HEMA Sparring - Minimal Gear? Slow motion? Full speed?
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- Опубліковано 6 сер 2024
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Interesting discussion.
Thanks!
For the reasons you stated in the video I agree with you that a mix is important. However, I find full gear full speed more important as it's where we test what we practice best.
Yes, exactly
But I feel like the main disadvantage of using protection is, it makes you unafraid of the sword of the enemy, and in a way, it makes you confident in doing things you likely wouldn't in a life or death fight
@@jacobharris3208 you likely wouldn’t participate in a life and death duel in the first place, but if one would, it would probably prefer to be able to hit with intention.
Every time I fence in an environment where people fence only, or mainly, with minimal protection I always end up more than 40% of the fights with clean, straight thrusts, the most basic of the actions. It already happened far more than once while traveling for seminars. To me, it means something.
Another important factor to keep in mind- In Austin Texas, if you are practicing outside, that means multiple months of practicing in weather well over 100 degrees, and wearing a full jacket is gonna be more harmful to you than getting some extra bruises on your forearms
Bloßfechter (in training) here...
We train without protective gear from the first moment onwards. No we are not suicidal - far away from that. In our school, we have far less injuries than in other hema Clubs. Our advanced students are sparring with full speed, while remaining maximum control over their steel and the situation. Best of all, they all know their limits and adjust to the "slower" fencing partner.
What lots of hema practitioners seem to forget - your opponent is a partner and friend.
What are the pros of training without gear or with a fencing mask at max:
- learning to respect the steel and partner
- better control over your actions
- higher focus on applied defense
- higher precision
- focus on actual technique rather than pure strength or speed
- better feeling for tempo
- learning how to adjust speed
- more fluid fencing as a goal
- learning limits
- better understanding of Mensur.
- more corrections from your instructor, because errors are more visible
Cons:
- more corrections from your instructor, because errors are more visible
- higher effort
- slower progress
- higher frustration levels, because you know what and when you did something wrong
I trained without gear for a couple years, It has too much limitations for me to be appealing. I bet others can enjoy it anyway, but it’s not interesting to me anymore now!
That said, I have to say that most of the pros you mentioned are a little biased hehe! Just to mention one, it’s harder to have a better understanding of tempo when no one can thrust into the opponent actions on tempo.
I'm sorry, but almost of your points are completely false. Usually the opposite is true:
- learning to respect the steel and partner
People who rarely or never fence at higher speeds and intensities will never properly understand the forces involved, and usually lack the necessary respect as a result. This is one of the reasons why low-gear results in MORE injuries in my experience
- better control over your actions
In truth, you'll never learn to properly control your sword because you won't use it at speed enough. You have to practice at speed in order to develop control and precision when going fast.
- higher focus on applied defense
This is untrue. It's just easier to defend. You won't learn proper defence like that.
- higher precision
Again, it's just easier, but you can't learn to be precise at speed that way.
- focus on actual technique rather than pure strength or speed
No, you are learning false versions of techniques that will no longer work when you speed things up. I used to do more low gear/slow sparring and it heavily damaged my technique.
Strength and speed and their proper application are an important part of martial arts. Even the historical sources tell us this. Denying this is a sign of Bullshido.
- better feeling for tempo
You get no proper feeling for tempo because all things related to timing are falsified by the slower pace
- learning how to adjust speed
You are not learning that, you're instead exclusively learning how to fence in slow motion. Real speed-related mix-ups only work when fencing at a decent pace.
- more fluid fencing as a goal
This doesn't even make sense. Fencing at speed with real momentum will result in real fluid movements. Fencing in slow motion won't.
- learning limits
There's no difference here between low and high gear.
- better understanding of Mensur. (Mensur = distance/spacing in German)
Incorrect, your idea of spacing is falsified because you're not fencing at proper speeds, which matters a lot in this area.
- more corrections from your instructor, because errors are more visible
Believe me when I tell you, the corrections your instructor is giving you probably don't apply at all at higher speeds.
Cons:
- more corrections from your instructor, because errors are more visible
- higher effort
You're using less athleticism, so the opposite is true.
- slower progress
Learnign wrong things will hamper your progress, yes.
- higher frustration levels, because you know what and when you did something wrong
I would also be frustrated if my training was still leading me in a bad direction.
I'm sorry if this sounds mean, but people in my club used to think the same way your club did, and we learned it was wrong the hard way.
do you by any chance have any videos of the sparrings of the more advanced students in your club?
Do you perform thrusts ? For me it's the most obvious annoying thing when sparring with low gear (I still do it occasionaly).
Mechanichally I feel that thrusts need to go into the target a bit, so thrusting the torso without a jacket is really complicated.
@@retohaner5328 Historical sources didn't have gear, why would you need it to perform the techniques correctly? Also you can still spar at full speed when unarmored, you just need to actually have control of your sword. And I'm going to heavily disagree with "you need to do it at speed to get that control", you build up from slow to fast. If you are starting out going fast you are in all likelihood doing it wrong.
It also doesn't help that you physically cannot do some techniques with gear on. For example, half of the plays in Fiore with grappling no longer work because the gloves are so damn bulky that they just block you.
"Because chaos exists -sparring is chaotic, fighting is chaotic- sometimes doubles just happen".
- Federico Malagutti
Well made video, thank you for going over this.
For me the main potential usage of 'slow minimal gear' sparring is as a starting point for people who do not feel relaxed in general sparring in gear.
For many people a good way to get to general sparring in gear is to have them do drills that get more 'aliveness' over time (whether one uses a 'CLA' approach or not),or through use of particular games(kind of like very very specific forms of focused sparring in a way), etc. but for some that can still be hard to do.
However having them start slow with minimal gear, then add gear on, then add speed etc. bit by bit over time tends to get nearly everyone ok with regular sparring.
And while doing minimal gear sparring can be very very fun as well(which is also something people tend to not talk about enough as a factor) a lot of folks oversell it's usefulness to actual skill development,what you did is a fairly balanced video on the topic that goes over both aspects of it.
Thank you for that.
Another option is go with only a mask and the SPES foam swords, you can go full speed and no risk of injury. We are using them in our club for warming up and parry-riposte exercises and they do the job very well. I agree with you that it is not a question of gear or not, buy mentality, train with respect for your weapon and your sparring partner and always keep in mind that the instrument that you have in your hands could be deadly.
Also, about figthing "careless"or "sportive" opponents, well , there are even mentions of them in the treatises , the "buffel" ones in german and in spain the "aporreadores". If your fencing is not capable of dealing with them, your fencing sucks, not your opponent.
Great content, as always
Foam is fun but has other problems of realism, and thrusts are anyway still a problem. But yeah, it’s an interesting playful training activity, agreed
Of course, it is only another tool to train :)
But why are you saying thrust are a problem with foam weapons?
@@FedericoMalagutti
@@salabatallador the plastic part which keeps the foam sword “rigid” can be a problem sometimes. It depends of course in which way we are thrusting: As a riposte in the bind? It’s fine! As a fast attack from out of measure? Meh!!
When my friends and I spar, we often wear only HEMA gloves (fingers break easily) and goggles. We use homemade practice swords (that I make from pvc and foam rubber with weights inside to give close to proper mass and balance).
If we’re using steel practice swords, we wear helmets but no body protection. We get might end up bruised a bit, but that’s okay.
Mind you, I am not in a club. This is with my friends and we’ve been doing this for many years.
Definitely an approach to training. Of course it limits a lot the possibilities of the fencers, especially the thrusting ones, a thrusts properly landed with a blunt sword or Feder, be it flexible or not, is extremely dangerous.
Very true. Pulling our thrusts is necessary, with the steel blunts especially. For me, I prefer that to full-contact with armor or going unarmored but being forced to concentrate on caution instead of the fight.
you boys are a club already. lets choose a cool name
Excellent points. Overall, my understanding is that sport science tells us that doing an action slowly is very different from doing it quickly, different muscles, and in the case of sparring, different intentions, techniques, and results. I think slow sparring has too many problems to be a reliable training method most of the time, and I find people may start to rely on it because it gives them a false sense of skill.
Exactly!!! I experienced this first person, being on the false sense of skill part.
In my experience, minimal gear usually isn't a good idea for sparring. Granted, I come from a different background (Sidesword), and I think Sidesword is even less suited to minimal gear than the longsword, where it has more of a place. My club used to do much more slow/minimal gear sparring in the past and has mostly moved beyond it for both safety and effective training reasons.
The most important thing is that the idea that minimal gear reduces injury is absolutely false in my experience. The vast majority of scary injuries I've seen and heard of happened due to a lack of appropriate gear. Not just the occasional hand injuries (even a slow moving sword will really mess up a poorly protected hand), but worse stuff, including other broken bones and rolled/spatulated tips piercing skin. There was a bad incident in Germany involving a sabreur getting stabbed through the forearm during "responsible" slow sparring this year. He was incredibly lucky that nothing important was hit.
Compromising safety to make sure that people "properly fear" hits is also unbelievably stupid and will inevitably go very wrong.
Slow sparring also tends to teach you bad muscle memory in terms of weapon control, because the physics of how a sword moves changes heavily when you move a sword slowly compared to quickly. It also gives you false feedback in terms of tempo, distance, etc. I have also found that slow sparring has taught me false things in terms of how binding actually works in practice.
This all leads to horrible interpretations of the source material.
I find that many people who hate on full gear fencing and call it "ahistorical"/"unartful", etc. frankly don't want to put in the necessary effort in terms of fundamental fencing skills and fitness in order to be able to fence decently at higher intensities. The gear itself is often a secondary matter.
With regards to problems that gear might present, the important thing is simply to get your gear right. Good fitment makes all the difference for things like mobility.
As for when it simply is too hot, I find it better to change the weapon to something that is safe at a higher intensity in less gear. For people like me who mostly fence with one-handed swords, Dussacks are a great (and incredibly fun) tool for this case. There are other options for longsword as well, such as padded swords and modified Shinai.
I'd like to finish by saying I'm not some super-intense hyper-aggressive tournament fencer, I simply think there's a certain baseline of speed/intensity that you need to reach for sparring to be properly productive. You can't reach that point safely in minimal gear.
I completely agree with you. I still think minimal gear spar is a good exercise to do once in a while, with good control and slow pace. But it should never occupy more than, say, 10% of sparring time.
there is so much to discuss on this point.
in the end its all about your goals.
and in the end everyone will fence differntly if you put the "sparring"frame diffently.
if we would fence naked with HEMA-Feders then I would fence differently maybe less "stiff" ;)
or naked with sharp sword would, or shard swords with HEMA-Gear or Sharps-Swords with Full-Plate.
In the End we do not use the full-range of HEMA itself. Mordhaus and pokes to the eye with the crossguard are not trained...
i personally have more success sparring minimal gear so i like it much more 😅
in full gear people fence much much differently. We did some stick rubbered sparring no gear at all with head target and its so different, it feels like two different world. Head automatically dodges attacks is what I learned, and when you whack someone once, suddenly they start fencing much less aggressive, so its actually easier to hit them and not just double because they dont care.
Hehehe, that’s exactly what I explain in the video. People tend to go this way because it feel more satisfying and more “right” or “real”. In no gear or minimal gear is the environment which makes you “do better things”, while instead if you consider every social violence situation ever existed and now existing, it is the opposite.
a while ago i saw a video from a korean hema/martial arts channel called weaponist where they were sparring without ANY equipment (absolute chads) and they were going at it fairly aggressively, although with some control. it seemed to me these two were very experienced and definitely not something i would advise doing unless both are very skilled and know and respect each other well enough. and even then, it's very risky.
I’ve seen it too, I am, admittedly, a little bit skeptical about that video. Some exchanges are, in my experience, clearly the fruit of a sparring exchange, while others have various artifacts which moves away the action from sparring more and more. Such as the opponent freezing and stopping every action, or the absence of commitment in the action of one of the fencer together with, instead, the 100% commitment of the action of the other fencer, this latest case which happens like 5-6-7 times throughout the video, and the use of speed-up footage during certain part of certain actions, suggests me this:
Those guys trains, for sure, without equipment some times (I did it too back in the days, you can still find some of my old sparring videos on the channel). At the same time, some actions are partially organized, not necessarily staged, it may simply be that they trained a Meyer Stucke and they were reproposing it fluently in sparring with the partner following the rhythm more or less consciously.
It’s a good video, though. And the guys are skilled. There are anyway some weird things I notice, based on my experience at least.
Edit: I rewatched the video, out of curiosity and to be fair in my judgement. Some of the artifacts I pointed out above are clearly explained by them in the video as safety rules. It actually reminded me a lot when I was training sword and buckler with no gear, but thanks to this rules they can speed up more during certain situations.
It’s interesting to me, but I also find it relatively risky and far from being a good training tool for a club. I would do it with the one or two fencers I trust the most in terms of control among my training partners only.
@@FedericoMalagutti yes i did remember seeing some artifacts as you called them like seeming hesitant sometimes, so i also went back to take another look and it felt more like safety measures as they also pointed out. not something i would attempt, not without any protective gear at all, even if both parties knew each other's combat styles well and were cool headed enough. accidents do happen
@@badrequest5596 definitely, agreed.
A little OT question from me, maybe for future video. Every cut can either go from back to front (ending in posta longa) or across the enemy (ending in the opposite posta; say fendente to dente di cengiaro or coda longa). When to do each variant? I tend to prefer the first type, because it tends to be more annoying for opponent and you tend to be more covered. Also when my attack is parried, I end in a possition similar to where I wanted to be anyways. I don't feel comfortable with the wide sweeping cuts that drive you sword away from centerline.
However these wide cuts are clearly something that is meant be used, and Fiore seems to like the ending positions of them (posta di donna, coda longa etc.). Why and when to prefer wide cuts over the back-to-front ones? How to deal with disadvantages of ending with sword behind you while being near to the opponent?
I made a short yesterday on this topic
@@FedericoMalagutti What a coincidence! I don't like shorts much, so I ignore them.
OK, I watched it, and yet I think it would deserve more elaboration. You gave two reasons to use wide arc attack - better cutting and more useful in some combinations. But better cutting mechanics are of no use in competition, and the combination you have shown can be done with pushed cut as well. The question remains the same - why would I do the combination you have shown with arc cut instead of pushed one?
@@PetrKavan I’ll expand more in the future.
@@FedericoMalagutti Great! Looking forward to it!
In my opinion.
You should have the aim of what you are training for in mind... if fighting sports tournaments is the aim and highpoint of your practise, then i agree.
If you are training to replicate a period in history, then i would disagree.
Activities souch as cutting with sharps.. hitting pells etc. Is in my opinion also an aspect that needs to go along with any form of sparring.. if you want to qualify it in terms of "realness".
Many fast hits full of intent and power would not nescesarily deliver alot of great quality damage in terms of cutting etc.
Oh yes, interesting activities for sure. Useful to recreate certain aspects of practice to an extent (cutting practice in the west isn’t really a thing we know, we “imported it” from the east), the pell for sure, and solo drills too. But is not what I’m talking about in this video.
Your message is anyway interesting to me because it shows this “geared spar -> no brainer sport” which I’ve been part of years ago. I funny enough work more on sources now than years ago lol!
That said, you are right talking about different objectives and goals. At the same time your statement about damage is a little bit weird, getting hit by a 1.5 kg crowdbar is always damaging, especially on head, hands, arms and leg articulations. The sharpness is a welcome plus, and the precision is too on top of all of this. Training to use a weapon better is the goal, but a weapon is a weapon even in kid’s hands.
Today I have found this video: ua-cam.com/video/twE-zdUkB_U/v-deo.html about importance of "playful" sparring in MMA, and martial arts in general. It immediatelly remainded me of your minimal gear sparring, and even more of I.33 sparring. I am not much interested in I.33, however even I noticed that training tend to be light, flowing and playful, because of the nature of the manual. Maybe this way of training gives trainees even more then just necessary safety.
Oh, I practice Kick Boxing (and Muay Thai) since more than 2 years now, on a regular basis, once or twice per week. And we spar in a light and playful manner 99% of the time, only when someone has to fight he goes for a very small number of higher intensity matches.
Now, the playful spar can also be at higher speed but this is more for people who are able the exercise control over their gestures, not me now, hehe.
But there is a radical difference between MMA and HEMA. High intensity MMA sparring is far, far more dangerous, for injuries in general, and for brain damage on the long term.
HEMA hurts sometimes, yes, and it certainly at the highest intesity levels it will also create brain damage, but comparatively is far lower.
MMA athletes have to be able to fight at 100%, they can't risk injuries in training, and so playful sparring has to be the main way of sparring, if not almost the only way of doing it, especially before the fight.
The other skills, such as exercising force while striking, and developing a good transition between striking and grapling at higher speeds, can be isolated with pad works and specific trainings.
But believe me, if high intensity sparring in MMA would not have all this risks and disadvantages, everyone would go hard all the time.
@@FedericoMalagutti Yeah, but that's generally the point of training. If full-on fighting would not be risky and dangerous, then of course it would be best to always fight full-on. The question here is how to best prepare for full-on fight which is dangerous. My idea always was "the closer to reality the better". And the video is saying that no, light playful sparring may be better. Not only because of injuries, but also because it eliminates sense of danger, so the fight starts to be a game, and the brain reacts differently to it.
But I see your point - modern gear can make HEMA quite safe, it eliminates most of risks, so we can train almost full-on. HEMA full-on fight then becomes a game - almost risk free, so the brain behaves as in the game. There is nothing similar for MMA, so they have to train lightly and playfully to create that "game" situation. And the fencers in middle-ages, without the propper gear, had to do the same thing.
What an irony that fighting with long dangerous weapons can today be done safer then fighting with bare hands! But that is the nature of the thing I guess. A gunfight was the first to be made absolutely safe (paintball, airsoft) while in reality it would be the most dangerous of them all.
@@PetrKavan exactly