Check out the awesomeness...

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...my new sword, on route from Tim Noyes.

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HEMA games

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I've spoken about this before  but I feel that one of the key pillars of successful swordsmanship is developing a good mental attitude. Being relaxed and adopting a playful mindset allows you apply your knowledge gained from study and drilling to successful sparring. Like with strength or technique there is training you can do to develop this. Training for a good mental attitude is partly about training to reduce stress and reducing the likelihood that you will freeze under pressure. It is also partly about encouraging you to understand the linkages between techniques, how to apply the technique in different situations and how a technique fits into the bigger strategic picture. So, what's a solution? Games. Here's a list of some that I like to use with descriptions (I'll keep updating this list as I come up with new games): Without swords Slappy facey / tag -  based on a childhood game from my upbringing in Scotland, slappy facey in it's natural form is...
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10 simple tips for improving HEMA sparring

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Shamelessly inspired by this article: 1. Game I agree that relaxation is important. Being tense means you're thinking about being tense and not smiting the other guy. One of the simplest ways I've found to do this is to play more. This means treating sword fighting more like a game than a serious life and death situation because the only thing in danger in our pretend sword poking is our egos. Here are a whole bunch of games to help induce a relaxed mindset. 2. Train fast and get faster Not many sword fighting sources have ponderous complex actions but rather lots of simple actions done at the correct time and measure very, very fast. Want to be fast? Then recognise that what you are doing now is actually slow and do specific drills to improve your explosive speed. Just try this and see what I mean: Throw a glove in the air and do as many cuts as you can before it falls. Go as fast as you can while maintaining good body mechanic s. If you're loosing good mechani...
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Some thoughts on using the Guards in Meyer

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"you must not remain in one guard, but always move from one to another and transform one into another, it will behoove you to pay good attention to how these guards follow from one another" - Joachim Meyer " now as regards the postures, I would not have you remain long in any of them, since they are not invented or devised for this purpose...linger in that furthermost point for just a bit, almost only for the blink of an eye" - Joachim Meyer Meyer is clear that the "guard" postures are not points that you hold but points that you transition through while making your cut or thrust. They represent moments in time where if your opponent reacts and your intended action doesn't look so good, you can change your intent. They also communicate your intent to your opponent who will have to react, in fairly set ways, to your projected intent. This conversation is the Art.  The human brain is hard wired to spot something that isn't moving sudde...
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