The Rapier Part Three: Developing Your Skills: The Rapier Workbooks, #3

By Guy Windsor

With this workbook you can take your skills to the next level. We will cover how to train: how to take things you already know, and make them actually work under pressure. To become a swordsman/swordswoman/swordsperson, not just someone who knows some sword moves. This is the heart of swordsmanship, and its most sophisticated element.

You will learn how to systematically add depth and complexity to the basic drills you already know, bridging the gap between choreographical drill practice, and free fencing. You will learn how to keep your practice in the optimum band between too-easy and too-hard, and you will learn the basics of coaching, which is all about creating that optimum level of difficulty for your partner.

All technical exercises are shown in the videos for both right-handers and left-handers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spada Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9789527157831

Guy Windsor

Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi's Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.

Book preview

DEVELOPING YOUR SKILLS

Welcome to the next level.

The goal of this workbook is to teach you how to train: how to take things you already know, and make them actually work under pressure. To become a swordsman/swordswoman/swordsperson, not just someone who knows some sword moves. This is the heart of swordsmanship, and its most sophisticated element. The key skill you will be learning is how to coach, because that’s how your training partner will get better. And as they learn the content of this book themselves, they can coach you.

This is the difference between evolution by natural selection and intelligent design. If you just fence, sure enough you will get better. Slowly, and in a haphazard way. But using the skills you will learn in this book, you can deliberately work on your areas of weakness, find and enhance your natural areas of strength, and deliberately, intelligently, improve.

Birds are amazing examples of the awesome power of evolution. But compare them with the history of powered flight. By the application of intelligent design, we got from a short hop of 120 feet in 1903, to the moon in 1969. This is the kind of astonishingly rapid improvement that we are aiming for in this workbook.

We get there by building a bridge between your current level (which should be that you know Capoferro’s rapier plays quite well, and have reasonable footwork and blade handling skills) to where you wish to be: expert fencer.

It is relatively easy to teach set drills to a student or class: she does this, you do that. And it is relatively easy to set up a freeplay (sparring, fencing) environment that is reasonably safe. I have seen many groups and schools that have nice set drills, and freeplay quite a bit, but there is no real relationship between the two kinds of training, and nothing in between those two extremes. As a result, the things done in freeplay bear scant resemblance to the actions in the drills. In this workbook I will show you how to build a bridge between set drills and freeplay. This is especially important for historical swordsmanship, as the manuals tend to show short, simple sequences (usually an attack and its defence) which are easy to turn into drills, but very hard to pull off in friendly freeplay or against a resisting opponent.

In a nutshell, you need to be able to identify your areas of weakness, and fix them. We do the former by running diagnostic drills, and the latter by training at the optimal rate of failure.

Most of this book will be about ways of running diagnostics, and of generating the optimal rate of failure in practice.

Run a Diagnostic

Almost any drill can be used as a diagnostic. The purpose of a diagnostic drill is to establish at what point you are failing. Taking Plate 7 as an example, by running through it you may find that you don’t remember the drill (solution: learn