conclusions than a specific study might warrant, or stating things in too-conclusive terms, such as “mouthbreathing was making me dumber”, a remark based on a single study done in rats regarding problem solving, and one in humans regarding oxygen supply to one part of the brain (p30). As a description of subjective experience it would be fine (“I felt that mouthbreathing was making me dumber”), or a more qualified statement to introduce the interesting research would also have been fine (“mouthbreathing may have been making me dumber”). 

He’s generally very good about such things, and he is having to balance telling a gripping story (that’s the “popular” bit in “popular science”) with getting the science across. This is not an easy trick to pull off, and he does an excellent, if not perfect, job. As with anything health-related, take what you read with a grain of salt, and go read the original studies before betting your life on their conclusions. 

But, and this is a huge but: there are so many things in the book that every human should know, and so many practices that you can simply and safely try for yourself, that you’d be a fool not to read it. Go! Even if you think you're already an expert, go. And if you know nothing about breathing, go still faster. I'm certain you won't regret it.

*and let the record state that I fall into the same three traps rather more than I should!

The Sword Guy episode 9: Siobhan Richardson

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Today's podcast episode is with Siobhan Richardson. You may recognise her from the cover of my latest book:

She's an actress, singer, martial artist, stage combat director, among her many skills. We've been friends for quite a while, as you can probably tell from the tone of the interview. She even gets me to talk a bit about shoes!

Siobhan Richardson photo © Dahlia Katz

You can find her online here:

Instagram: @fighteractress

You can find our conversation here: Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts from.

Information Hygiene

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My parents watch the 10 o’clock news every night. While I was staying with them recently I took that as my cue to wander upstairs and do my evening stretching and breathing routines, and read before bed. I just don’t need to see interviews with people complaining about lockdown restrictions, or the latest speculation about a vaccine, or what happened on a sports field somewhere. This got me thinking about what information I do allow in, and why. It seems that I categorise any piece of information as belonging in one or more of these five categories, listed here in order of importance:

1. Connection. Finding out a friend has had a baby, or chatting with another friend about books we’ve read, or catching up with my family. This is the most important category because it is the one that most directly leads to good mental health outcomes. Without connections, we go mad. Or at least, I do. Sure, catching up in person is better- tribe are the people you eat with, generally speaking. But many of my friends live on other continents, and one of the silver linings of lockdown has been that the number of distant friends I have regular online catch-ups with has gone from one to four. This doesn’t include friends who are also sword colleagues, so the real number is actually higher. Social media scrolling absolutely does not constitute connection. It has to be real-time interaction with a single human being or a small group. This category is usually very positive, but does also include being in the loop when a friend or family member is ill, has died, or some other bad thing has happened to them. That would make it also fit into the next category, action, because it would normally trigger some kind of response: sending a card, going to a funeral, sending a message of support, or somesuch.

2. Action. Am I going to act on this data? This is the broadest category, and can include everything from a weather forecast (what do I wear? Do we go to the beach?), to my swordsmanship research (how should I parry that?), to that youtube video I watched the other day when I had to change a headlight bulb on my car and didn’t know how. If knowing this thing means I may change what I’m doing, it counts. I check the NHS corona virus data every now and then, to establish the current risk level for myself. I act on that information. So this category is stricter and narrower than the next, positive curiosity, and is the one most likely to include sad, difficult, or frightening information. These first two categories are the only ones in which negative, unpleasant, information is ok. I want to know if something has gone badly for someone I personally care about, or regarding an issue I’m actually going to act on in some meaningful way. But I do not need to expose myself to reams of bad news just to feel like I’m staying “informed”. “Informed” about what? There is only so much data you can take in at any one time- might as well make sure it’s important, useful, or interesting.

3. Positive curiosity. Am I interested, and do I care? I first wrote just ‘curiosity’, but then realised that doom-scrolling could be counted in there, and it absolutely isn’t. It only includes the things you want to know. Curiosity is related to the next category, ‘Entertainment’, because it’s fun to find stuff out for its own sake. For instance, did you know that book sizing is based on calves and goats? Originally a single piece of vellum (thin rawhide from said calf or goat), folded in half once and trimmed, would be a folio (i.e. a folded piece). That’s a really big book. Fold a folio in half, and you get a quarto (a quarter), which is about A4 or US letter size. So one piece of vellum (or more commonly paper these days) has eight individual page sides written or printed on it. Fold a quarto in half and you get an octavo (eighth). That’s about the size of a modern paperback. Of course there was (and still is) no real standardisation, and most modern books aren’t built of stitched-together quires (groups of folded paper or vellum) any more, and with modern paper sizes you can literally have any size you want. But if you’ve ever wondered why a big book is about 11 inches tall, and a normal book about 11 inches wide when open, that’s why. I’m guessing a lot of my readers knew that already, because we’re not just sword nerds, a lot of us are book nerds too. Bookbinding is a rabbit hole I can dive happily down for hours at a time.
My current blood-sugar experiments counts as both Action and Curiosity- I am changing some things about what I eat (action) but I’m also simply curious to find out what is really happening when ice-cream hits blood stream.

4. Entertainment. The category also includes tv shows, movies, etc. It’s the least important category by a mile, though it can overlap with curiosity. Uri Tuchman’s YouTube channel is my current go-to curious entertainment. He’s very funny, and absurdly skilled, yet oddly klutzy at times. Most importantly, he seems like a very nice man to spend time with.

Have a look at this, for one glorious example:

And thanks to watching his videos I’ve started adding much more metal work to my craft repertoire. Including making this little sword, hot-forged from a nail, and furnished with brass and walnut (photo is of an early stage). So some entertainment also leads to action.



The question is always: does knowing this thing make me more connected to people I care about? Or am I going to act on it? Or am I actually curious? Or is it entertaining? If it is no to all of those, I just don’t want it to impinge on my consciousness. It fits in the final category:
5. Everything else. Everything in this category can be safely ignored. There is absolutely no need to watch the news to find out that there’s something major happening: you always find out eventually, and it is practically never time-critical: if it were, the news is probably too late. Just ask any investor- if you’re making your investment decisions based on the news, you’re already way too late. If you’re contemplating a course of action, by all means do some research- data that was irrelevant before is now in the ‘action’ category.
There is no need to fear missing out on something good. You almost always find out anyway, whether you want to or not, because we live in an age where we are simply bombarded by information all the time. Filtering out the stuff that is just unnecessary stress does mean that you may occasionally miss a particularly funny cat video- but should you ever feel the need for a funny cat video, you can just go look for them. I apply this information filter everywhere- especially in my email inbox. If I’m getting emails I’m not interested in, or am not planning to act on, or do not lead to connection, or are not entertaining, then I unsubscribe (feel free to do the same if you’re on my list and my emails have fallen out of the four useful categories), or just delete. Here’s a Venn diagram that may be helpful:

All of this is yet another way of keeping a healthy focus on my area of control, and a weather eye on my area of interest.


If you’ve found this useful, please share it, and feel free to leave a comment. If not, please let me know why in the comments here: I don't usually see anything on social media platforms- having read this post, you probably know why!

The Sword Guy episode 8: Roland Warzecha

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I first met Roland Warzecha (also known as Dimicator) at the first Swordfish event, in Malmö in 2006, and we have been friends and colleagues ever since. He has built a first-class reputation in the fields of I.33 sword and buckler research and Viking sword and shield combat. He is a graphic designer by profession (he consulted on the card design for Audatia), and produces extraordinarily well presented research on sword design and related topics in his 800+ patreon posts.

In our wide-ranging conversation we discuss how he got started in the sword world, his early training influences, Viking sword design, and many other things. Specific links: we mention the Berlin Buckler Bouts, and historical sword hilt manipulations.

You can find our conversation here: Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts from.