This is effectively a reply to @Corvos at https://www.themotte.org/post/1829/tinker-tuesday-for-april-8-2025/316753?context=8#context , but I invite anyone to discuss the topic.
Ask me anything. I love talking about this subject but rarely have the opportunity.
How long ago did you get started?
I started in 2013, and was very active until the lockdown and my subsequent life changes put me out of commission. When I started out, it was basically five core guys reading a medieval manuscript in a university hallway and trying to do what it said with nylon swords. By 2020, we were one of Germany's top clubs, with dozens of members, a proper gym, several courses and a very good tournament track record. I was mostly just along for the ride while others did the heavy lifting, though I like to think that I contributed to that growth, a little. The club, while occasionally dabbling in other weapons systems (dagger, sickle, half-pike, sword and buckler) and eventually establishing a recurring grappling class and a permanent rapier class, mostly teaches longsword, and that mostly based on the Liechtenauer system as documented by Peter von Danzig. We occasionally took a look at other styles as well, but mostly stuck to this, though in latter years the focus transitioned from historical reconstruction to maximizing tournament-effectiveness. I don't have as much as insight into what happened since 2020, or rather since the lockdowns were lifted, but from the looks of it it's been going steady since. If anything the mood seems a little worse than it used to; I feel there's not as much of outright joy and camraderie on display as used to be, but that might just be my own grumpiness coloring my perception. Nowadays I very rarely make it to regular practice, low single-digits per year, since it's an almost 2h drive both ways, and the practice sessions are late in the evening and I'm more of an early bird. Weekend events are more convenient, but somehow there are fewer instructive events than there used to be in my larger area. Tournaments still exist though, and I do like those. I'm just entirely out of shape, and growing old, on top of never having been all that good to begin with.
What do you practice?
Mostly longsword. I tried to get more into rapier, which is reportedly the preferred weapon for old men, but one lucky day I managed to break my thumb and my rapier and since then that's been on ice. The rapier-fencing, I mean - the thumb is fine by now. I used to just do absolutely everything and had lots of fun, but that's just not possible with my severely reduced practice time, so by now it's all longsword. Obviously I started out with the formally correct Liechtenauer style the club in general leaned on, learning the correct stances, master-strikes, infighting techniques, and I think I can say I achieved an acceptable level of technical proficiency across a wide spectrum of skills, though I never quite built up the physical fitness to leverage them properly.
Liechtenauer, compared to Meyer, the style we most love to disrespect, is less flashy and more energy-efficient, and relies more on geometry and less on psychology. You learn a handful master-strikes that efficiently threaten or hit the enemy while preventing him from striking you directly, and the rest is mostly learning which of those techniques to use in a given situation. You can even condense it down further; one very successful fencer (top 5 globally at the time) once told me that he pretty much just practices one strike and one thrust and applying those skillfully enough covers all his needs. So as long as you can avoid becoming too predictable, I think you needn't stress yourself about obtaining an encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of highly situational techniques with hard-to-memorize German names.
Nowadays, being a lot weaker yet and having unreliable knees and a propensity for injury on top, I try to compensate for my physical inadequacy with a more defensive style: Always keep the sword between me and my opponent, keep the range open, use strikes very sparingly and try to go for thrusts from the bind instead. I like to fight from the left, point forward, which takes several powerful striking options off the table for my opponent, so that they have a harder time just battering through my guard. And defensively that works; I can often work out an opening...but fail to exploit it because I lack the explosiveness to generate forward momentum on demand. Something to work on; just plain physical exercise would do me good.
Any tips/advice?
The following will be colored by my tournament-centric view. Obviously it's also possible to just enjoy the archaeological aspects, or the methodical technical exercise, but I mostly speak as someone who wants to go to tournaments and perform as well as possible.
In no particular order:
- Ignore any clubs or schools that don't have their people go to tournaments.
- Gear is expensive. If your club doesn't have any to borrow, you'll be looking at 500€-1000€ for a set of protective equipment and a Federschwert (steel practice sword). When you get a sword, make sure it suits your build - not too short, not too long - and that it complies with your regional tournament regulations.
- Dry technical practice and instruction are valuable for learning the basics. Don't ignore it early on, you need to get the foundational knowledge, skills and vocabulary from somewhere. But over time it will become less important, as you need to find your own way.
- Outright drill - repeating the same motions over and over - is great for increasing the quickness and reliability with which you deliver a specific technique, but it's effectively an isolation exercise and should not occupy the majority of your practice time.
- On the other hand, don't neglect relaxed, playful sparring. At 100% pressure, you'll stick to what you know. With less pressure, you can experiment. It pays to spend some time trying new things.
- Throw yourself into sparring fights and then tournaments as early as possible. Don't get stuck in endless dry practice sessions thinking you aren't good enough. You never will be, if you don't go out and get your mistakes highlighted by adversarial competition.
- HEMA is overall very woke. Ignore it though - it's superficial. Once you get into the competitive scene, nobody takes that seriously anymore. And have a laugh whenever women go into mixed-gender tournaments. Hell, let me tell you about the one time I fought a pregnant woman...
- Everyone fights differently. There is no standard HEMA fighter, not even within clubs or schools, and there is no singular example to aspire to. You too will need to find ways of fighting that suit your personality, build, weapon of choice, the opponent you face, and whatever other factors come into play.
- Don't waste your practice time chatting. If you need information, then get it and immediately get back to practice. There will be social events at other times.
- That said, talk to more experienced people, as often as possible before and after practice. Don't stick to the kiddie pool, get with the big boys. There's too much ignorant pseudobabble at the entry level.
- Most beginners quit. It's normal. Don't assume that this reflects poorly on a club.
- If your club isn't a commercial school, take over responsibilities to keep it running as soon as possible. Somebody's got to do it.
- Visit other clubs as often as you can. Swim in as many different kinds of water as possible.
- More practice, no matter whether technical, drill, sparring or competition, is always better. The more you do, the better you'll get. Take every opportunity you can.
- When you get hurt in a fight, fight on if you can by any means. If you aren't used to getting repeatedly bruised and battered, any injury will feel much worse than it is.
- The judge is always right. Make your peace with it.
- There is no substitute for physical fitness.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
About women.. well girls.
There were 'historical fencing' groups around my city when I was in high school and I heard that they all had too many chicks and too few boys is what I heard. Maybe I definitely should have switched my focus from tanks to swords bc. There were few girls in my class at school and they were all homely, and the girls in those historical fencing outfits mostly got into swords from reading fantasy crap so probably the better kind of girl out there.
I heard about HEMA as a kid from my cousins, (the coloquial term was 'plechárna' , 'plech = blech' and had much respect for it bc what I heard is that your hands and fingers and arms are gonna suffer a lot and I have an unfortunate tendency of getting carried away while fighting. I broke every single wooden sword I ever had as a kid or teen. You probably have something to say about that kind of people.
Some of my best friends get carried away when fighting and keep breaking their steel swords! It's normal.
But yeah, RE: Fingers, arms - they do take a beating. I've stopped seeing Doctors about broken fingers. Thumbs usually.
How common are shoulder joint dislocations / injuries?
Moderately common. Shoulder injuries most often happen when repetitively drilling particular strikes, when grappling, or during exotic warm-up exercises.
A friend of mine permanently ruined his shoulder and had to quit martial arts, another was out for a year and never really made it back in. Shoulder injuries can be career-enders in HEMA. But many others bust their shoulders and reucperate just fine, and most never have any shoulder trouble at all.
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What do HEMA practitioners think about the 'Battle of Nations' event and the associated competitions ?
Either that that they're unskilled hooligans with too much money and no appreciation of technique or brain cells, or, secretly, that it looks kinda fun and they wish they could afford a full suit of plate armor.
Why'd Germans be not able to afford a full suit of plate armor ? It's only like what, €3-4k euro ? People blow that on electric bikes or foreign holidays routinely. Oh, I guess if they were students..
Most people I know who got into HEMA did so when they were students. And even affluent people I know who do HEMA and could afford a plate harness largely just don't because it's a huge hassle, still expensive, and saddles you with a big pile of steel parts you need to maintain.
That said, it's not unheard of. I know a few who got one, or are in the process of getting one.
Can't you today simply seal the steel parts in an oxygen free environment when not in storage? Like welding argon is really cheap, with some good plastic bags you could get rid of all the oxygen and keep it from rusting easily.
Probably? I'm guessing most people who own armor would prefer to put it on display somehow.
We're really outside my area of expertise with this, though. It's always been far out of my price range.
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There is no substitute for physical fitness.
fitness is the most underrated thing in sports IMO
I only did HEMA for about a year (got to enter 2 events total) but one time I got into a longsword match and in spite of his vastly better skill and experience the fact that I had a sub 20 minute 5k and could deadlift 315 mattered way more than his incredibly superior skill. These aren't even good numbers I'm putting up my opponent was just that out of shape.
Ringen is the most physically demanding part in any HEMA tournament holy crap. I think nobody had any serious skill other than the NCAA division 3 wrestler but pure fitness won out by an insane margin I got 3rd in the only ringen tournament there was in our area off of near pure athleticism with the tiniest bit of skill.
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I think it's important to note that the traditional requirement for HEMA is a source. For example, we do not generally consider people doing Viking combat reconstruction to be doing HEMA because we have no sources for it. The reconstructors are working in (notionally) accurate reproductions of the historical weapons, but they're ultimately guessing as to how they were used. HEMAists are... still guessing, but they're guessing with a reference to historical texts. Sometimes the texts are very straightforward, sometimes they are borderline useless (cough, Talhoffer).
The "main" disciplines of HEMA are, in rough order of popularity:
There are a number of other disciplines as well, though generally less popular (and some are amalgamated into one of the categories above for competitions, e.g. many saber tournaments won't bat an eye if you show up with a broadsword/backsword). Messer, broadsword, sidesword, singlestick, arming sword, sword and targe/rotella, and more I've probably forgotten. Also worth noting that many of these distinctions are modern. It's not clear that historically people would have seen much of a distinction between what we now call sideswords and rapiers, nor is it uncommon to find sabers referred to as broadswords.
I really liked the 5v5 formation halberd event we did locally. It was a lot of fun. Though I think that it was way to easy to win by being taller, it was also a little too easy to disarm people, I think most HEMA guys don't good enough grip strength, anyone with sub 45 kg grip strength is just too weak to hold the halberd properly and you probably want >50 kg grip strength realistically)
I've also seen a few armor sim events where you had to hit a shock sticker (signaling where gaps in the armor were) and a light would go off if you hit it hard enough. (these were very rare but were very different from the standard events, It became basically a wrestling contest with daggers more than a sword fighting competition)
(again these were basically one off events but they were fun, I stopped playing HEMA due to cost and how much less enjoyable it was compared to pure grappling. HEMA is very weird.
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Ah side-sword, my beloved Achille Marozzo drills :) :). I trained casually with a school before law school while I was living in a different city, but since then I've not managed to get back into it. I had a blast when I was doing it, and still occasionally leaf through manuals for fun during my free time; I'm trying to slog through a destreza manual right now.
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All true.
Anecdotally, people around me disparage saber as being essentially the same thing as olympic saber, only with darker clothing. I wouldn't know.
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My boys do a lot of mock sword fighting (as all boys do), and I've been toying around with the idea of teaching them some proper techniques. (I fenced epee/saber in college 20 years ago and so at least have some idea about what this would look like). I think they'd also be totally thrilled to see some live HEMA tournaments to.
Do you have any recommendations for getting young kids (~7 years old) involved in the sport?
Nope, not so far. My daughter will turn 4 soon, and I handed her all kinds of equipment and she likes to wave swords around and bang them together together or get some beeps out of battery-powered self-contained beeper foils, but has little interest in actually doing anything resembling fencing or fighting. Winning she likes, getting her beeps, but not if there's significant adversity.
Good luck to you though! With multiple boys, I hope you can get them to compete (friendly-like!) with each other.
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Interesting - I would have assumed that the historical masters had refined their styles to be close to optimum given the weapons available. Does tournament-effective differ from historical because modern fencers have better techniques than the historical masters, or because there is something artificial about modern tournaments which mean that historical combat-optimised techniques are not tournament-optimal?
Many of the older sources have significant gaps in what they cover - either due to the fact that they're incomplete or because they're not intended for new fencers and thus don't spend much time talking about the basics of how to fence. More recent (as in 18th/19th century) often have the opposite problem: they're extremely barebones systems that are meant to train someone who has never held a sword to bare minimum competence in bare minimum time. And virtually none of these sources assumed you'd be using them as a primary source of instruction - even the Saber for Dummies manuals are meant to be reference material for instructors.
Modern HEMA is unlike its historical counterpart. We use different equipment, different rules, and have different social mores* around fighting compared to the original practitioners. There's also just the reality that many techniques become less effective as your opponent becomes more skilled and everything collapses down to fundamentals like distance, timing, and tactics.
The result is that if you're trying really hard to win tournaments, you're going to be less strict about adhering to the sources. You're going to mix-and-match systems and incorporate things from other martial arts or modern fencing. You're also going to end up constrained by the rules in ways that affect your fencing - a scored match is an artificial construct (a "real" swordfight is never going to have a situation like "I'm down by 1 with two seconds on the clock, better dive head first across the ring"), certain historical techniques are constrained or off limited (e.g. S&B tournaments tend to restrict or disallow buckler punches for safety reasons), and you may game afterblow rules in ways that would be insane in a serious sword fight ("I'm going to leave myself wide open and go for an uncovered afterblow" is something nobody would do if life or limb were on the line but might make perfect sense if you've got a lead and just want to burn time off the clock).
*the people whining about hand snipes might actually have a point, historically, for example, and there's some reason to think thrusting was considered semi-off-limits in certain contexts.
Then just change the rules? For example make any deadly touch eliminatory, so that no one says "I'm going to leave myself wide open and go for an uncovered afterblow" . I suspect the problem is that you want tournaments to be more spectacular than realistic (if the adversaries are more conservative it might get a bit boring)
Short answer: they do change the rules, frequently. HEMA has no unified ruleset. The trouble is that it's very hard to create a ruleset that can't be gamed - introduce a solution to one kind of tactical double and you likely create another (or incentivize some other kind of bad behavior). Insofar as you can they tend to have other problems.
People do occasionally do "first blood" tournaments with mutual loss rules precisely to try and circumvent this situation, but they have a number of practical issues. They tend to exacerbate the problem of low quality judging in HEMA, since a single poor call isn't just disadvantageous, it's decisive. There's also the more prosaic issue that if people are going spend hundreds of dollars traveling to your tournament, they are generally going to demand more than a half-dozen exchanges. The result is that first blood tournaments are usually sideshows.
It does not make sense to me: either you want the historical thing, or you want a sports optimised for tournaments (in its rules and techniques), and in the second case you have modern fencing which is a pretty much optimised olympic sport. But as long as people have fun, maybe it does not matter
There's a a pretty substantial gulf between modern fencing and HEMA. Weapons, linearity, weird shit like right-of-way...
Even if you want the historical thing, it needs to be practical. Without tournaments you're not getting much feedback on what works and what doesn't, but if you try to turn tournaments into realistic simulations then most people won't show up for them, as @Skibboleth explained.
There's a range of compromises possible that are neither olympic fencing nor realism-maxxing by duelling each other to death. There are trade-offs. And most people, for good reason, decide to optimize for actually being able to perpetuate the sport rather than have it become impossible to organize or completely redundant.
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In asian martial arts, the latter is the case. For instance judo, being firmly a competitive sport, has a bunch of techniques that assume your opponent is wearing a judo gi. But the flip side is that this is often used by crappy schools as an excuse to not train effectively; it's better to have trained limited "sports adjusted" techniques against a resisting, incentivized, opponent in sparring than having trained "deadly" or "dangerous" realistic techniques in katas/forms/drills without sparring. For sure historical warriors sparred; it being their main occupation I imagine they would accept a higher degree of risk in their sparring than modern hobbyists who have to go to their office job their next day, so the degree to which their ajusted their techniques to be "sparring/tournament" friendly vs warfare accurate is probably less than we do.
I'd argue the opposite. If you break some fingers or a rib in sparring, or sprain your ankle, then that doesn't at all impair your ability to drive or ride the subway to your office job and interact, perhaps a little more slowly than usual, with your computer / papers / coworkers. Plus, nowadays you can just take sick leave in many western countries.
If your livelihood depends on your motor abilities, you'll probably be less rather than more reckless.
OTOH, people back then were probably more tolerant of pain in general.
On the other hand, once lives are on the line "unsportsmanlike" techniques that are hard to realistically train without risking injury (like eye gouges, fish hooks, striking at the throat, etc...) are definitely on the table. Risking injury in training to some extent might be worth learning how to realistically defend against them.
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As an anecdote, I remember a story about someone setting up a paintball match between the national paintball champions and an elite spec ops unit of my country. The spec ops guys got BTFO'd, and their response was "they won because they were absolutely reckless".
I'm pretty sure high ranking officers take advantage of this for a living, and once they have troops with high enough morale that they'll willingly march to their deaths, it unlocks strategies that minimize casualties in the long term.
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Multiple reasons that I know of.
There is a significant degree of uncertainty in interpreting the primary sources. The language is more than archaic, the wording may be unclear, imagery if present at all only presents one still shot of what might be a complex sequence, there is extensive implicit contextual information that modern readers simply do not possess, and there is always a risk that the document in question is merely meant as an aid to an actual flesh-and-blood instructor rather than as a standalone manual. So after reading the text, you need to experiment a lot to find out what actually works in a given situation, and then you vary the parameters a little and find out that the technique you just reconstructed stops working when the distance, relative positioning, enemy posture, momentum, body size differential or god-knows-what differs a little from your previous setting. So while you absolutely can have fun and learn a lot from doing this kind of archaeology, it's not necessarily a straight road from there to becoming tournament-effective.
And even beyond that, we do not always know for sure what type of fighting a given source describes. It could be for war, for self-defence, for regulated judicial duels, for nonlethal competition, it could be for armored or unarmored or even horseback fighting but forget to mention it, etc. Regarding historical tournaments, we also don't know much about what historical competitive fencing looked like, what rules and regulations they employed. From depictions, we deduce that medieval sports fencers generally wore thick everyday clothing, but no face protection, so either risks were significantly higher for them than for moderns with all their fancy protective equipment, or their rules somehow resulted in more restrained fighting, or they just shrugged off broken bones and lost eyes even though their livelihoods depended on them. Obviously if you argue that the fencing manuscripts are for judicial, martial or self-defence fighting rather than competitions, then you're suddenly playing a completely different game.
Modern tournaments are quite possibly more forceful than historical unarmored competitions, but at the same time modern tournament fencers can make many more mistakes and take greater risks than someone could in a self-defence situation.
We're not necessarily better nowadays than people were 600 years ago; there's just a massive gulf of time between them and us and little information that made it through. So instead of trying in vain to accurately reconstruct what they did, we focus on what works nowadays, which we can actually get actionable feedback on.
I think the “better fencers” theory makes the most sense. Swordsmanship was the job of a class of people, and you’d to some degree just pick things up from being around swordsmen training. The other thing is that you wouldn’t necessarily want to create a book for your school that gives everything away, as rivals can use that to train countermeasures against your school of fencing.
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And even beyond that, we don't know what the informal rules or social prestige goals were within those situations! There was a point made in a BJJ podcast I was listening to recently, that there’s a popular meme that there are “no rules” in street fights (or bar fights or whatever term you prefer). But for the most part, actual people who engage in fights are typically restrained by legal codes and social restraints. The French tradition of Savate, which in Marseille developed among sailors, consisted primarily of slaps and kicks because the law at the time considered using a closed fist strike a deadly weapon, while slaps and kicks were punished more lightly. There are also social rules: most of us in middle or high school would have agreed that if you got into a fight it was wrong to hit the other guy in the balls, and that a guy who did so was kind of a pussy/bad person, so that would be avoided both because of potential social opprobrium and to demonstrate one's courage and toughness. Similarly we can have social goals, like puncicate, the Italian soccer ultra tradition of stabbing opposing fans in the ass, which dates back to medieval first blood duels where stabbing your opponent in the ass was difficult and showed skill. Traditions like counting coup among the Plains Indians were common examples where even in war, actions are optimized for social prestige rather than deadly effectiveness. And even within a regulated and ruthlessly competitive sport like American football you see a team like my Philadelphia Eagles innovating on the Brotherly Shove, and a lot of teams refuse to use the play and criticize it for being distasteful, unaesthetic, a “rugby play” rather than a football play.
All sports start as a way to demonstrate some trait, strength or toughness or grace or speed or skill. And often the process of developing competitive strategies leads to situations where those traits aren't demonstrated in the same way, or entirely different traits end up being demonstrated.
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Wow, thank you! Very comprehensive. (I hope to have more detailed thoughts later).
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