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Club Politics: It's Not About You

What's All This For, Anyway? Virtually none of us earn our living from doing HEMA. Being good at HEMA doesn't necessarily make you a good person either. So what is the point of doing it? There certainly are more effective ways to get fit. There are other combat sports out there if you want medals. It's certainly not going to make you look cool in the eyes of society. We do it because it's fun, right? Even in stuffy koryu circles, we admit we do classical martial arts at least in part because it's fun. But is there more than the funsies? We're In This Together Is there a deeper purpose to our training? Certainly not for everyone, but we all have our own reasons for doing what we do. For a bit of perspective from other martial arts, the stated purpose of Kendo is to "discipline the human character through the application of the principles of the Japanese Sword". Jigoro Kano, the founder of Judo, said its purpose was "to strengthen body by practicing...
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No, You Don't Know More than the Masters

Check Your Ego at the Segno It's OK, People Have Always Had Their Heads Up Their Butts There's been an interesting phenomenon in HEMA lately. OK, it's not lately. It goes back to the dawn of our modern discipline. Some practitioners and instructors have the idea that they know more about swordsmanship than the masters they purport to study. My first instructor (admittedly a very good sport fencer who decided to take up HEMA) would say things like "Don't read the manuals, I've read them all and will show you what you need to know", and "You have to trust your own intuition and knowledge rather than the manuals". Admittedly two contradictory statements from one person, but I'm not making this up. He also told me that in order to interpret the manuals you had to be "a special person, and I don't think you have that". At least he was right about me not being special. I'm not special, neither was he, and neither are you. The good...
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On the Sportification of HEMA

Tournaments Are Not Bad Things Yes, I've fought in lots of tournaments Let's not for a moment think that I'm in the "too deadly to spar" camp. I enjoy tournaments, and have fought in enough of them since about 2008 to have 25 or so medals hanging up in my closet collecting dust. Tournaments have had an incredibly positive effect on raising the skill level of HEMA practitioners over the years. Even for those who aren't tournament fighters, the lessons learned by their competitive counterparts help improve their club's interpretations of the techniques described in the manuals. And that's what we're all about, right? Reconstructing the arts described in the manuals as well as we possible can, yeah? Admittedly, some arts are basically completely reconstructed already, such as Italian rapier. Given that so much of rapier was preserved in Classical Epée, it was a fairly straightforward task, or so I'm told. I haven't done rapier since 2007 or so...
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The Beginning of Your HEMA Journey

Inaugural Post: Where to Begin? The First Step Most of us start our HEMA journey with hopes of being an elegant, effective, and impressive sword fighter. We hope we will learn quickly and impress our instructors and classmates. We hope we hope to win tournament gold one day. Some of us do just that, but most of us mere mortals don't. Things are tricky, the lingo is hard to remember, and some stuff just takes a while to figure out. In our first tournament we might not even win a single match. And that's perfectly OK. If this were easy, everyone would do it. There are a few rare, talented individuals to whom everything comes easily, but measuring ourselves by their abilities is never helpful. There is only one person you need to compete with, and that's the person you were yesterday, and you won't even win that competition every day.  That's also perfectly OK. But we have to start somewhere, and there is only one piece of advice that truly matters: never give up. Just...
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