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Category: Training & Practice

How historical martial artists can use tournaments: a case study

Stephan giving Guy Windsor a statuette prize for teaching a class in the worst time slot at the Torneo di Spada hema tournament
Receiving the prize for “because someone had to teach the slot”.

I'm not known as a tournament fencer these days. Indeed it's been well over 20 years since I last officially competed. But one of the great benefits of interviewing so many people on The Sword Guy is that they spark ideas in me that then get acted on. My conversation with Martin Hoeppner included a lengthy discussion of tournament rulesets, and cemented my pre-existing opinion that his club holds great events (I’ve taught at their Swords of the Renaissance four years in a row). A few weeks later I interviewed Maciej Talaga about an academic article he wrote on medieval physical culture, and we got talking about the benefits of tournaments for historical martial artists.

This got me really thinking… I have a decent amount of tournament experience from sport fencing in the 80s and early 90s, but the last time I entered a tournament was in (if I recall correctly) 2003. It was a rapier tournament, in Italy, and I won it. But I had been a professional instructor for two years by this point. If I win, so what? Being a competent fencer is part of my job. If I don’t, then what does that say about my right to teach?

Bear in mind this was a very, very, long time ago.

There are some major equipment issues with modern tournaments: most don’t allow steel gauntlets (I absolutely will not use any of the synthetic gauntlets currently on the market, for the simple reason that they prevent me from holding my sword correctly), and most probably wouldn’t allow my That Guy’s Products mask. In situations where cuts to the head with a heavy weapon are likely, anything built on a fencing mask foundation are simply inadequate.

I understand that creating equipment requirements for a tournament is a nightmare job for the organisers; it’s much easier if you can insist on established brands and models. But the restriction on steel gauntlets extends back to well before the time that companies were making synthetic gauntlets, and organisers were requiring things like lacrosse gloves because “steel gauntlets are dangerous”. Which in an activity that involves swinging steel bars at people’s heads seems at best misguided.

(I think I need to do a deep dive into sparring gear for longswords and other heavier swords… interested?)

I’d heard about the Torneo di Spada through attending Swords of the Renaissance, and checked with them that my mask and gauntlets were allowed. They are!* And they very kindly lent me some of the extra bits of kit (such as forearm guards) that I don’t have. They also asked me to teach a class on the Sunday afternoon, which made the whole thing even easier to approach.

I flew in to Berlin on Friday night, and on Saturday geared up and got stuck in. The first day was sidesword. This was perfect for me because I’m not a sidesword instructor. I haven’t taught a class in Bolognese fencing since maybe 2007, so I could go into it with no particular expectations. My goals were simple:

1. to break the seal on my tournament fencing,

2. evaluate my current level of training,

3. and, most importantly, to embody the spirit of the Art of Arms.

Bolognese Sidesword Tournament

How does one embody the spirit of the Bolognese Art of Arms? In the 16th century duels were very often public affairs. Your reputation is on the line, as well as your skin. The most important thing is to fence boldly.**

The ruleset was simple: hits to the head score 3 points, to the lower leg 2 (hence the need for shin guards), and anywhere else only 1. This is to reflect the opinion of Antonio Manciolino in his 1531 Opera Nova, in which the author writes that the head is the most noble target (a common opinion at the time), and that the lower leg should count higher because it’s so hard to hit without getting hit yourself.***

Every bout consisted of three scoring passes, so the maximum possible points in a bout was 9.

The twist was that the ranking is primarily based not on the points, but on how many passes you survive untouched. Winning 9-3, where you get 3 points in every pass and your opponent gets one, is useless; it’s better for your ranking to win 3-0.

A tournament-minded fencer will then be very cautious, and if they can’t stop the attack, at least go for a double.

To my mind though, to properly embody the spirit of the art, I needed to march in and hit them in the head, with style and control, but absolutely no dicking about at the edge of measure trying to not get hit. So that’s what I did.

The results? In my pool of 8, I had 7 bouts (21 passes), and scored 37 points, of which 33 were from hits to the head. But I had only 5 clean passes. That put me 21st out of 25 fencers. (Where the ratio of clean passes was the same, ranking was decided on points.)

I was delighted. My points per bout were the highest overall (37 out of 7, so 5.3). The next best was 38 out of 8 bouts, so 4.8. The next highest number of head hits was 7 to my 11. And several people complimented me on my fencing style.

Of course, if it was the points that counted, not the clean passes, the other fencers would have been motivated to go for head shots too, they would probably have scored a lot higher: the comparison isn’t really fair, but it is illustrative.

The Rapier Tournament

The second day was the rapier tournament. My goal was the same: to embody the spirit of the art. But the art was different. When it comes to rapier, I’m a Capoferro man, so the year is 1610, the duel is private, the top priority is going home in a whole skin. Fencing to first blood is fine: murder is an option not an obligation. So my fencing was totally different. Not just the style, but also the incentives.

The clean passes ranking was the same. Points were scored so that thrusts to the head or body were 3 points, cuts to the head 2, and cuts or thrusts anywhere else just one.

Fencers could choose rapier, or rapier and dagger, but they had to agree (so, both fencers had the same weapons). I always gave my opponent the choice, because I want their best game. In the end I think I used a dagger in three of my bouts.

In the qualifying pools I had 9 bouts (27 passes) and scored 19 clean passes, so a 70% success rate. I only scored 42 points, of which only 5 hits were to the head. This put me at the top of the rankings for all 30 fencers (the next best was 63%), but lots of fencers scored more points than me.

I conclude from this that the clean-passes ranking system rewards a private-duel mindset and approach.

Safety First

Unfortunately I wasn’t careful enough with one of my opponents. I knew he was wild, but after the halt was called he was chambered to cut me in the head. I stopped at the halt, and so didn’t parry his full-force horizontal cut to the right side of my head. As I was not expecting heavy head cuts in a rapier pool, I was wearing my regular fencing mask (it’s a bit better for face thrusts), with the usual HEMA overlay. This is totally inadequate to deal with that kind of blow, and he rung my bell. He also got a red card.

I sat down for a bit, and thought about my options. I had no obvious signs of concussion: vision and balance were fine. My last three opponents were all relative beginners, and not prone to hard hitting, and I didn’t want to drop out, so I fenced them very carefully (I got three clean passes in all three bouts).

There was about half an hour before the pools all finished up and the rankings to go on to the next round were announced. At the end of that time, over an hour after the blow, my head still hurt.  When it comes to brain injury a second hit in the same place is orders of magnitude more dangerous than the first one. And the “champions pool” would have no easy fights in which I could be reasonably certain to prevent my opponent from catching me in the same place. If I had a student in that situation I would not let them continue, so I withdrew.

The organisers and my fellow fencers were all entirely understanding and supportive of my decision. And I should say here explicitly that there was no malice or bad sportsmanship involved in the situation. I should have recovered under cover, not just stopped dead.

I should also say that none of the three medal winners were in my pool, so it could be that I would have ranked less well if I’d had stronger opponents. I don’t want you to think that coming first in the qualifying pool means terribly much. Had I continued I probably had a 50% shot at a medal.

Fitness

At the end of my first bout on the first day I was breathing quite hard. This was odd, because the bout wasn’t that challenging or athletic. It could only be tournament pressure. This was excellent! It meant I had a chance to practice controlling my level of arousal. I cycled in some breathing exercises, and got my breathing and heart rate back down to reasonable levels, and had no fitness difficulties at all for the rest of the weekend.

I could feel my thighs and shoulders a little bit on Sunday morning, but nothing significant.

More critically, my recently-recovered knees were fine, and so were my back and neck. So it seems that my physical conditioning is working really well. Hurrah!

The only point of stiffness or soreness on the Monday morning after the whole weekend was over, was the front of my ankles. A completely weird place to feel a bit of fencing, so I’ll try to figure out what caused that.

I’m being extremely cautious about my head. No alcohol (which I’m off at the moment anyway), and I won’t engage in anything where I’m likely to be hit in the head for a good long while. A minor head trauma is like priming your immune system for anaphylaxis. You have to avoid the stimulus if you don’t want a severe response.

The Tournament Fencer

Quite a few of the fencers there were clearly in it for the tournament. For them, winning the tournament itself was the goal. Medals matter. This generates a fencing style that is like a cross between sports epee and a bit of kendo, with lots of jigging about at the edge of measure and a very fast tag with the sword.

You can tell the competitors because they ask questions about the rules (what exactly counts as stepping out of the ring? Does my foot have to touch the ground? The whole foot? What if it’s just my heel?). They also use their ‘video challenge’ right. In the finals, video challenges were allowed, one per fencer per bout. If the challenge was successful you can challenge again. This means that if you disagree with the judges, you can, in effect, argue with them.

To a tournament fencer, it really does matter who gets the points. It’s what they are there for. To lose a medal because the judge made a mistake would be intolerable.

I would die in a pit of fire before I ever issued a video challenge. If I failed to hit my opponent with such clarity and in such obvious control of their weapon that the blind, drunk, biased-against-me judge who has been bribed by the opposition,** still has to give it to me, then I don’t deserve the point. “Bad” judging (as in judging you disagree with) is part of the tournament challenge. The greater the challenge, the greater the learning opportunity.

It’s really useful to have people like that to fence against, because they are usually very good at hitting you, and in ways you may not expect because they look different to the canonical style. The hit is always right. If you fail to parry, that’s on you. Also, seeing how incentives affect behaviour allows you to learn to predict some of that behaviour. Another useful learning opportunity.

It’s illustrative of the difference that, while I think I won my first bout on Saturday 7-4, and I can work out some of my clean-pass scores, I don’t actually know what my scoring was in any of the bouts. I don’t think I looked at the scoreboard more than half a dozen times in the whole weekend. Because the points aren’t relevant to my aims.

This is not virtue. There is nothing wrong with being a tournament fencer, who needs to track their score because it matters. I’m just playing a different game.

Final thoughts

Firstly, thanks to Stephan, Anna, Martin, and the rest of the Schildwache Potsdam team. Especially those noble souls who gave up their weekend to judged and score. It’s a huge amount of work putting on a tournament like this, and you all made many young fencers very happy, and one old instructor too.

Secondly, thanks to all my opponents over the weekend. I hope you enjoyed fencing me as much as I enjoyed fencing you. I do wish I’d kept a record of everyone I fenced, but I failed to. If you recall our bouts, feel free to remind me either in the comments or by email.

Thanks also to Malleus Martialis for sending me a delicious sidesword at very short notice. I only signed up for the tournament in mid-December, then realised my old sidesword was not fit for modern competition use. So I contacted Eleonora at Malleus, and a shiny new sword was waiting for me when I got there.

One interesting quirk of the way the tournament was constructed was that fencers in each pool had to find their own opponents, and keep doing so until you’d fenced everyone in your pool. This means that your first interaction with your opponents is face to face, unmasked, and arranging a match together. I didn’t notice it at the time, but chatting with Stephan afterwards it was clear that this contributed something to the feeling of the event. We weren’t fencing against anonymous numbers. We were fencing our colleagues, peers, and friends.

Overall, I’m delighted by the results. I went there to play my game: to use the tournament environment to measure and develop my historical fencing skills against motivated and resistant opponents. Most particularly, to not get sucked in to the competitive fencing mindset, where scoring touches according to the rules is the only consideration.

There was one pass in the whole weekend where I decided to play tournament. In one of my rapier bouts it seemed that the only thing the judges could see was incidental arm touches. Bending my sword on my opponent’s chest was literally invisible. So in the last pass I flicked my point under my opponent’s guard from the edge of measure. Sure enough, point to me. Ugh.

So I stopped that and went back to embodying the Art of Arms as best I know how.

Notes

*The organisers have asked me to mention that “we allow steel gloves only under circumstances where we, as organisers, can be absolutely sure that they are of proper quality, well maintained, free of burrs and sharp edges, and without loose rivets.”

** For example,  Leonard Eckstein Opdycke’s translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Book 1, paragraph 21: “ “Moreover I deem it very important to know how to wrestle, for it is a great help in the use of all kinds of weapons on foot. Then, both for his own sake and for that of his friends, he must understand the quarrels and differences that may arise, and must be quick to seize an advantage, always showing courage and prudence in all things.

Nor should he be too ready to fight except when honour demands it; for besides the great danger that the uncertainty of fate entails, he who rushes into such affairs recklessly and without urgent cause, merits the severest censure even though he be successful.

But when he finds himself so far engaged that he cannot withdraw without reproach, he ought to be most deliberate, both in the preliminaries to the duel and in the duel itself, and always show readiness and daring. Nor must he act like some, who fritter the affair away in disputes and controversies, and who, having the choice of weapons, select those that neither cut nor pierce, and arm themselves as if they were expecting a cannonade; and thinking it enough not to be defeated, stand ever on the defensive and retreat,— showing therein their utter cowardice. And thus they make themselves a laughing-stock for boys, like those two men of Ancona who fought at Perugia not long since, and made everyone laugh who saw them.”

“And who were they?” asked my lord Gaspar Pallavicino.

“Two cousins,” replied messer Cesare.

Then the Count said:

“In their fighting they were as like as two brothers;”

*** Specifically (in Jherek Swanger’s translation):

[40] Of two playing together, he who strikes in response is more praiseworthy than the one who strikes the first blow, because he reveals himself sooner to become enraged than to lose vigour after the received hit.

[41] It is not licit after the received blow to make more than one response stepping forward with a crossing step; the reason being that one must do well with all of one’s wit, since with that one can recover honour.

[42] The blow to the head, considering the excellence of that member, counts for three; and the blow to the foot is taken for two, having regard for the difficulty of making it so low.

[43] A valorous player is he who redoubles his blows.

****Just to be clear, the judges were of varying levels of experience and skill, but were all wearing any necessary eyewear, sober, honest, and unbiased to the point of spending endless amounts of time discussing what exactly happened because they really, really, wanted to be fair. And the only way to get skilled, experienced, judges is to give less-skilled, less-experienced judges the opportunity to practice. I have no complaints, and much respect for their time and effort.

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Liechtenauer’s 12 Hauptstucke for the Longsword

German longsword

In July I flew to Kansas to shoot video with Jessica Finley. I originally intended to just get the material for my medieval Italian wrestling course, but when I saw this amazing mural on Jessica's salle wall, I was hit by a really good idea- why not use this memory-tree of Liechtenauer's 12 hauptstucke (“chief pieces of the art”) as a course plan?

12 hauptstucke mural

Jessica is one of my oldest sword friends, and a highly respected colleague. We first met at a Western Martial Arts workshop event in about 2007. She was my first choice for a podcast guest (and has been back on the show twice since then). She started out as Christian Tobler’s student, and used the training he gave her to develop her own areas of expertise, notably in medieval German wrestling. She wrote the book Medieval Wrestling, published in 2014, which was one good reason why I shot my own medieval wrestling course with her. And she has her own way of organising and interpreting Liechtenauer’s longsword material, based on Liechtenauer’s own categorisation of the hauptstucke.

You can find the course here.

We have quite different teaching styles, as you can see in this video where she teaches the guard Ochs:

I think it’s important to expose your students to other instructors, and this is no less true in online courses as it is in person. When I ran my school in Helsinki, we averaged 3-4 visiting instructors per year.
But there is a very small overlap between the quite large group of instructors whom I would deem worthy to teach my students, and the much smaller group who have the skills to produce a course like Medieval German Longsword: the Hauptstucke of Johannes Liechtenauer. To be clear- Jessica herself doesn’t have the technical background to produce a course either (though she is solidly in the first group, and indeed taught a seminar for my students in Helsinki in 2015). But I do, and we had the time, the space, and the very clearly organised system that you need for producing a course, when I was over in Kansas in July this year.
My part in this course includes directing, producing, editing, and providing the Fiore perspective in each section, so the course itself is very much a collaboration. But every bit of Liechtenauer interpretation is 100% Jessica.
Here’s the next video in the sequence: Thrusting from Ochs and Pflug:

The course is available here
See you on the course!

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Creating a Physical Practice

We have to move.

If a shark stops swimming it dies- and if we stop moving it doesn’t take long before the problems mount up. We can get away with it for a bit longer than sharks, but sooner or later the bill comes due.

Swords are cool- cool enough to get people who have never even considered taking up a physical activity for fun before to actually start training. There are huge long-term health benefits to regular exercise, pretty much regardless of what that exercise is.

But no historical martial art is optimised for long-term health. It can’t be: the immediate needs of surviving the sword fight are more important than the possibility of eventually developing knee problems or back pain. 

The specific ranges of motion required by a given sword fighting style may be quite extreme (such as in a rapier lunge), but they will never be comprehensive: in no style ever do you do a gentle forward stretch with a curved back, or indeed arch as far back as you can sensibly go, or even just touch your heel to your arse to stretch your quads. Those ranges of motion are good for us, but not included in the martial arts themselves. 

I intend to be swinging swords around in various historical manners for decades to come, and I’m already 48. It is therefore necessary to have a physical practice aimed at filling in the gaps, and keeping this carcase in sufficiently good shape that I can be whacking my friends over the head with blades when I’m 90.

I also need to be able to teach my students how to do the same thing- and there’s the rub. Every body is different, and so every training regime should be tailored to the individual. And every body changes over time- ideally getting fitter and stronger, but at least not deteriorating any faster than we can help. Which means that you can’t just learn a routine now and stick with it forever, if you want the best results for the least effort.

I cover the fundamentals of how to train in my book The Principles and Practices of Solo Training and we follow those principles in class. But the book doesn’t include much in the way of specific exercises, because it was intended to lay out the principles, not cover every possible practice. The book will tell you how to train, and how to prioritise your training time, but it doesn’t tell you whether you should be doing push-ups or lunges right now.

To create our practice we need a comprehensive suite of exercises to select from, and the skill to choose from that suite wisely. We also need to know what it is we are training for at any given time. Here are some possibilities:

  • Pre-hab. Long-term injury prevention through movement, range of motion work, breathing and strength training. This is perhaps 50% of all my training.
  • Conditioning. Increasing our strength, speed, range of motion, or other attribute, through exercises of various kinds. This is about 40% of my training.
  • Warming up and warming down: preparing for a specific kind of movement (such as strength training, rapier footwork practice, a longsword tournament bout, or any other high-intensity activity), and promoting recovery afterwards. You may need to warm up for pre-hab or conditioning, of course.

A specific exercise such as an overhead press, or a push-up, or a hamstring stretch can be used in all three of these situations- but how we use it will differ. 

Structuring a Training Session

I run a Trainalong training session over Zoom three mornings a week, and usually structure them like so:

Section One: warm-up.

1. Running a diagnostic. Gentle joint rotations from toes to fingers, with a few squats and some gentle range of motion work. This tells me whether I need to pay attention to a specific area, and whether the session I had in mind is likely to be a good idea.

2. Full range of motion of the spine

3. Shoulder stability work

Section Two: conditioning

Focusing on my own areas of weakness, especially forearms.

1. Some kind of strength work, often bodyweight or kettlebells

2. Leg stability work such as seven-way legs, or kicking practice

3. Forearm conditioning

Section Three: skills practice

1. Some kind of footwork

2. Some kind of weapon handling (though often disguised as stick conditioning drills or bladebell exercises). These are often combined with the footwork, of course.

3. And/or breathing training, such as the Breathing Form.

Section Four: recovery

1. Some breathing

2. Some stretching, especially of the legs

3. Forearm and leg massage (which you may be familiar with from my free Human Maintenance course)

4. A very short meditation

5. Deliberately finishing.

Seeing it broken down like that doesn’t reflect the experience of it. The sections will blend into each other, and overlap- we may intersperse arm weights with footwork, for example. I very often include planks and other “core” work in with the spine range of motion or hip/knee stability exercises. The full-body survey at the beginning and the warm-down ending sequence tend to be quite consistent. I also adjust the training depending on my own health and current needs, and incorporating any requests that the students bring up on the day. 

Some of the weird stuff we do sometimes includes jaw relaxation exercises, toe yoga, and finger dexterity drills. 

I’ve attached a fairly comprehensive list of the exercises we do as a pdf below. Be warned, it’s just a list, and “Granny’s Scarf” may not mean anything to you just yet. But it should give you an idea of what I mean by ‘comprehensive’. 

What about the skill to choose wisely from the list?

That is primarily a matter of mindset. If you go into a session with the intention of finding out what your body needs, and then carefully doing that, you will probably avoid injury, and certainly become better at listening to your body. As every body is different, I encourage my students to adapt or adjust what we’re doing to suit them. I may be recovering from an injury or illness, and be doing some gentle recovery work when we’re twenty minutes in- you may need to be doing push-ups or kettlebells while I’m resting. While the class is doing Turkish Get-ups, a student with a knee problem may be doing her prescribed rehab exercises.

Levels of Difficulty

Every exercise can be done at various levels of difficulty. Let’s take the humble push-up for example:

1. Knees on the ground, go down an inch.

2. Knees on the ground, work up to going all the way down.

3. One leg extended

4. Full push-up position, hold

5. Working up to a full basic pushup

6. Different hand positions- three knuckle, two knuckle, one knuckle, prima, seconda, quarta, hands wide, long, staggered, etc.

7. Going for more repetitions

8. Slow push-ups (eg 30 seconds down, 30 seconds up)

9. Plyo push-ups, eg clap push-ups, or push-up-twisting-squat-jump-burpees

10. One-armed push-ups

11. One-armed push-ups with different hand positions

12. Plyo one-armed push-ups

And so on.

I may be working on 6, while one student is on 2, and another on 11. Literally every exercise has easier and harder versions, so can be adapted to anyone’s current level.

Join Us!

It is very relaxing to just show up and do as you are told for a while, and indeed having a personal trainer who knows you well and pushes you as needed would be great. But as martial artists, more is expected of us. We can’t be dependent on external forces to guide our training- we must take ownership and responsibility for our own development. And outside a one-to-one coaching session, no trainer can perfectly adapt the class to your needs. But you can. 

One way to learn to do that is to come to my Trainalong sessions. You can find them in our Sword People community.

 Everyone is welcome, whether you’re super-fit or not fit at all (yet). You won’t hold up the class (or be held up) because we are all moving at our own pace.

Useful resources on this topic:

You may find The Principles and Practices of Solo Training helpful.

I cover a lot of the exercises in the Solo Training course, though that course focusses primarily on weapons handling. https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/solo-training 

You can have a go with a sample session here:

You can download the exercises list here: Trainalong Curriculum

You may find my conversation with biomechanist Katy Bowman: Movement Matters.

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You’re probably holding your sword wrong. Here’s why.

Holding the sword correctly is safer

One of my students mentioned tendonitis problems in his wrist on the Swordschool Discord server this week. It’s probably caused by holding his sword incorrectly, which forces the small stabiliser muscles to do more work than they evolved for. He is by no means the first student I’ve seen with this problem.

It has been my experience that almost every sword student at any level in any style is either holding their sword incorrectly, or at the very least, there was room for improvement. This is partly due to most modern sword makers producing handles that are a bit too big (my friends at Arms and Armor have a post on this, here), or a bit too round; and partly due to most people simply not understanding how the mechanics of sword holding is supposed to work.

In essence, your grip strength and wrist stabilisation strength should be acting as back-up systems only: the sword should stay in your hand with almost no strength being used at all, and when you strike, the force coming back from the target should be routed through the bones of your hands and wrist, and thence through your body to the ground, with no need to tighten up on impact at all.

Seriously. Not at all. 

Have a look at this video of me hitting the wall target with a rapier, and bashing the tyre with a longsword. My hand is not just relaxed, it’s actually open, to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that grip strength is not required. 

I have been banging this drum for many, many, years now (I first posted that video in 2012!), and have written this up in many places, and posted endless video content about it, and yet still the sword world has crappy sword holding skills. This is for three reasons:

1. the sword handle is too big 

2. because this is very counter-intuitive

3. and also because most people are strong enough to fake it for a while; they think it’s correct, when actually their muscles are faking it for them. Until the pain in the first joint of the thumb kicks in. Or in the elbow. Or indeed anywhere along the chain from fingertip to toes. 

So how should you hold the sword? 

That depends on what kind of sword it is, and what you want to do with it. 

Generally, the sword is either held back in the hand, like so:

Guy Windsor Holding a sword, chambered grip

 

Or extended in the grip, like so:

Guy Windsor holding a sword in an extended grip

 

This is also how most chefs hold their kitchen knives when chopping and slicing.

Guy Windsor holding a kitchen knife slicing cucumber. Grip is extended.

There are exceptions: we do sometimes support the flat instead of the edge, like so:

Guy Windsor holding the sword thumb on flat

 

The sword is usually held back in the hand when it’s also held back near the body, and extended in the hand when the sword arm is extended from the body. Some longsword folk have half-understood this concept and hold their longsword in the extended grip even when the guard is chambered (such as in posta di donna). Some swords are almost always held in the extended grip; rapiers, foils, smallswords are good examples. The basic rule still applies- when holding the sword it should be supported by the bones, not tied in place by the muscles.

The extended grip does not depend on grip strength; you can perfectly well hold the sword with one finger, if it's aligned correctly, like so:

 

Guy Windsor holding a sword, fingers open.

I'm not recommending fighting like this, but it's worth making sure you're not depending on grip strength when holding the sword by opening the thumb, forefinger, ring finger, and little finger, and seeing what happens.

One common error is to extend the wrist, rather than extend the sword in the grip. You need to be able to distinguish between at least three positions of the hand relative to the forearm. Three-knuckle, two-knuckle, and one-knuckle. The easiest way to learn the differences between them is through “Eurythmic push-ups”. You can do them on a mat if you prefer, and you don’t actually need to do the push-up bit; just getting the feeling of the different wrist positions is very helpful.

Cocking the wrist between the ‘three-knuckle’ and ‘one-knuckle’ positions instead of allowing the sword to shift in the grip between the ‘chambered’ and ‘extended’ grips is another common cause of wrist problems.

Please pay attention, this may save you a lot of pain, as well as massively improve your general sword handling.

Holding the Longsword

I introduce the basics of how to hold a longsword in this video borrowed from my Solo Training course

Holding the Rapier

This footage from a rapier seminar I taught in 2012 goes into the correct grip for the rapier in some detail; you can watch the whole thing of course, or skip to about 22 minutes in, where we get into the grip.

If you are already having wrist problems, for any reason, you may find my Arm Maintenance course useful. It’s free, and bundled in with my Human Maintenance course. And if you're interested in mechanics, you should definitely try the free Mechanics course.

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Being a Beginner (again)

One of the things I’m enjoying most about learning to fly is being an absolute beginner, and making beginners’ mistakes. Such as:

  • Getting my radio check and airfield information call in to the office (we don’t have a tower at this airfield), and wondering why I couldn’t get a reply even though the radio seemed to be working just fine. Turns out I had the volume turned down too low.
  • Having successfully landed the plane (yay! That’s the critical bit), when taxiing back towards the place where the planes are parked, my tail got caught in a bit of cross-wind, and I ended up getting the plane stuck in the rough grass between taxi-way and runway. That meant getting out and pushing while the instructor (Clive) drove us out. Clive has been (gently) mocking my “gardening skills” ever since. He also spent the rest of the taxi-way ride rolling a cigarette, manifesting complete confidence in my ability to go not gardening again. Planes on the ground are steered entirely with the feet, so he could actually have steered us out of trouble if necessary, but it’s fascinating to see how something I do all the time in class to essentially trick my students into relaxing, is being done to me, and I can see it and understand it, and it still works. I don't roll cigarettes, but I try to exude a sense of absolute confidence in my students.
  • Forgetting to check under my wing before turning in that direction. Instructor says ‘make a right turn’, and I just start doing it, instead of following correct procedure and actually checking for myself that it’s safe to do so and we’re not about to bump into something. Not that there’s much likelihood of that, where we are, but it’s essential to check, just like checking your mirrors before making a turn in a car. Incidentally, I had no problem with that in the previous lesson (on turns), but this lesson was on the stall,* and so the turns weren’t the focus. I was thinking about the stall, not the turn, and so forgot something essential that I had been fine with previously.

And, most interestingly for me, for the first five lessons I had practically no questions. I didn’t know enough to know what to ask. That phase seems to have passed and I am now pestering my instructors with all sorts of questions. It’s also instructive to note that there are many things that have been explained to me such that I understood them just fine, but couldn’t hold on to the idea until I’d seen it again, usually after a practical exercise in the plane that demonstrated the idea in action. Being able to follow the logic of an explanation is not the same thing as remembering, which is also not the same thing as really knowing and understanding.

I cannot overstate how useful this is to me as an instructor. It has been a very long time since I was last a real beginner at something; most of the new things I’ve learned over the last decade or so have been somehow related to things I’m already competent at, which changes things completely.

The instructors at Skyward are all nice; they don’t berate you for mistakes, just encourage you to learn. I think they’ve been a bit surprised by how I’m not at all embarrassed by making a mistake- I know many of my beginners often are embarrassed. Beginners taxi planes into the long grass, forget to check under their wing before a turn, fail to turn the radio volume up, and do all sorts of other silly things. It’s the beginner’s job to pay attention and do their honest best to do follow instructions. That’s it. It’s the instructor’s job to make sure that the beginner’s mistakes are survivable, and this is as true in martial arts as it is in flying.

I hope that all my beginners have felt that they were free to fail because I was there to create a safe space for them to fail in. But it’s been so long since I was last truly in their position that while I could be nice to them, I didn’t really understand their situation any more. In the past I have been a bit baffled by a lack of questions in a beginners’ group, or when this thing they could do just fine last time was now going wrong. I hope I met that with kindness before, but now I can meet it with comprehension too.

 

*A stall in an aircraft is what happens when the angle that the wing is meeting the air (the “angle of attack”) gets too steep, or there is not enough air flow, so the smooth flow of air over the top surface of the wing breaks up into turbulent eddies, and you lose lift. You fix it by putting the stick forward a bit, to lower the angle of attack (and gain some speed). It has nothing to do with the engine conking out- that’s a whole other problem.

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How to get the most out of a too-advanced class

I am often asked by students if they are “ready” for a class with me. It's a common insecurity- nobody wants to feel that they are holding the class back, or be overwhelmed by a fire-hose of information. I actively seek out opportunities to be a beginner, partly so that I can better understand and empathise with the beginners who train with me. One such opportunity occurred earlier this year. I started bouldering (indoor climbing on low routes, no ropes) a couple of years ago, and on January 20th 2020 took a class with Neil Gresham, at my club, Avid, in Ipswich. It was a great example of being in a class way over my head. But it has been really useful, and while the specific insights regarding bouldering are probably not useful to you, the process of extracting the most value out of a class that is way beyond your current level will be.

There were 10 students, varying in experience from dazzlingly good (from my perspective), to my friend Katie and I (one year of about once a week). One person in the class had been climbing for only two months but was elegantly smashing routes I can’t do (yet), so Katie and I were definitely bottom of the class. Which is the best place to be- literally everywhere you look you can see someone more experienced doing something interesting. You should never give up the opportunity to take a class with a great instructor just because you’re “not experienced enough”. Sure, your brain may fill up in the first ten minutes, but that’s ok, there are ways of capturing the rest of the class for future reference. I’ve been working on the insights from this climbing class for nearly a year now. Money very well spent! But that's only possible because I captured the class outside my brain, and then refiled it.

In short, the process is this:

1) expect to be out of your depth, and to stop taking in new information early in the class

2) take detailed notes (I use pen and paper with stick-man sketches, but any system that works for you by definition works)

3) write up your notes as soon as possible after the seminar. Ideally on the same day. Notes work to trigger memory, and the longer you leave it, the less effective the trigger will be

4) summarise the key points.

Here is my somewhat edited write-up of the seminar, with topics bolded so I can find them easily:

We began with some opening remarks, Neil introduced himself, asked a couple of questions to get the feel of the class. Then we warmed up. The instruction was to do vigorous exercise for a few minutes to get the blood pumping. Wind sprints, burpees, and running were suggested. I did all of those, plus some monkey walks.

Then Neil lead us through some basic joint rotations; shoulders (as front crawl, then reversed), hip rotations (forward-back, then side). He advised to avoid passive stretching before climbing (I agree 100%).

Then it was shoes on, and to the wall. When warming up on the easy grades, here are the rules for improving footwork:

1. No sliding your foot down the wall onto the foothold.

2. No re-placing the foot after contact with the hold.

3. Silent feet.

4. Watch your foot until after you’ve made contact with the hold.

Goal: to improve precision in footwork that will help with harder climbs.

Practice. I spent some time on a green-grey (easiest) grade. It’s surprisingly hard to be that precise, even on really easy climbs. This one approach had me thinking two things: 1) why the hell didn’t I think of that? It’s so very like how I teach swordsmanship footwork: use very basic drills to concentrate on foot placement. And 2) I’ve got my money’s worth already. Everything after this is a bonus.

Then we re-gathered, and Neil talked about arms.

  1. Keep them extended but not locked, as much as possible.
  2. Bent legs, straight arms.
  3. Keep the shoulders engaged though, so you’re not hanging on your joints.

Practice: back on the easy grades. Indeed, as he said, especially at the start, it’s tempting to step up onto the footholds, pulling yourself into the wall. It’s better to hang from the handholds, bending the legs as much as necessary.

Finally, grip: we re-gathered and Neil challenged us to climb easy routes using the minimal tension in our grips. “Use the friction of your skin” to hold on.

Practice: with precise feet and straighter arms and relaxed hands.

Summary: when warming up on the wall, use these rules to encourage precision and minimal strain when climbing. This mental focus will also help transition you mentally from normal life to climbing.

This was followed by a discussion of bouldering training sessions: either volume, or intensity. Volume sessions involve a lot of easier grade climbs. Intense sessions involve working on a few very hard (for you) problems.

Techniques for overhangs:

We went to a part of the wall that overhangs, and Neil talked about how to do it. Fundamentally: left foot goes to right holds, and right foot to left holds. This allows you to reach with an extended arm. No frog-clambering (my term, not his). This did make life a lot easier, where the holds were set up to allow it.

If you have a right foot on a right hold, or vice-versa, you can “flag”: if there’s space, reach through with the other foot inside the one on the hold. If the foot on the wall is too high for that, you can flag “outside”. This has a similar body placement effect to having your left foot on a right hold, etc.

Note: “avoid a pull-ups competition”. Good advice, especially for me. I tend to rely on strong arms more than is gracefully optimal.

Volume sessions: When doing a volume session, try a pyramid approach: start easy, get harder, hardest climbs at the mid-point of the session, then ease back down. (Same idea as our pyramids: 1 pull-up, 2 push-ups, 3 squats; 2,4,6 etc. Until you max out on one (e.g. 4 pull-ups). Then back down the pyramid: 3-6-9, 2-4-6, 1-2-3.)

“Project” sessions: warm up with 10-12 easier climbs, then pick 2-3 hard problems and work on them. Not too long on any one, or you’ll get tired. Rest: rule of thumb is 1 minute rest for every hand move.

Using the circuit board (a wall with graded routes that go in a circle round the wall, for endurance training): two approaches:

1. “Strength”: pick one hard circuit and go round once. Rest, etc.

2. “Endurance”: pick an easier circuit, and do laps (e.g. 3-4). This trains you for longer climbs, such as rope work outside.

I didn’t mention in class that I find going round once on the easiest circuit to be a sufficient challenge to my endurance! But I’ll work on it, starting by just doing a few moves after the end of the first circuit, to get out of the habit of automatically stopping at the end.

“Supportive Conditioning”: for injury prevention. Assuming you’re not a gym rat (good call).

#1 most important exercise to prevent tendonitis: finger extensor training, opening the hand against resistance, e.g. using an exercise band. 3 sets of 20, 2-3 times per week. Yes this is useful but I think I should do a class on forearm maintenance for climbers. They all seem to get tendonitis! (You can find my forearm conditioning training here: go.guywindsor.net)

#2 easiest supportive conditioning: push-ups. 3 sets of 10-25, twice a week.

#3: TRX handles on straps (I’d use my gymnastics rings at home). 3 exercises shown, all knees on floor to start:

1. Push-ups

2. Pec fly, arms out to the sides at shoulder level, recover.

3. Plank, extending the arms out in front like diving into a pool, recover.

#1 stretch, after EVERY climbing session: hand flat on wall, shoulder height, fingers pointing down (extending the wrist). Extend other arm about shoulder height like in a pec fly, look out over your extended hand. Seems useful.

Other stretches recommended:

1. feet wide, knees wide, squat and push knees apart to open hips.

2. Standing, knee to chest, pull knee in to stretch hip.

Best takeaways:

1) After the usual warm-up, warming up on the wall with: precise feet, extended arms, and minimal grip.

2) Flag on overhangs.

3) Pyramid sessions.

4) Use circuits more.

5) Why have my rings been in a box in the shed for the last year?

And finally:

As you can see, that is a TON of information, way more than even the more experienced climbers will be able to remember the next day. How many sets of how many push-ups was it?
And here's the kicker. I'd accidentally left my notebook and pen at home, so I borrowed a pencil and a single envelope from the reception desk. Literally ALL of that was captured in note form, covering both sides of an ordinary envelope (about 4 inches by 9, or 10cm by 22). Notes do not have to be extensive to be useful.

The specifics I tried to capture were notable phrases (such as “avoid a pull-ups competition”), the overall pattern of the class (or I would certainly have forgotten entire sections), and as many specifics as possible (such as “finger extensor training, opening the hand against resistance, e.g. using an exercise band. 3 sets of 20, 2-3 times per week”). Then when writing out the notes, I added as much detail and experience as I could recall.

Experienced students are able to remember more than the less experienced simply because they can chunk the information, and fit it into pre-existing patterns in their heads. I didn't have the experience to chunk the information, nor the pre-existing patterns of climbing theory, terminology, and practice. But even though the class had way more information than I could possibly make use of at the time, and so way more than I'd be likely to remember, I could effectively use the class insights months later when I was ready for them, because I have a way to file them outside my brain.

This is actually better than videoing the class, because it depends on the write-up immediately afterwards. Information outside your brain is of no practical use. To be useful, it must be stored inside your brain. Having a video of the class will tend to let you believe that you have it all available, and so you'll forget to ever watch the video, and the information never breaches the world/brain barrier. But having dodgy notes on a scrap of paper that simply must be written up soon or it will become useless forces you to re-enter the information in another format, which massively improves retention. I saw and heard the class, and experienced the exercises, now I have to recall the class from notes and memory, and re-create it as text. That regurgitation process is absolutely key to getting your brain to hold onto the information.

I hope this is useful, and perhaps persuades at least one beginner to jump in the deep end and take a class above their level. Feel free to share.

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Staying fit- what to do?

Hello.

I’m having trouble making sure I hit all the pain points in my own training. I have a simply enormous variety of exercises and practices that I should be keeping up with. Such as:

Meditation: Awareness of Breathing, Body Scan, Mantra, Movement.

Breathing exercises: Wim Hof method, standing qigong, the Crane, 9 breaths, the Health QiGong form.

Bodyweight exercises: push-ups (many kinds), pull-ups, plank/killer plank, squats (many kinds), quadruped movement.

Leg technique: kicks (front, round, side, back, hook, stomp, crescent inside, crescent outside), leg swings. Footwork drills (accressere discrescere, 4 guards, rapier footwork form, smallsword footwork and lunges etc. etc.) 7-way hips.

Weights: Kettlebells: overhead press, Turkish Get-Up. Small dumbbells: turns, rolls, wings. Clubs: figure 8s, cutty-cutty, krump-schiel-zwerch, squats. Long stick: figure 8s, static catch, twisting catch, feed-through, prima-quarta extensions, play. Short stick: shoulder mobilisation routine, shoulder stretches.

Stretches/ flexibility training: Hamstrings, single leg extension, back arch, forward bend, side bend, twists left and right, four-way wrists, shoulders.

Skills practice:

Pell: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword

Point control: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword

Handling drills: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword, long stick/spear.

Forms: Longsword, Rapier, Sword and Buckler, T’ai Chi, Health qg.

Massage: knees-feet; elbows-hands

(All of these except the meditation are included in depth on the Solo Training Course. I’m currently working on a standalone meditation course based on a six-week series of classes that is just finishing up.)

There are lots of ways to categorise these activities. Some are very much therapeutic (such as the forearm turns, rolls, and wings with small weights, which are part of my tendonitis prevention routines), others are more about developing or maintaining overall strength and fitness. Massage is only remedial, some skills training is also conditioning (such as kicks), some don’t seem to fit in a simple box. This makes organising them into a clear system hard.

My usual approach is to simply do what my body feels is necessary. My body is very good at telling me what it needs now, but not so good at predicting what it will wish it had done in five years’ time. I need to take a more deliberate approach. This may mean dropping some training altogether- as a deliberate choice, rather than an accidental ‘oh, I haven’t done that in two years’ realisation, and doubling down on the things that work. 

The overall goal is to be fit enough and skilled enough to do my job properly now, and sensible enough to be still able to do my job properly when I’m 70 or 80 (because why retire? From swords? Really?). Most of my exercises are either sword-skill specific, or establishing the necessary ranges of motion under load (so, strength/flexibility combinations), or about creating a state of mind, or deliberately adjusting my metabolism.

I probably could develop a simplified routine that hits all the bases, but I’d get bored of it quite quickly, and it would inevitably become less effective as my body adapted to it. And I’d lose a lot of the fun stuff. As it stands, a normal session will include some breathing, some conditioning, some skills, and some remedial work. I usually do the meditation separately, and the flexibility stretches also separately, at night.

I control my weight through diet (following the principle that you can’t outrun your mouth), so weight loss/gain/control is not a consideration.

I know from experience that writing out a training program for a weekly or monthly routine will be an excellent theoretical exercise but I won’t stick to it for more than maybe a couple of days unless I’m doing it with a group of people. So one option would be to lay out say a month’s worth of training sessions and publish it as a class program, recruit students onto the course, and then I’d have to stick to it.

Another option would be to just keep all my toys handy, and play with the ones I feel like every day. That’s pretty much what I’ve done in the past, and especially with the help of the regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday exercise sessions, it works quite well but not perfectly. If you'd like to join in you can find the sessions here.

The Zoom recordings (when I remember to hit the button) are uploaded on the Solo Course. You can see today's session on my vimeo channel here:

Friends, readers, and students, lend me your brains. What should I do to bring order to this galaxy?

And while you're here, let me invite you to the best party this weekend: my AMA video hangout with Jess Finley on Sunday. Join us!

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How to train swordsmanship (or anything else), part 2.

cover of complete rapier workbook which includes how to train swordsmanship

This post is borrowed from The Complete Rapier Workbook  and follows on from How to Train Swordsmanship (or anything else) Part One.

The “Rule of Cs”

The “Rule of Cs” determines how every drill can be practised.

1. In the beginning, you learn set drills by Co-operating in creating correct choreography.

2. Once the choreography is smooth, increase the difficulty by increasing intensity, or introducing a degree of freedom, with one player adjusting the difficulty for the other to learn at their most efficient rate—if it works all the time, ramp it up—if it fails more than twice in ten reps, ease off a bit.

This is called: Coaching correct actions.

3. Finally, the players each try within reason to make the drill work for them. This can be dangerous if it gets out of hand, so be careful, and wear full protection just in case. In practice, the more experienced fencer should get most of the hits, without departing from the drill. This is fine, and gives a good indication of whether your training regime is working. So: Compete.

Let’s stick with Plate 7 from Capoferro as our example and run through a specific series of degrees of freedom, and apply the Rule of C’s so you can see the idea in practice.

  • In the basic form of the drill, there are no degrees of freedom.
  • Set up the drill, but the one stringered can, at the moment of the stringering, attack by disengage, or feint. That is one degree of freedom.
  • Start out with the stringerer obliged to attack in both cases. This makes for a nice choreographical drill.
  • Once that is stable, then the stringerer will only attack if they believe they have the tempo. This is a second degree of freedom. The stringered’s job is then to sell the feint.
  • Now we must ask the question who is coaching who? Because if the stringerer is coaching the stringered, then they must adjust their response so that the stringered gets better at feinting. If it’s the other way round, then the stringered must adjust their feint so that the stringerer gets better at identifying feints from real attacks.
  • You can also play the drill competitively. Without changing the drill, but allowing these two degrees of freedom, you can compete with your partner. If you are stringering, you are just trying to get the tempo for the parry-riposte in one tempo; if you don’t get it, don’t go. Your partner will be trying to trick you into it, with the occasional feint. 

There is a significant risk of this getting out of hand; be mindful as you play the drill competitively that you must stick to the constraints of the drill that you have both agreed on. Otherwise you lose track of the rationale behind what you are doing, and mistakes creep in that are difficult to spot and to trace back to their source.

Coaching

I kind of dropped you in it in the previous couple of drills: I got you coaching without teaching you exactly how. So let’s have a look at that specific skill. In any drill you must have a clear definition of success. In a tournament bout, that’s winning within the rules. In a basic set drill, it’s making the choreography as correct as possible.

  • In a coaching environment, the student’s success is defined as getting measurably better at the target skill.
  • The coach’s success is defined as: the student is successful.

Be very clear on this before moving on. If the coach is doing their job properly, they will get hit over and over. Because in fencing, the student is successful if, and only if, they hit the coach, but do not get hit.

The coach’s job is to create an environment in which the desired action will work, and everything else will fail. Failure is defined as the student not hitting, and getting hit.

The coach is providing a feedback mechanism. If the student is performing the desired action at the desired level, then they will be reinforced by immediate success; if they do anything else, or do the desired action at an insufficient level, the student fails to hit, and gets hit. 

This is why a good coach can get preternaturally fast results, because they can create and control a perfect learning environment, in real time.

In a perfect world, every historical fencer would have access to a high-level coach and spend much of their time one-to-one with her. In the real world, that’s never going to happen, so you and your partner must learn the basics of coaching so you can help each other develop.

As with every other skill, you will get better with specific practice. So in this next drill, let’s be clear about who’s training whom. We are studying coaching, so it is the coach whose performance we really care about. We measure that performance by the improvement of the student.

Coaching the Attack by Disengage

I have been preparing you for this over the last couple of workbooks. Begin with the Buckler Game. The one holding the buckler is the coach. You’ve done this many times before, so pay attention to the mindset: the total focus on your partner’s improvement. This is the mindset you’ll need for the following exercise.

You’re going to improve your partner’s attack by disengage. This action occurs in almost every Plate in Gran Simulacro, so it’s quite important.

  1. Start by setting up a static, basic version of Plate 7 and Plate 16, steps one and two. You step in to stringer, your partner attacks by disengage. Make sure the choreography is there, and that you both know what you’re going to be working on.
  2. Then reduce the window of opportunity for the attack by disengage, by stepping into measure, and immediately back out again. Not fast, but no pause. The student has to time their attack for when you will be there in measure.
  3. Then follow their attack with a strike of your own, in any line. They must be recovering, and parrying if necessary, after their attack.
  4. Then have the student keeping measure with you, waiting for your blade action (taking the line with a stringering) before they attack by disengage.
  5. Finally, have the student keeping measure, and remaining defensive after their successful (or unsuccessful) attack.

The coaching exercises we’ll be doing in the rest of the book will generally follow this same pattern:

  1. Set up the basic, static, drill
  2. Reduce the window of opportunity for the target action, by either reducing the time it’s open, or providing mechanical resistance
  3. Add a step: make sure the student is getting out under cover after striking
  4. Add movement: have the student do the action while moving (so the drill doesn’t start with them standing still). Refer to “Who moves first?”
  5. Add both the step and the movement, so they have to do the target action while moving, and remain defensive after striking.

You can see this drill on video here:

We are scratching the surface here, but I hope you can see that this approach will turbo-charge your training by deliberately designing your success.

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How to train swordsmanship (or anything else), part 1

cover of complete rapier workbook which includes how to train swordsmanship

This post is borrowed from The Complete Rapier Workbook

How do you take things you already know, and make them actually work under pressure? How do you become a swordsman/swordswoman/swordsperson, not just a person who knows some sword moves? This is the heart of swordsmanship, and it’s most sophisticated element. The key skill to learn is how to coach, because that’s how your training partner will get better. And as they learn themselves, they can coach you.

This is the difference between evolution by natural selection and intelligent design. If you just fence, sure enough you will get better. Slowly, and in a haphazard way. But using a disciplined approach, you can deliberately work on your areas of weakness, find and enhance your natural areas of strength, and deliberately, intelligently, improve. 

Birds are amazing examples of the awesome power of evolution. But compare them to the history of powered flight. By the application of intelligent design, we got from a short hop of 120 feet in 1903, to the moon in 1969. Evolution can go suck eggs.

This is the kind of astonishingly rapid improvement that we are aiming for in every training session.

We get there by building a bridge between your current level (whatever that is) to where you wish to be: expert fencer.

This idea is the heart of my new workbook: Rapier part three: Developing Skills. Much of this blog post is adapted from the book.

It is relatively easy to teach set drills to a student or class. She does this, you do that. And it is relatively easy to set up a freeplay (sparring, fencing) environment that is reasonably safe. I have seen many groups and schools that have nice set drills, and freeplay quite a bit, but there is no real relationship between the two kinds of training, and nothing in between those two extremes. As a result, the things done in freeplay bear scant resemblance to the actions in the drills. In the new workbook I will show you how to build a bridge between set drills and freeplay. This is especially important for historical swordsmanship, as the manuals tend to show short, simple sequences (an attack and a defence, usually) which are easy to turn into drills, but very hard to pull off in friendly freeplay or against a resisting opponent.

In a nutshell, you need to be able to identify your areas of weakness, and fix them. We do the former by running diagnostic drills, and the latter by training at the optimal rate of failure. 

Run a Diagnostic

Almost any drill can be used as a diagnostic. The purpose of a diagnostic drill is to establish at what point you are failing. Taking Plate 7 as an example, by running through it you may find that you don’t remember the drill (solution: learn the choreography. Refer to the first workbook), or one part of the drill isn’t as good as it should be. Your disengage, for example. Or your parry. It doesn’t matter which, it only matters that you can find it. For this you need clear feedback mechanisms.

This approach can be applied to any weapon and any system, of course, but I’ll stick to rapier examples for now.

Feedback mechanisms

The best feedback mechanism is a partner who will invariably hit you when you make a mistake, and who you will invariably hit without getting hit, when you do something right. 

That partner is a coach.

But nobody is perfect, so your training will be slowed down by false positives (you hit with things that shouldn’t work, or your partner fails to hit you when you’ve left an opening), and false negatives, when you’re doing the right thing, but your partner prevents it from working in a way that isn’t useful for your development.

Secondary feedback mechanisms include video cameras, so you can see what actually happened, and verbal feedback from coaches and training partners.

Direct immediate accurate feedback is the holy grail of training. Quest for it.

The Optimal Rate of Failure

The optimal rate of failure in combat is zero. But in training, the optimal rate of failure is about two out of ten. Whatever you are doing should work 80% of the time, and fail the other 20%. If you are succeeding 100% of the time you’re not learning anything. If you’re failing much more than 20% of the time, you will get frustrated, and frustration is the enemy of learning.

The coach’s job is to keep the student training in that zone: and for the coach, the optimal rate of failure is zero. Because the coach isn’t supposed to be training: they are supposed to be the perfect feedback mechanism.

The rest of the workbook addresses exactly how to do that, like so:

  1. Addressing the common psychological impediments to learning swordsmanship.
  2. Building a bridge between set drills and freeplay. By deliberately layering up the complexity, we can improve faster.
  3. Learning to identify the problem areas.
  4. Learning how to modify drills to fix specific problems.
  5. Learning how to coach.

This post has been all about the theory of practice… if you've enjoyed this post but rapier isn't your thing, you might find the Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts interesting, or indeed the next post in this series: How to train Swordsmanship, part 2

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