One Way of Moving, For Everything

Yes, this is another rant about cutting and it’s place in the study of HEMA. You have been warned.

We HEMA people do not have the luxury, for the most part, of learning from people who know what they are doing (when it comes to HEMA). Consequently, we often find ourselves working really hard to perfect body mechanics that don’t work, body mechanics that we invent in our back yards while looking at 500 year old static two dimensional images or worse, by reading period treatises and believing we can learn how to move from words. Words and pictures can direct, set criteria, describe end results, but beyond that, you’re on your own.

We as a community have no problem coming up with body mechanics that work well in free fencing. After all, that is something we can do often, and see our mistakes, and improve. And what we end up with are fast, non-telegraphing motions that can score us lots of points. Motions that tend to send tatami mats flying off the their stands, mostly undamaged.

So what, right? Tatami mats don’t fight back, right? Well, buddy, if you can’t kill something that doesn’t fight back, what chance to do you have against something that does?

Cutting a tatami mat is so easy that a 12 year old girl can do it (see our youtube channel). Heck, a 7 year old Japanese girl can cut three of them (lined up next to each other…she’s on youtube too). Tatami is harder to cut than naked flesh, easier than living bone (much easier than a skull), and much, much easier than flesh and bone clothed in typical 14th or 15th century European clothing. So if your super cool tacti-awesome match winning strike can’t sever a single mat cleanly, guess what? Back to the drawing board, bud.

There are tactical considerations in cutting, considerations that don’t tend to occur to people inventing body mechanics in their basements (yes, this used to be me). For example, there is the “you must cut to longpoint” crowd that believes that cutting past longpoint is wrong as they believe (wrongly) is described in the texts. If that were true, Germans would be extinct. Do you know what happens if you cut to longpoint? Well, if you miss, it’s great. You should stop the sword there if you miss. If you hit, though, your sword is going to get stuck in your opponent’s body (assuming it doesn’t bounce off his shoulder because your cut sucks to begin with). And then you will die.

So that leaves us with a simple question…how do you cut? There are several choices. One, you can optimize your body mechanics to cut tatami. That will be great when it comes to cutting tatami, but you’ll probably have your ass handed to you in a fight, since you’ll make big sweeping motions, pull back your sword before striking, etc. Two, you can optimize your body mechanics to free fencing, delivering super fast non-telegraphing strikes directly to your target in a straight line just like the often quoted and just as often misunderstood passage in 3227a describes. This will get you tourney wins and maybe groupies (where do I sign up?). But then you won’t be able to cut anything, and you’ll be a sport fencer. That’s great, if that’s what you want. There are many great sport fencers in HEMA that I respect very much. But if sport fencing isn’t your cup of tea, you need to look elsewhere.

Another option is to have one way of moving when you cut tatami, and a different way of moving when you fence. And that would be…pointless. You’d be proving that your cutting motions don’t work in a fight and you fighting motions don’t cut, rendering both motions useless.

What you need to do is optimize your body mechanics not for cutting, not for free fencing, but for fighting. What we German fencers like to call ernstfechten.

That means a cutting motion that is non-telegraphic and direct, but one that moves in the proper arc and with the proper structural backing to cut clean through your opponent and not get stuck in his dying body. Will this motion cut as well as a tatami optimized motion? No. Will it win you as many tournaments? No. So why bother?

Honesty. Keeping it real, as they say. The goal of a martial approach to learning to use a sword is to learn to use a sword in ernsfechten. To learn to destroy your opponent and not get killed in the process. If you want to do this right, you need to use the same motion for everything you do, be it cutting, free fencing, drilling, etc. And it has to work well in all of them. You won’t get the glory, you won’t get the groupies (dammit!). But you’ll go to your grave knowing that you practiced an extinct and obsolete primitive fighting art in the way it was meant to be practiced. That and 99 cents will get you a loaf of store-brand white bread on a sale day. But at least you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror every day and know that you did at least one thing right in your otherwise miserable, imperfect and all too human life.