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 -
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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