Breathing: The Swordsman's Quick Guide, #7

By Guy Windsor

This book describes the core breathing training that is the basis of my martial practice, supported with seven video tutorials for the exercises. In the book I describe how breathing works, and how you can train your breathing, for health, fitness, and stress control.

 

The book has internal links to the videos, and also includes a £10 discount voucher for my 6-week Breathing Course.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spada Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9798201199180

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

The Swordsman’s Quick Guide Series Introduction

Hello, and welcome to The Swordsman’s Quick Guide series of booklets on various aspects of life in general and training historical swordsmanship in particular. My name is Guy Windsor, and I have been working on historical European swordsmanship, mostly from Medieval and Renaissance Italian sources, since the early 1990s. In 2001 I opened my first proper school, and have been making my living as an instructor and writer on this topic ever since. Each instalment is intended to put my key ideas about a single subject together in one place for easy reference, and so they are not specific to one weapon, style, or system. As such, they should also be useful to most other martial artists and students of other disciplines.

  In many cases, I cover the specific systems in detail in one or another of my books. For Fiore’s longsword techniques, you will probably find my The Medieval Longsword and Advanced Longsword, Form and Function useful. For Capoferro’s rapier plays, The Duellist's Companion. In this series I will do my best to stay general, so that the fundamental principles are not hidden behind system-specific jargon and examples.

The ideas for which topics to cover in this series mostly come from the questions I am asked by my readers and students, so if you think of a topic you’d like me to include please let me know! The idea for this book came from one of my students in Helsinki, Cecilia Äijälä, who won the referrals competition on my last crowdfunding campaign.

The rest of the series includes The Seven Principles of Mastery, available free in most ebook shops, Choosing a Sword, available free when you sign up to my mailing list, Preparing for Freeplay, Ethics, Teaching a Basic Class, and Fencing Theory.

Introduction

Breathing exercises of various kinds are fundamental to most traditional martial arts, and are increasingly widely used in modern military and police training. In this instalment I will cover how breathing works, the main kinds of breathing exercises and what they are for, and how to train your breathing to achieve the goals you want. This is one area of martial arts that is especially prone to woo-woo bullshit, so let me be clear; no matter how much you train your breathing, you will not learn to fly, stop bullets, or kill without touching. Sorry.

That said, breathing exercises are a kind of magic. I’ve always been drawn to the more indirect, even spiritual, aspects of martial arts training, and breathing exercises are perhaps the most obvious example of that. What possible use is gently waving your arms about and breathing deeply in a fight?

Well, none. But training is not fighting. Push-ups don’t help much when boxing either. But have you ever met a boxer who didn’t do push-ups?

The primary benefits of breathing practice can be summed up as fitness and calmness. By learning to breathe better, we are automatically fitter because we can get more air for less work. By learning to use breathing to control our nervous systems (at least up to a point) we become better able to manage stress, and control fear.

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