How to Train Technique

These short videos are the inspiration for our ideas on how to train a given technique:

Duke Gaston, Duke University:

After watching those videos many, many times we found some older, more in depth videos of the (possibly) complete set of drills:

These Gaston/Baldar drills have inspired us to work all of our initial training for a specific technique into 2 person drills.

The fact that Baldar is right handed and Gaston is a lefty seems to be the reason that they do the sword drills in both hands, but it has an added benefit for us florentine guys; it helps train both hands equally.

So the way we've been training is generating drills for every technique that we want to use, by following these steps:

• Think of a technique, eg moulinet to the head, that you want to improve
• Establish what stance and position you would throw this shot from
• With a partner, at 1/4 speed, do the technique once and complete the technique
• Do the technique again, at 1/4 speed, and have the partner do the corresponding move; eg tent block for the moulinet to the head.
• Make sure you both go back to your starting stance and position
• Then the partner does the technique, and you do the block.
• That is one loop of the drill
• Continue in this loop at 1/4 speed, subtly playing with variations of the strike and block, so that you find the optimal way to perform the technique
• If it's a single sword drill, once that arm gets dead tired, do the drill in the other hand.
• Both partners should be thinking and commenting on their own strike and block, but also each others' as well. One really good way to do this is to film yourselves, and watch the footage afterwards; making sure to decide on what you need to work on next time.

Once you have a set of established drills, you can mix them up, move around while doing the drill, play around with the range, and try them at full speed in armour.

Not only does this sort of drilling help improve techniques you already know, it helps you to always be thinking of new techniques; and new ways to use existing moves.

We've found that drilling techniques this way allows us to deliberately learn techniques a lot quicker than before.

Florentine Instructional videos

Here's a few florentine instructional videos

Duke Erin

Duke Fuyusuru Tadashi

The Duke Tadashi videos show a style closer to our own, but the Duke Erin videos contain some interesting ideas that I'm trying to incorporate into my own style too.

Brion of Bellatrix

Information from over the seas is oft hard come by, however word of the deeds of Brion of Bellatrix has reached our shore. I was interested to discover this youtube video of Brion demonstrating pell work.

In particular there is some interesting advice here regarding training with two swords using a 'parallel' method. In this drill, one does the same movements of their preferred drills (on a pell or partner) however instead of striking with one sword, the practitioner uses both swords tracking adjacent at the same area of the pell (or partner). naedyr and myself have recently discovered this technique independently and it has highlighted both our common mistakes and some new and interesting shot possibilities. We aim to upload a video of some of these drills.

Introduction

Greetings all,

This is the first time I have been involved in a blog so excuse my poor blogging skills. This is a joint blog currently run by myself (Gib) and Naedyr from the SCA who have developed an interesting in honing our skills at competing in the SCA ruleset for heavy fighting. In particular the SCA household (Reverie) that we participate in has predominantly florentine (two-sword wielding) fighters. We are unashamedly unapologetically speaking from an SCA bent. With that said, some excellent online resources for SCA heavy fighting or Fechtbücher are (and have been for some time) available, most notably:

House Bellatrix

Duke Gaston 's Res Ducis

and more historically any of the Fechtbücher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechtbuch#German_Fechtb.C3.BCcher

While these resources focus on diverse areas of fighting for sword and shield or two handed weapon combinations, very little has been said regarding florentine fighting. There are a few reasons why this may be so.

Florentine itself is a somewhat contentious issue with little historical evidence indicating that two swords were infact used at all in the context of battle or sport between 600 and 1600AD. To date we have not seen anything which challenges this statement and concede that Florentine in the SCA is more of a 'what about if' than a 'but that's what they did'. We, however, feel that Florentine adds a unique and fresh perspective to combat in the SCA under the assumed armor (mostly chainmail + helm) rules. We can postulate on a few reasons why that might be.

Florentine is not a weapons combination which is readily accessible to newbies. Very few people will state that fighting with two weapons is easier than one. The joy of a shield is that it allows the emphasis of your attacks to come from your preferred hand. With this in mind viable shot selection comes down to a range of movement options described in detail by Duke Gaston 's Res Ducis and a range of target locations from the legs, body, shoulders, arms and head. Adding another sword effectively doubles the possibilities for selecting an attack. This means that in training one needs to do all the training of a single sword user and then do it all over again for the other hand. So far we have found little reason why someone would be incapable of learning to use both hands to attack early on, however our experience has been that the requirements of a great deal of training time (including the adaptation or generation of a number of drills) to simply feel comfortable fighting from either hand equally is prohibitive. It is certainly a valid argument that if this time had been spent on sword and board fighting, we may have progressed further.. I guess we will never know for sure :).

There are a number of reasons why florentine has not historically been an option. We can only base our knowledge of medieval armor exploits from fechtbuch, museum exhibits, internet images and the host of experimental displays on youtube such as this or this, it seems apparent that the arms (and hands) may be the biggest vulnerability under assumed SCA armor. Therefore we think that while the additional vector of attack has its merits the underlying requirement to expose both arms (and hands) to attack could greatly dimish any practitioners enthusiasm :). It could also be that florentine fighting training systems aren't present in SCA period documentation because, like Miyamoto Musashi's niten'ichi, while demonstrably effective now no one ever thought to try it. Or that if they had the art was lost because they didn't live long enough to show anyone or bother writing it down. Again I doubt we will ever know for sure.

I'm sure there are many other reasons why one simply can't look up Sir Blah's book of florentine fighting but in any case we haven't managed to do so yet. Therefore we hope you stay tuned to our version instead and provide feedback on what you think.