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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Kit Review: Superior Fencing "16th C. HEMA Jacket 800 N"

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Kit Review: Superior Fencing "16th C. HEMA Jacket 800 N" These jackets have become pretty much the standard jackets of my club and, at the last count, I think over half of our club members now use them. As far as I can see they also seem to be very common throughout the Australian clubs as well. However, most of the orders for our Club have taken place as collective efforts and one observation is that it definitely seems like Superior Fencing handles these larger orders better than an individual order (see below). One thing to observe about Superior Fencing is that they seem to have designs that are surprisingly similar to other designs on the market but better made and with better touches. Possibly this is an advantage of making each one individually, they can better incorporate upgrades and improvements as they go. This jacket reminds me of a Neyman Fencing Renaissance jacket but it has improvements like ventilation grommets etc. Finally, I've had this jacket fo
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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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