This was some fantastic footage! I hope you do more of this kind of thing in the future. Understandably, it might not bring in the views like other types of videos. Regardless, thanks for the video! It's always really awesome to watch some sparring with commentary.
That's it, Mat. The advantages of olympic fencing is simply that many take the training very seriously in terms of time put in. Obviously it can't confer mysterious extra advantages. But the level of discipline will always confer an advantage - whatever the system.
Loved the concept, you managed to highlight MANY key points in the field of fencing, and more generally martial arts in my humble opinion, in an entertaining way. I tend to think that if my life was at stake, managing to be alive and safe at the end of the fight "could" be quite a win. Always on Darren's side, not that easy to be shorter than the one you are facing I can tell you. Quickness or flexibility are great but well some bloody inches
I really enjoyed this. It was actually really useful to see some freeplay-style sparing with military sabre. It's made me respect HEMA fencing all the more as well as reflect on the similarities with modern sport fencing.
You're absolutely right with the power generation, it reminded me of the head of our school, Borek Belfín. When he's striking, he doesn't seem to move a lot, but he actually strikes very hard, yet also very economically - only from the starting guard to the target, with no telegraphing. Btw thanks for some refreshing content :-) .
I have been doing olympic fencing for 12 years. Epee mostly and some sabre for fun. And now i've started HEMA since last year. I found that when i started sparring, i was really filling my lack of technical skill with a my good knowledge of timing and such, wich is very important too of course. And somehow, that allowed me to keep head with relatively good fencers (for lack of a better word). You brought some interesting commentary.
Thanks! I love sparring videos, and your commentary is interesting and insightful. I learned to fence with my left (off) hand when I was studying to teach - as my coach said, we have to teach our student's to deal with left-handers. I found it a fun challenge and really worked at getting adequate with my left hand. I particularly enjoyed fencing left handed against true left-handers... It all proved quite useful a year or so later when I sprained my right index finger, but could keep teaching and fencing for fun. I'd encourage anyone to train with both hands once they've got the basics down pretty solidly, at least occasionally. I think it improves ones general swordsmanship.
You are a joy to watch. Your spatial awareness is excellent, you maintain control of the distance and direction of engagement very well, and your footwork is *incredibly* precise. Granted, my observations are those of an untrained layman, but still. Highly enjoyable.
I found this video immensely useful, more breakdowns would be excellent -with no personal experience it's hard to unpack what's happening and how it relates to known historical styles/scenarios.
I waited for any time Darren landed a blow, and just announced in my own head: "That was a hard one." In his voice. Also, everyone fenced brilliantly! Or so it looks to me. Fun video! Thank you for sharing.
oh my, your comment about folks focusing on scoring instead of defense is identical to my elders' and teachers' woes about modern gatka competitions as well. made me chuckle
Enjoyed the commentary! Especially the comments about left handed fighting; as someone who is left handed for at least writing, I find that it is often overlooked. I definitely have trouble playing against left handed opponents (never done any HEMA, but for sports like ping pong) simply because I was the only one playing that was left handed and never had any practice against it.
I really enjoyed this style of video. Describing the action, warts & all, was very helpful as I learned as much from the fencers mistakes as their successes. Also, the lack of ambient sound & the higher point of view made it easier for me to follow the action. Regarding double hits: It's better to sleep in a whole skin.
.....WOW!!! IMHO: THIS LOOKS LIKE A GREAT TYPE OF "REAL TIME", PRACTICAL, MARTIAL ARTS TRAINING, AND, A GREAT FORM OF "HIGH INTENSITY INTERVAL TRAINING", COMBINED WITH PRECISION, WHOLE-BODY MOTOR SKILLS TRAINING!!!! BRILLIANT!!!! THANKS!!!!
Very enjoyable and informative. You should do more like this. In foil fencing I'd use the "linear" track to my advantage. I'd sit on the right side so I could easily parry, and sometimes the other person wouldn't line up right and if I push them back far enough they wont notice that they've gone off track. I thought of it like fighting on a narrow sideless bridge over The Pit of Eternal Peril.
I found the commentary made the video very interesting. Generally I find sparring videos are uninteresting, this could be whole series. I would like to see similar videos where the commentary was about the specific techniques or strategies being displayed, dissimilar styes, dissimilar weapons etc. Thanks for the excellent and varied content.
maybe a ruleset for a tournament to avoid people just taking hits, would be to have the points be like 'health points' that you lose each time your hit and they are persistent across the whole tournament, so that if you fight rough in the early rounds and just take a lot of hits but get through, you will run out of points by the finals and not be able to continue
Or maybe a global score so that a person who is hit less gets rewarded more. For example, instead of determining a winner in a duel and then considering who moves to the finals based on wins, have a fixed number of fights (or whatever the part of match from the beginning to the first hit is called) for each duel between a pair of competitors and then just sum the score. I do not know what system is currently used, though.
We did three hit points in our health bar. Arms/legs = -1 Torso = -2 Head = -3 If you lunged like a mad man for a leg without covering yourself, your opponent would konk you right on the head and win the match.
@@Ranstone This seems bad, since the person konking the other person on the head just let themselves get hit in the leg. Your system should encourage people to never, ever receive a hit from a sword if they can possibly avoid it.
This is actually the way dueling Fencing tournaments where held. Source hitandnotbehit.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/fencingepee_renaud1913_ptc17.pdf Its on page 14.
Really good analysis; as usual, I'm in agreement with all your points. I'm surprised some of these things aren't obvious to most. I normally wield left handed, which is quite enjoyable as it really throws off opponents. Switching back and forth even more so. Not sure why more people don't do it, actually.
It's funny you should mention the "rock, paper scissors" effect around the 18 minute mark. I once fought someone in longsword pools who was utterly defeated by me in pools (despite me losing to nearly everyone else), yet went on to win gold later on. In his case, the strategy was to hit absolutely as hard as possible, so I guess enough people just got frightened by this approach, but it was always a fendente/oberhau/hew type of overhead from the right cut, meaning a parry and riposte was simple.
You mentioned the audio was missing in the editing software. If you are shooting with a gopro and editing in Adobe Premiere, it is helpful to clear your media cache. Hope that helps.
Great video! We use sabres from Regenyei at the moment but it looks like yours are a bit lighter (or I just need to do more underarm training 🙄). What sabres do you use in sparring?
As a HEMA fencer and sport fencer I do quite like priority in theory. The issue that comes in modern fencing is how they determine priority. For example, who attacks first in saber doesn't matter, it's who is moving forward, allowing them to ignore attacks as long as they have priority. The speed and electric scoring methods also don't help. That being said, I'd be very open to the principles of priority in a modified form being implemented in some tournaments
Oh, the other problem is parries don't have to be solid, blade contact that appears vaguely like a parry is enough to gain priority even if they still hit you through it, so as long as your riposte is fast enough, you get a point for tapping their blade rather than actually preventing them hitting you
this was interesting. What about one from the fighters point of view (chest mounted go pro or something) and a commentary to their experience and decisions about when and why to attack in a certain way?
While watching this, and listening to you discuss various aspects of various styles and modern sports, and how they compare to, or contribute to, HEMA, a thought occurred to me. You might be in a particularly well suited position to comment on which "real" (meaning actually used historically for lethal combat) sword fighting/fencing styles are the most visually appealing from a cinematic perspective. In other words, while movies and TV absolutely must make some changes, for entertainment purposes, and they opt to make many other changes that are not so strictly required, there must certainly be a HEMA style which already lends itself the "best" to cinematic sword fight visuals, with the fewest cinematically motivated changes to the style. Which style is that, do you suppose?
@@Brigadier9 The longsword fencing I've seen is hard to follow. Usually both fighters move in and chain attacks really fast and then someone gets hit by something I, the viewer, couldn't even tell was an attack. The reason for this is that, as a two handed weapon, you need very little wind up to deliver a cut. There are some fast and tight sabre cuts in this video, but all of them involve a visually noticeable turn of the wrist. To answer the original question, I think rapier would be the best for movie fighting for a couple of reasons. Rapier fencers are incentivized to stay far away from one another, leaving lots of open space. It's easier to see the weapons moving through this open space than it is when they're close to the body. Additionally, because the blade is so long, cuts are a bit easier to see. I'm not sure if movie directors are anti-thrust, but thrusts seem to me to be easy to see and, unlike cuts, they don't come one after another really fast, so it's easy to keep track of who is thrusting and when. Maybe that's my sport fencing background. I also think rapiers historically led to a lot more nonlethal wounds than other types of swords, which fight choreographers love because a wound is a way to indicate who is winning, ratchet tension, and tell the story. Thrusts also seem to have less immediate stopping power, and arguably lead to more grappling. Certainly the long blade of the rapier is tough to use in a grappling situation. In this video, the grappling was limited to one guy grabbing the other's elbow for a second to open up a cut, but if they were using rapiers there might be more protracted grappling engagements where people go to the ground, lose weapons, etc. These things also help to tell a story really nicely, as evidenced by the fact that 90% of climactic movie fight scenes end with a grapple.
@@maxbachvaroff1967 watch Adorea Longsword Fight. I do actually agree with you when it comes to tournament longsword, but it can be adapted to look good.
I've been reading Burton's "A New System of Sword Exercise for Infantry" and trying to use some of his methods in my practice. Have you found anything useful in his this book?
Maybe instead of a "gaining points for hitting" system in tournaments, use a "losing points for getting hit" system. Like a video game or tabletop RPG, really. You have X number of points, you lose one each time you get hit, even if it's an after-blow. You win a match by having points left when your opponent hits zero. I can think of a few problems with this system too, but it might promote the right mentality.
The one comment I have is to have your back heel raised (more), like a sprinter. You'll notice when you lunge forward you have to raise your heel then push off. It's makes a much quicker lunge
Do you think it would be possible to run a tournament where, rather than awarding points every time someone lands a blow, everyone starts with a certain number of points, and gets points detracted when they're struck? Possibly based on the severity of the blow? You could even go so far as to give people a number of points for the entire tournament, so they're REALLY motivated not to be hit. Perhaps then ending every match after a loss of 10 points, or whatever number works. I think this could use some testing.
Well... neither do lots and lots of double-hits :-) No rules are perfect, and it is one way of dealing with doubles, which are forever a problem in tournaments, regardless of how we punish or score them unfortunately.
"Lazy" guards, and switching hands. That's the primary reason I do it, to rest my right arm. (Right handed.) In most fights, you can't really predict how long it will last, but in Sparring, you often know that you have X amount of minutes. So, I save my strength, and hopefully outlast more aggressive opponents. (Assuming they don't over-extend, and leave themselves wide-open, which is honestly how I seem to win most bouts.)
I'm aggressively defensive. I tend to move forward as much as possible, but with my guard up, and ready to react to any attempted strikes, it tends to put opponents off balance. (I also circle around, hoping to back them into bad positions.) I avoid hits as much as possible, and generally only go for serious strikes (Well, follow-through with feints. I feign a lot, but with the option to follow through if it's not countered well.) It's just the way I fight, generally not to the detriment of Offense, I like to think, but I generally err on the side of caution. Then again, I'm more of a swordmaker than a fighter, I have to say that. I'm generally not the best fighter on the field at any event. In fact, I can't remember a single one where I completely dominated other than casual pick-me-ups with boffers in the park. That's not really a fair field for assessment. Generally the people who show up have no effective defense whatsoever. Also, I'm more of a pole-arm fighter than a swordsman, and I suck with sabers.
One thing I have wondered about is the scoring systems we use in tournaments. Do they contribute to doubles and afterblows? Particularly the use of multiple point systems where the opponents continue to face each other even after one or both of them would have been incapacitated or killed in an occasion at sharps? What about a round robin tournament where bouts ends after 90 seconds [or a minute, or three minutes] even with no score? In such a tournament scoring is subtractive rather than additive. The combatant with the lowest score against them overall being the winner. [I hate to say this, but rather like golf.] In my hypothetical tournament the bout ends after, in the opinion of a majority of the directors, a disabling or immediately lethal strike has been made against either or both of the combatants. With all other strikes, even slow kills, declared as "nuisance" and not interrupting play? I would also declare the bout "done" with a disarm or a grapple which in the opinion of the directors had achieved control. Those being a loss for the combatant who is disarmed or brought under control. In the case of a grapple which became a mess, [Hard to define, but we know it when we see it.] my temptation would be to stop the bout and declare a loss for both, just like a double hit. My thought is that this might be a fun tournament. You get to fence a lot of people, in fact everyone else in the tournament. It would not necessarily be a hugely long tournament if you had three or four fields constantly in use. And it might tend to promote the defense first type of fencing that you and I would like to see. I would be interested in your reaction.
could an aspect of linear vs “rotational” combat be the length of engagement? In something like boxing, you can be very close and a single pivot step can give you a very different angle to an oponent, but the further you are from each other, the more negligable rotation will be. It will take multiple steps for one person at saber lung distance to get a relitively different angle, one that a static opponent can do much easier.
I wonder if it might make sense to score fights where getting hit loses you points rather than hitting the other person gaining you points. Say each person starts with 20 and the fight does not end until one person has reached 0. Count different types of hits and afterblows with the number of points you otherwise would, except now they subtract from your opponent's score rather than adding to yours. Add in a rule that the last hit must be uncontested so that it doesn't encourage suicide tactics when you know your opponent only has one hit left. Maybe the final score that determines ranking is the number of points remaining to a fighter at the end of each bout summed together rather than standard tournament elimination, or just use that score to break ties. Essentially I imagine it would emphasize not getting hit as the primary objective, but you still have to hit your opponent in order to progress past them. I'm sure there's some way to gamify this method in a way that detracts from the actual goal too, but it's an idea I had.
I have the same issue when switching to left hand, the left hand and arm I'm able to move and control quite well, but my foot movement goes to hell ends up very jon snow like lol.
I've noticed that el señor Easton is not a fan of HEMA pants. Why is that? Does he have a video in which he explains that? What kind of pants is he using?
A couple questions about sport sabre fencers entering HEMA sabre: First - how did they adjust to heavier blades? Second - were they ever caught off guard with opppnents using the point?
There should be a competition where you only do one bout per pair, double both out, if you hit without being hit you proceed to the next bout. So the only way you can win is by successfully hitting without being hit and by only having one bout you remove the exhaustion issues and you don’t get the chance to learn how your opponent does things like you can when you have multiple bouts, which I think is unrealistic.
Mr. Easton: Left handed dude here. Wasn't a problem in longsword, but how is it for sabre? (Or one handed swords generally?) Is this an issue in terms of those who are left handed all the time? Curious if you got any in your club, etc.
Can you dodge to the side when the attacker tries to attack you in a vertical line? And are you allowed to slash horizontally? and do takedowns when you get to close? because historically that's what a soldier would've done if they got to close.
I think you could use a health bar mechanic. Say you start with 100hp and each time you're hit you lose an amount of points based on where the hit occurred eg. 20hp for the head, 10hp for the torso, 5hp for legs and arms or whatever. That way double hits are lost points for both competitors and when double hits do occur it's unlikely that the person going for the quick strike to get a double will land as high scoring of a hit. I think eliminating doubles all together wouldn't be historically accurate as not every hit was an instakill and in that split second where you realise you can't stop the strike you may as well try to do some damage to the opponent at the same time. In high stakes situations you may even choose to take damage in order the land the critical strike. Imagine it's coming to end of a bout, fighter A has 20hp and the B only has 10hp. A goes for a fairly safe cut the the chest but B uses his arm to block the attack while stepping in with a thrust to the face, winning the match. I think that'd be really exciting to watch and easy to understand.
If you're looking at staring sabre and are brand new, I recommend (and I'm only chiming in and suggesting this because Matt has mentioned it in a video before, so I'd wager he might suggest the same) the Allanson-Winn saber book (pamphlet?) - there's a link to a free eBook version of it here. www.gutenberg.org/files/31214/31214-h/31214-h.htm It's got solid late-19th century instruction for the beginning sabreur - best of luck on your journey!
13:00 any suggestions on how to better incentivize defense in martial arts? It's something that's been bothering me, especially when teaching beginners, they often go for suicidal strikes and I want a good way to show them not to do that without just whaling on them every time.
Score both hits, but award extra points for the after blow. That makes it a guaranteed loss to always hit first but never defend. If you can't determine who hit last, no points for either.
@@scholagladiatoria You are the expert, but I would like to challenge your dismissal. My intent is to emphasizes defense over offense. The extra points are not a bonus to the second hit, but a penalty to the first, should his defense fail. It would hopefully teach that If you are too bold, you will lose. While one could concentrate on just getting the after blow, I'm not sure that would pay off in the long run. People will hopefully adapt. I'd like to see this tweak to any point system attempted, at least. It would at least be interesting to see how and if it changes people's attitudes about defense.
Hmm, I thought that leg hits were disallowed in olympic fencing because it evolved from military sport fencing that was done on horseback and they didn't want to hurt the horses, and that the myth was leg hits not being done in actual cavalry _combat._
Just to add, sabres intended for infantry officers tend to be a little lighter than their cavalry equivalents (eg. 800g compared to 950g), but sabres can have very curved, slightly curved or almost straight blades.
It's more to do with not breaking. The horse and speed delivers more than enough energy to a soft human target - the extra weight is only a bit and is really just a case of making the weapon a little tougher to withstand the potentially more violent impacts.
