Hi,

I spent five days in Spain recently, ostensibly on holiday. This did not entirely prevent me from doing sword stuff.

I was teaching the first of my Foundations of Rapier (Capoferro Mechanics) webinars on Saturday, three days after we got back, so I did my best to stay fighting fit by training on my balcony. You saw the results last week. Here’s a much more characteristic “what I did on my holidays” pic:

Capoferro’s mechanics are hard. Not complicated, exactly, but physically demanding if you try to do everything exactly as shown in the book. And preparing to teach the class meant reminding myself which bits are essential to making the system work, and which bits can be sensibly compromised if your knees, hips, strength, or general willingness to suffer don’t quite match those of a seventeenth-century Italian fencing master.

We had the first class on Saturday evening, and I had a marvellous time. We worked through the basic mechanics, including guard position, footwork, how to hold a sword, and so on. I got the video edited and sent out to everyone signed up to the webinars the following day, so they’d have a fair chance to watch it before the second session.

I think perhaps the most important bit was getting Capoferro’s lean to make tactical sense. Why lean so far back? Why lean so far forwards? Why not just step?

I’m teaching the class again this Sunday, 27th September, at 8am UK time. This isn’t “part two”: it’s another complete run-through of the class, scheduled at a civilised time for people in parts of the world for whom 7pm UK time is horribly inconvenient.

While there will be a lot of overlap, I’ll take the opportunity to cover some things that didn’t fit into Saturday’s class, to make the total package more complete. And of course different students will bring different questions, so the Q&A section will probably differ wildly.

And in other sword-related news…

Want to be on The Sword Guy?

I have a podcast interview scheduled for next week, my first for some months, and it occurs to me that it’s been far too long since I explicitly invited people to pitch themselves (or somebody else) as a guest.

So: if you’re doing something interesting involving swords, swordsmanship, martial arts, history, research, writing, teaching, making things, or anything else that you think would make a good conversation, I’d like to hear about it. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll know we often stray pretty far from strictly historical martial arts.

The best pitches aren’t just “I have a book/project/product to promote”. Tell me what you’d actually like to talk about. What have you discovered? What do you disagree with everybody about? What problem are you trying to solve? What have you learned that you think other sword people would find interesting?

You can also nominate somebody else. Some of my favourite conversations have come from people pointing me towards interesting people I didn’t already know. If you do nominate someone else please include a way for me to find them and their work (such as their club website url).

Just reply to this email to make your pitch. I don’t bite (unless you pay extra).

cheers,

Guy
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