Tag: longsword

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Some months ago my elbow started hurting. (The little bump on the inside of my elbow joint was where it hurt.) I don’t think it was a sword-fighting injury; I think it was a dog-walking injury—but the sword fighting seemed to aggravate it.

A sword bag on the floor holding two rapiers and two longswords

So I did less sword fighting. I switched from three times a week to just twice, and then just once, and then I quit going altogether. Then last week I traveled to Amherst to visit my brother and my mom, and just about didn’t exercise at all while I was on that trip. My elbow got steadily better, so that for about a week now, it hasn’t hurt at all.

So yesterday I went back for a sword-fighting class!

The class was kind of abbreviated. At the beginning of class we did a bearpit for a member’s birthday, so I got to do three passes at longsword. Then we did an actual class on rapier fencing. Then we were going to switch to longsword, but there was a tornado warning, and we all stopped to stare at our phones, looking at weather radar and texts with friends and relations in the area, making sure we were all okay.

Turns out that’s just a well. My elbow seemed to hold up fine during class, but today it’s a bit twingey again, so I’m glad I didn’t aggravate it more.

This pretty clearly means I’m not ready to go back to three-times-a-week training, but maybe it doesn’t rule out once-a-week training.

I’ll see how my elbow feels over the next few days.

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I’ve scarcely fenced with the students since the groups split a year ago. It was made clear that I was welcome to come train with the student group, but most of the training sessions were the same time as my group was meeting, and anyway my shoulder and elbow issues meant I had to reduce the amount of training I was doing, so I ended up training with my own group.

That changed this week when the student group had a “fancy-dress fechtschule,” and invited the TMHF members to join in.

A fechtschule (which just means “fight school”) is a particular kind of contest where the point is not so much to “win” (although you want to do that too), as it is to display artful fencing. To encourage that the rules call for only head hits to count, and prohibit things like thrusting (too likely kill your opponent), grappling, pommel strikes, etc.

Because only head hits count, it seemed reasonably safe to wear just masks and not full protective gear, enabling a fancy-dress version, which seemed to me like great fun. Many of the women showed up in dresses or gowns of one sort or another (some in heels!). Many of the men wore suits. I wore a coat and tie.

Two people with swords, one wearing a sport coat, the other wearing a fabulous gown, with other people in fancy dress in the background
Me practicing a drill with Autumn. Photo by Matt K The Other Shore Studio

The call for attending was simply to wear “the most formal thing you own that you are willing to fight in.”

After a youth during which I couldn’t imagine “dressing up” any more than absolutely necessary, somewhere along the line I figured out a few things, one of which was that men’s dress clothing is actually more comfortable than casual clothing, because it is altered to fit well, rather than just being “the right size.” These days besides wearing dress clothing whenever it will give me an advantage, I also wear it anytime it seems like fun. (While traveling—on a plane or a train, and while in a station or an airport—you get much better service if you’re wearing a coat and tie than if you’re wearing shorts or sweats.)

There was a great deal of artful fencing.

Two fencers in dress clothes with longswords and a judge behind them with a staff
Me on the right, fencing with Milosh. Photo by Matt K The Other Shore Studio

It has taken most of three years, but I’m finally doing a pretty good job of keeping my arms extended while doing longsword. (Partly I just needed to develop the habit, but I also needed to build strength and endurance in that arms-extended posture.)

It was glorious fun. I even did okay in the contest. (I think Milosh went easy on me.)

I do need more work on fencing artfully.

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In my previous post, I talked about RDL (Romanian dead lift) the exercise. In HEMA practice RDL refers to something else: the writers of three famous glosses of Lichtenauer’s Zettel (a long didactic poem on sword fighting) by Sigmund ain Ringeck, Pseudo-Peter von Danzig, and Jud Lew.

So far, I’m reading a different gloss of the poem (although I’ll probably get to those as well):

Cover of Michael Chidester's "The Long Sword Gloss of GNM Manuscript 3227a"

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An image from Meyer's 1570 treatise on sword fighting, showing figures with longswords well extended, standing in deep lunges
Source: Wiktenauer

A couple of aspects of longsword turn out to be hard not from a skill perspective, but from a simple strength and endurance perspective. Look at the guys in this picture. Their arms are fully extended, either forward or upward. That’s just hard to do for minutes at a time. Besides that, they’re in a pretty low lunge position. That’s also hard to do for minutes at a time.

A couple of days ago, I had a chance to ask celebrity trainer Mark Wildman how he’d program for building arm strength and endurance. It turns out he’s a huge longsword geek. Here’s the video, cued up to where he reads my question (should be 41:57). The related stuff goes through 48:50).

My original question was: “I’m doing longsword. One issue is arm strength and endurance. I’m doing kettlebell clean&press and pushups (for holding the sword overhead and extended forward). Any other ideas?”

Here are my notes on Mark’s reply:

Mace & Club

Single-arm heavy club program (a program that isn’t for sale yet, but that is pretty easy to deduce from the videos on Mark Wildman’s youtube channel).

Basis of Strength (2-Handed club program that does exist, although it’s pretty expensive).

Mace 360s. (The mace equivalent of a club shield cast: You bring your hand past your opposite ear, swing the mace behind you, and catch it back in front.)

Cut the Meyer square for time. (I don’t think he said WHAT time would be appropriate. Maybe do a 10-minute emom, where you do the full square, rest until the end of the minute, and then repeat. Or maybe 30 seconds on/30 seconds off.)

Graphic of the Meyer Square, from Wiktenauer https://wiktenauer.com/index.php?curid=43889

He emphasized training both dominant hand and non-dominant hand.

This, by the way, goes against the advice of Liechtenauer, who says:

Fence not from left when you are right.
If with your left is how you fight,
You'll fence much weaker from the right.

I suspect that the difference has to do with your goals. Liechtenauer was speaking to someone who had to win sword fights. Wildman is speaking to someone trying to get fit for a hobby.

Push ups as part of a warm-up. (Since I had mentioned pushups.)

Instead of pushups, do burpies in full HEMA gear. (Oy.)

Don’t do actual sword movements with mace or club. Do those with an actual longsword.

Mace drop swing in Meyer stance (4 versions: contra- and ipso- lateral with each foot forward): Here’s two videos of that:

I’ve ordered a mace so I can try that (and other mace stuff). I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on the (expensive) Basis of Strength program, although I’m tempted. While I ponder that, I’ll start doing mace drop swings while in a lunge, and see if I can get both my extended arm strength and endurance up, while also improving my Meyer fencing stance.

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I’ve been training in longsword for almost a full year now—I just looked and saw that my first two classes were in the last week of March last year—and I’d gotten kind of discouraged. I did okay the first few weeks, but then plateaued. For months I felt like I was making no progress at all. Finally, on Thursday, I felt like I had taken a step forward.

Me doing a zwerchhau.
Here’s an image from today—a couple of days after that training class

I’ve come up with training-at-home plans a couple of times in the past year, thinking that I need to work out my Meyer stance (very low lunge, with the front thigh almost parallel to the ground), and of course my cuts. (This pictures shows me doing a zwerchhau, and the cut looks pretty okay, although the stance isn’t nearly low enough.) That is, I’d come up with the plans, but I largely hadn’t followed through. Today, with the encouragement of having done okay on Thursday, I got out with my sword and spent a while working on low stance, Meyer square cuts, and zwerchhaus.

Several members have done a “bear pit” for their birthdays: The birthday boy faces everyone in the group for a pass or three, one after another. The exact details vary, but the idea is to pick some metric (passes or opponents) and do enough to hit your age. I’ll turn 65 in mid-June, and I’d like to be able to carry on the tradition. I think I’m within striking distance on the basic fitness. (I was doing 2-hour runs at the end of last summer, and my last run was 1 hour 14 minute.) But it wouldn’t be much fun to face opponent after opponent and get beat every time, so I’m pleased to finally feel like I’m making some progress.

If you’re local, and you think swords are cool (and who doesn’t?), you might check out our group: Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing.