To address the problem discussed in my previous rant...er...blog post, I brought in an Albion Earl longsword. Not only is this a sharp, but it is a realistic representation of a 15th century sword, not an ultralight designed to appeal to modern sensibilities.
The first thing I did was to have the students show me how they fought with a plastic simulator. I asked them to do the kind of moves they normally do in free fencing. Then I gave them the real sword and had them try to do the same thing. They quickly realized two things. One, they were considerably slower with the real sword than with the plastic, and two, a good percentage of their cuts were ineffective. The Earl is a very good longsword to test this out, because it is very, very loud (when you cut with proper edge alignment and velocity). So if you swing it and you hear nothing, you're wrong.
Imagine that...swinging a real sword and actually getting it to work right is really hard. Hmmmm...
After they took turns doing solo cutting drills with the real sword, we did some free fencing with a twist. The idea was to be honest, to yourself and your training partner, and only do things with the plastic sword that you could actually do with the real sword. Not only do, but do successfully.
The fencing was fantastic. Boris and Vlad participated, and both were able to keep it honest the vast majority of the time. I fought each of them, and they fought each other, and the fighting was really good, and really clean. The things they did were things they could actually do with a sword. The disconnect between cutting and fighting was, if not eliminated, greatly reduced.
Way to go, guys. Really well done. Now to try it on the rest of you and see if works just as well.
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