Happy stabby days.

 

Here as you can see, is the beautiful Jacksons Lane class. This class is dedicated to longsword for the 

next few months, these chaps are practicing counters from the Iron Door. 

The wonderful Monday class. Lots of rapier and lots of work; here we are going through the

suppressing cut from Meyer, this is mainly for sidesword but I feel that the boundary between that and rapier is a lot more fluid than some would have you believe.

 

The same counter to an attack from the right. 

More Meyer next week, then who knows, maybe a little Thibault...

What went went on.

Another fantastic week. insanely full on in the best of ways. So what did we find out?
Playing retro computer games with people armed with sticks can be amazing fun, Pong and space invaders being my favourites. I will shoot some video for training games but to sum space invaders up... All the students bar one stand at one side of the hall. The remaining student chooses one to attack, and may keep striking until he gets a blow of the staff in killing the invader. However all the time he is attacking one of the other invaders may walk slowly to the base wall which "if" he notices the base student must intercept and fight back. We spent and entire evening playing these games and although they may sound childish they improved everyone's standard quite well as ultimately you are either fighting or watching someone else exploit weak spots and successful attacking strategies.

Sickles are awesome.
You can see the video here if you haven't already, but a more rippy nasty weapon you could not hope for. A fast and clever system too that makes a karambit look like a toothpick.

8 foot staves are quite nippy.
Burn night was a mix of rapier, longsword and longstaff, but by far my favourite exercise was a series of thrusts parries and disengage/re assaults. This may be our next video. Great stuff from Mair.

The best way to get the right energy to do a technique is to try to train something else (see pic).
I mention this a lot in class, and it is fairly hard not to do. The nature of a correct technique is that it is the right thing at the right time.
Through unconscious sabotage (usually I think a result of trying naturally to prevent what we know is going to hit us, over and over and over again) we unconsciously set up the wrong pressure or direction in a counter or assault. So if for example I want to receive a wide parry that opens the opponent to a blow on the other side of their blade, my partner will often leave the blade point more forward, making it ill advised to disengage to the other side and safer to stay on the same. If I wish to perform a doubling, two strikes on the same side of the sword, I would require a more forward dominant pressure, sure as hell my partner will push so far to the side that it is nigh on impossible and utterly impractical to carry out that move.
Often the hardest part in any drill is understanding and delivering the pressure that makes a particular response fluid and natural.
So the picture at the top was meant to be a grapple from beneath my blade, the slight difference in pressure made that approach incorrect but this technique above the sword (we trained a week or so back) perfect.