I.33 Sword and Buckler - Technical Sparring

Hi,

While I love some full gear sparring to test myself under stress, I have found out that I improve as a fencer much more in low gear and slower, technical sparring. It gives me a chance to work skills I don’t quite have yet in an environment that is a bit more non-cooperative than drills. I can practise for a longer period of time without tiring and it allows me to work on my form and footwork much more.

This might very well be a personal thing, but give it a try anyway and start even slower than the following footage. A good rule of thumb is, that you always have to be able to describe what happened after a bout and don’t need to rely on your panic reactions. Occasionally chaos will ensue anyway, but as you will see Stephan and I never double on any bout and we are training for about 1,5 years now with me having prior experience in reenactment.

Many thanks to Roland Warzecha who introduced me to this type of training and if you want in on the fun I recommend the Berlin Buckler Bouts to you which are taking place twice a year at the end of May and November – so actually the upcoming weekend as I record this. These are hosted by Twerchhau e.V. and Roland and consist pretty much exclusively on technical sparring in a friendly environment.

As for the displayed fencing you hopefully see that Stephan and I always try to occupy the centre with our sword and / or buckler. It forces our opponent to take a detour that gives us a time frame or tempo to strike. While doing so we need to react to different signals in the bind and try to use them to our advantage. On some occasions I’ve written the name of the technique in the subtitles but hopefully you are able to see, what we are trying to achieve.

As said before, this is just one training method and should not be mistaken for actual fighting.

Take care
Martin

[RKcousins]

This to me truly exemplifies I.33. I would be very interested to see a video of your explanations for some more debatable techniques such as durchtritt

[jasonbaldwin]

I have recently found your channel, and I really like what you are doing: the analysis, the open mind, actively looking for feed back and putting in clips from other content providers to show different ideas and perspectives, even when you disagree. All of that is amazing.
That being said it saddens me to see this kind of sparring for several reasons.
1. It uses almost entirely in long point, when there are seven guards. To be fair some of the guards seem (in my experience) to likely be transitory positions that are the end positions of cuts delivered with power. But guards 2 (blade over right shoulder), 4 (blade overhead), 5 (blade to right side, point forward) and 6 (to the breast, point forward or up) are all positions from which several different effective attacks can be made.
2. I33 stresses over and over again that shield knocks are a key part of the system. It is impossible to do a significant shield strike if the shield is already at or near maximum extension. Thus if a combatant has their buckler fully extended most of the time they are incapable of using it for one of its primary purposes.
3. Power is generated by weight transfer and acceleration. When fighting with sword arms forward at (or near) maximum extension it is not possible to generate significant power, so any hits will be of between trivial to minimal effectiveness.
4. I believe the codex shows the depth of finishing blows by showing the point being extended past the target. In my opinion this means that thrusts should be landing with enough force and extension to pierce the head or torso with a significant portion of the blade through the target area. Likewise slashes/haus are shown striking with the center of percussion (about 1/3 down from the tip typically). Thus long range attacks which can barely reach the head or body (the most frequent targets in the codex) at full extension will not be able to land with the force required to get these results.
5. The entire point of learning to fight in a historical context is to use the lessons for self defense. It is reasonable to assume that mutual practitioners of a given codex will be spending most of their time attempting to murder each other. The codex focuses on bind based combat, and so the illustrations and text show and describe this. So many practitioners seem to assume that there are no other options and try to use this exclusively, which in my opinion is artificially limiting, leaves out the interactions of all the obvious basic strikes and thrusts from the various guards, and at best mimics a limited subset of actions used by people who train only in the given style.
6. In my experience people who train using power and speed are far more effective against people who do not train with power and speed. Put another way, it is much easier to "turn down the volume" than to "turn it up".
7. Modern gear allows intense practice under safe conditions. Not using it, even under slow and gentle conditions, leads to less realistic results. I fully use slow drill and slow practice to work on specific techniques, but using masks and gloves for light contact drills and sparring only increases the utility of such actions. My practice with partners time has limits, I want to maximize my use of that time, and in my opinion that means using appropriate gear.

This is given with intent of starting discussion and working collaboratively to find ideal training methods. I hope we can discuss this all extensively. If my tone comes across as hostile, that is not my intention, rather please take any hint of that as passion for the topic rather than hostility.

And finally please keep putting out videos, I look forward to exploring your channel over time!