It has been two days and I am still stunned by the glimpse of the unifying principle behind the Liechtenauer system. Conceptually, it is a very elegant choice of design (and also astonishingly practical): the idea is that the physics of action-reaction behind strike, bind and wind is independent of the weapon at hand. Longsword, staff, poleaxe, sword-and-buckler: no matter whether the hands move from hilt to handle, the very same physical principles apply. I found it enlightening. There can be few modifications to the posture, few tricks to exploit the absence of blades on poleaxes, or the symmetry of staffs, but the mechanics are identical. Ideally, with enough exercise, any object of adequate shape could fit into Liechtenauer's verses.
Often I find myself stuck on a wrong posture, a lack of support from the hips, or a bad trajectory of the sword-tip. Cycling through different weapons helped. Some required more focus on the posture, other on the movement of the feet, or the arms, and others just feel so natural that the whole action folds inside the muscles and it fixes there, in the memory.
"Strike, slowly. Feel the bind. Wind!"
Together with intensity drills, the bind-wind-free-play has, at its first attempt, been a very instructive activity. The duelists have to enter in a bind and from there find the way to thrust the opponent. It felt like a game of planning and quick thinking, probably pointing at the fact that I need to practice more the different winden. Yet, eliminating all the adrenaline-clogged introductory tagging dance helped and the following free-play was closer, faster and felt more natural. I'll be looking forward to more bind-wind-free-play.
P.S. a brief comment on bucklers: I dislike them. Besides my skin-feeling for such a wimpish option, I am not even sure they are of any practical advantage. They protect the left hand, fine enough, so that we can be sure to have one for the final handshake: at what cost? Still I am not completely convinced that a longsword, driven by two hands can't be as fast as a single-handed short sword. In addition, the choice of buckler may imply a different strategy when facing a longsword, a strategy of compromise between a weak attack, a weak bind, a sword with less inertia and a well protected left-hand: is it worth it? As of now, I think it is not.
