Academic – Martial – Education
Most fighters with some familiarity with German longsword know Meyer’s cutting diagram; even if their group turns their nose up at Meyer’s “sporting” style, they probably cut their teeth on the diagram. It’s a simple concept of interlocking rings, where…
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I have an incurable disease. It’s not going to kill me, but it’s already made my life miserable and promises to complicate my life going forward. This is going to be a bit of a rambling post as I work…
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It’s always nerve-wracking, spending 10 months organising a visit from an overseas visitor, and then waiting for something to go wrong at the last minute. It gets even worse when you can’t be the one to collect your visitor from…
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I’d like to think I’ve done a decent cross-section through the HEMA tournament in Europe. At the same time, I’ve been organising tournaments bimonthly to yearly in South Africa. I’ve spent a lot of time fighting, judging and organising tournaments,…
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Most of what we train in HEMA revolves around one-on-one combat, but it is instructive to train multiple opponent scenarios every now and then, Off the top of my head, here’s a few reasons to do so: – Fighting multiple…
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It’s an age-old problem- how do you motivate and guide somebody to get better at what they do? It’s an issue that comes up in my day job as a university lecturer and my night job as a martial arts…
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I enjoy sparring, but I love tournament fighting. There is something about being in a competitive situation, with something riding on the outcome. In the past, I played rugby and soccer, and in the now, I hit people with swords….
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It was an odd experience, coming back to Europe in 2010 after not being involved in the international HEMA scene for 5 years. Whereas the early HEMAC meetings in Dijon were massively polygot (and still are), ranging from reconstructions of…
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Something a little less technical today, as I work on surviving the winter cold and the last of my marking. I’ll try get another chunk of Thibault’s longsword and a piece on Meyer’s First Device out over the weekend. Over…
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