Blog - Guy Windsor

How to get started teaching historical martial arts

8th December, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Learning Swordsmanship

A very inexperienced Guy teaching class in 2001

Teaching can be daunting, especially for less experienced sword people. But the future of the Art entirely depends on people stepping up to lead classes. Eventually all the existing teachers will be dead- if we have no teachers coming up behind us, the whole glorious progress of the Art of Arms will falter and die. So it is very important that we lower the barriers to entry, making the process of becoming an experienced teacher as easy as possible to begin.

I do this by creating a very simple standard to live up to: are your students better off with you or without you? To start with, the teacher only needs to create a safe training environment for the students to practice in. That's it. You don't need to be particularly skilled, and certainly not more skilled than the students. You just have to be willing to take the responsibility of making sure the training environment exists, and is reasonably safe. Just doing that means the students are better off with you than without you. Job done.

Then when that’s comfortable, it would be nice for students to learn one thing per session that they didn’t know before. This requires you to know one thing more than they do. That may not actually be the case, in which case you need to know how to set up drills such that they can find out what they need to work on, and how to work on it.

It’s helpful to distinguish between teaching and coaching. Teaching is the process of adding breadth: showing the students something they didn’t know before (such as a new drill). Coaching is the process of adding depth: helping the students become better at doing something they already know.

It is much easier to teach than to coach, because it takes much less nuance in constructing the training environment.

A much more experienced Guy teaching a I.33 class in the Lonin loft.

The hardest thing for most teachers is to get out of the way and let students practice. This includes senior teachers handing over their classes to beginner teachers. It’s hard because you know that you could teach the class better. The students would improve faster. But put the long term benefit to the student body and to the Art ahead of the short term skill improvement in one group of students in one session. Over the long term, we need more teachers, and those same students who are getting a less perfect class today will be able to get great classes in the future, because the beginner teacher was give the chance to practice.

As you can probably tell, this is a very deep rabbit hole, and one which I have explored in depth and breadth for many years. I cover it in The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts, pages 197-231, and will be expanding my thoughts into an entire book, hopefully in the next year. In the meantime, you may enjoy my post on how to teach a basic class.

Seminar on Saturday: discover your unknown unknowns

2nd December, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Learning Swordsmanship

We all have gaps in our knowledge and skills. To a large degree, training in any martial art is a question of discovering what you should be practising next, and then practising it. The key is discovering the gaps and filling them, before a serious opponent discovers them for you.

These gaps can be in your breadth of knowledge (such as, you don't know how to deal with a particular attack), or your skill (you know perfectly well what you should do, but you just can't do it).

Especially for less experienced students, it can be difficult to know what questions to ask, what gaps to cover next, what skills to practice. I have a process for teaching this ability to choose the right gap to my students: it is an essential part of being truly self-directed. This process is essentially theory, and so is easily adapted to online learning. It is primarily a question of spotting gaps in the breadth of your knowledge, and spotting shallowness in the depths, and having criteria for prioritising them.

This class is a short summary of my approach, followed by a more lengthy question and answer session. I’ll run the first session on this topic on Saturday December 5^th at 3pm UK time. You can register for it here: https://bookwhen.com/swordschool

The class will run for 90 minutes, and tickets are £10. Free tickets will also become available tomorrow afternoon. This class is too useful to keep behind a paywall. If you can afford to support the work please do, but if you can't, that's ok, come anyway.

See you there!

Teaching online

24th November, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Learning Swordsmanship, Reflections

I have been teaching a lot over Zoom since the Coronavirus epidemic screwed my usual teaching schedule. The primary benefit is that people and groups who couldn’t afford to fly me out to teach them can zoom me in instead. But it comes at a cost: it is astonishingly tiring to teach through a screen. I’ve been thinking about why that would be, and have come up with the following thoughts:

1. There is much less personal interaction. The sound quality and lag times mean that you can’t talk naturally with the group. Everyone takes a turn to speak, and it is really hard to generate useful discussion. My classes are usually very interactive, but teaching online is much more like giving a presentation. It’s all on me, all the time.

2. It is very hard to read the students. So much of my job is feeling the room, adjusting what I’m teaching on the fly to take the students’ affect into account. If they are flagging a bit, I’ll ginger them up or slow things down; if they are over-challenged, I’ll ease off; if they are under-challenged I’ll up the complexity. 90% of the information I get from a class isn’t verbal. It’s the sound of their feet, or their blades, or their breathing. The pattern of movement across a group. Very very often, they say they want one thing, their bodies say something else, and the body is always right. But not online- most of that information is just not available so I’m left with the unreliable verbal communications only, and what I can see on the screen, usually a partial image on a dodgy webcam.

3. 90% of swordsmanship is learned from the person you’re crossing blades with. That can’t be done over the internet, so we’re left with the 10% of material that can be taught online. This is less true when the students have a training partner in the room with them; I can usually tell the partner what to do to create the environment the student I’m working with needs. But it’s very clunky compared to being there.

4. The computer itself is built as a distraction engine. I’m conditioned to use it to check email, check social media, play videos. It takes a small but consistent mental effort to not do that. This is a form of ego-depletion, a drip drip drain of executive function, making the whole process more tiring. My students deserve and get my undivided attention, but giving them that on a computer is much harder than in real life. To get real work done I usually turn everything internet-related off. But unplugging the internet would naturally bugger the zoom call. I’m thinking of having my zoom account on a separate profile on the computer, one with nothing else in it.

But, and it’s a huge but, it is getting easier, and I am getting better at it. At the end of every zoom class I teach, I ask for feedback on what could be done better. The students are having to think harder for longer to find things to critique, which is excellent.

You can find the current online class schedule here: https://bookwhen.com/swordschool

If you have a topic you’d like me to cover, and/or a specific time you’d like me to do it at, feel free to ask!

I've been thinking a lot about teaching over the last dozen years or so, and have put together an online course to help historical martial arts instructors teach better. You can find it here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/how-to-teach-historical-martial-arts-or-anything-else

Learning Rapier from the Workbooks

16th November, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Books and Writing

It is hugely satisfying for an author to see their work put to work. I received an email recently from Anthony Klon, who is using my Rapier Workbooks. He described how he's using the area for notes to make cross-referencing the steps of the Rapier Footwork form with the translation he's using.

I’ve been working through the Rapier workbooks and hit upon this idea. I was really struggling with having to flip back and forth between workbooks, scanning the TOC, then finding and reading a section and going back to Tom Leoni’s translation to see the original context. So it occurred to me to organize the footwork form like this. Every step in the form has 4 entries in this outline:
1) the action described in your text (eg, step, step, lunge, recover)
2) the terminology, if applicable (eg, the scannatura)
3) the plate in Capoferro where the technique can be found
4) the workbook volume and page number where the corresponding lesson on the technique may be found.

Now there’s far less flipping back and forth. If I get stuck or want to perfect a part, it’s easy to go straight to the plate or page for revision.

You can see the footwork form here:

Longsword Mechanics seminar, November 22nd 7pm UK time

11th November, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Learning Swordsmanship

Do you want to learn precise control over the sword, for enhanced speed, power, and the ability to deceive the opponent?

In this seminar we will cover some basic handling drills, then move on to the specifics of shortening the path the sword must take. Beginners require a long movement to generate speed and power, experts accomplish the same action in a much shorter path, which of course takes less time.
These skills apply to any weapon, but we will focus on the longsword, with applications from both Fiore and Liechtenauer.
The seminar will run from 7pm to 8.30pm UK time, and there will be time for questions etc built into the schedule.

I highly recommend watching the general mechanics seminar recording first:

https://vimeo.com/475021509/e974ae88fb

This seminar will take the concepts taught in the general mechanics seminar for granted, so please do watch it first.
The seminar Zoom meeting will start about 10 minutes beforehand. The class itself will start on time at 7pm, and end on time at 8.30, but I'll stay online to take questions and hang out for a while afterwards.

Please note that the time is 7pm UK, which is (for example) 5 hours ahead of EST.

You will need:

As much space to move in as you can reasonably manage.
A longsword or longsword simulator.
A practice partner is optional, but helpful.
Common sense, and a commitment to safe practice.

Reserve your place at https://bookwhen.com/swordschool

Tickets cost £10. Free tickets will become available on Thursday 19th. Lack of cash should not prevent anyone from learning.

Feel free to share this with anyone you think may want to improve their longsword skills.

That awful meme

2nd November, 2020
By Guy Windsor
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Reflections

There’s a sword meme going round the internet which features some self-important prick that can’t hold a sword properly and has the posture most commonly associated with a lifetime spent hunched over a porn site, and words along the lines of the following:

While you were out partying, I studied the blade.

While you were having pre-marital sex, I studied the blade.

While you were taking drugs, I studied the blade.

Now the enemy is at the gates, and you have the audacity to beg me for help?

This sort of fuckwittery boils my blood. It was clearly written by a fantasist who has zero knowledge of what actual swordspeople are actually like, and it is egregiously annoying because it calls my profession into disrepute. Especially the last line. What, exactly, does the original writer think a swordsman can do against threats in this modern age? And since when does mastering a particular skill entitle you to sneeringly withhold it from those who did other things? My doctor has never, not once ever, said to me “I spent years in medical school learning to heal the sick while you were fooling about with obsolete weaponry. Now you’re sick, and you have the audacity to come to me?”

And what’s with the horrible notion that training with blades requires some kind of hermity asceticism? It's unhistorical, unrealistic, and while a degree of temperance is required to train to a high level, there are entire branches of martial arts that include mind-altering practices of one form or another. And I'd bet money on the notion that a lot of people have trained to become proficient with the sword precisely to get laid.

So I’ve fixed it:

While you were out partying, I was too, because social interaction is very important. I also studied the blade.

While you were having pre-marital sex, I was too. Probably not with the incel that wrote the original version of this meme, but a good sex-life is very important for mental and physical health, and I’ve always been lucky in my choice of partners. Plus I also studied the blade.

While you were taking drugs, I was probably drinking. I also studied the blade, and sword practice is a great way to get over a hangover.

Now the enemy is at the gates, but unfortunately swordsmanship isn’t terribly useful these days. I have many friends though, so I can certainly call on soldiers, pilots, doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, plumbers, gardeners, farmers, writers, singers … please state the nature of your emergency so I can help you better? Because you’re a human being and thus entitled to whatever assistance I can reasonably offer you.

Less catchy, perhaps, but way better.

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