Hi!

and greetings from Helsinki, where I’m writing this after a marvellous weekend teaching two seminars for Auri Poso’s (of episode 131 of the podcast) Gladiolus School of Arms. On Saturday we spent many hours marinating in sweat (it’s extraordinarily warm here: the temperature inside the hall got well into the mid-30s (Centigrade), which is like 100 degrees for Finns). The goal was to improve everyone’s freeplay skills, or rather, give them the tools to improve their skills themselves over the coming months.

As it happened, I went climbing the week before, and coming down off the wall in a perfectly normal fashion, managed to sprain a couple of ligaments in my lower back. It was ridiculous, actually. I got into position to start a climb that I’ve done before, changed my mind about making the first move (the hardest bit of the whole route), and put my feet back on the floor. Then went and lay down for a while with my back screaming at me. Absurd, but bodies do that kind of thing occasionally. Fortunately I had a session booked with Eki (of Fysio Sakura, in Helsinki) to follow up on my knee issue (which he seems to have fixed in our first session back in February), and we spent the full hour on my lower back instead.

This meant that I spent the whole day teaching people how to fence better, without being able to demonstrate much at all. And you know what? It didn’t matter a damn. Because (as we covered in day 2, How to Teach), it’s not about what I can do; it’s about what the students can do. And they were awesome!

The second day was even more fun (partly because my back was hurting less), as we delved into how to teach, using a simple set of heuristics to guide decision making. There was a lot of discussion about theory (such as how to develop a syllabus), but we got a lot of sword-time in too, looking at how to teach students to coach each other, and simultaneously teaching the teachers present how to coach their students better. All the attendees had access to an early copy of my forthcoming book Get Them Moving: how to teach historical martial arts, which helped establish some background, and also (top tip to my fellow writers) generated some very useful feedback on the draft, which I’ll be applying in due course.

Speaking of books, From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the wrestling techniques of Fiore dei Liberi is now wide on all stores (i.e. you can get it from Kobo, Amazon etc. if you want to). Of course I’d rather you got it from here:

​https://swordschool.shop/products/from-medieval-manuscript-to-modern-practice-wrestling-hardback​

But no pressure :)

This back stuff has buggered my training routines of course- I’ll be staying off explosive kettlebell swings for a while. If you’re interested in my general approach to recovering from injuries, you can find it here: https://guywindsor.net/2018/04/recovering-from-injury-six-useful-ideas/ I wrote it the last time I hurt my back (much much worse than this time), in 2018, but the principles hold true for any injury.

Madison seminar reminder:

While I’m over in the states in July I will be doing a couple of seminars, starting with Improve your Freeplay, in Madison WI on July 6th and 7th, in which we’ll spend a day improving your, you guessed it, freeplay skills with longsword and rapier (a day of each!). You can find the seminar details and registration instructions at guywindsor.net/madison​

This week on The Sword Guy: Could HEMA ever be big in China? With Zeng Yang

Today’s episode is with Zeng Yang, who is a doctoral student at the Shanghai Sport University, where he is pursuing a PhD in the history of European swordsmanship from the 14th to the 17th centuries. He is a lifelong martial artist having begun training in Wushu at the age of eight. His master’s degree is a comparison of Duan Bing and HEMA.

In our conversation, we talk about the spread of Chinese martial arts to the Western world, through things like kung fu movies and immigration, but the question is, why the same hasn’t happened in the other direction? How could HEMA become more popular in China? We hear about a new term, Bing Ji, which combines all steel weapons in an exciting new form of cross-cultural communication.

You can find the episode here:

yours,

Guy

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