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Happy New Year!

I guess I'm supposed to do a review of 2025 and a bunch of resolutions for 2026. I might get round to it, but haven't felt any particular urge to so I haven't yet.
Maybe that's my resolution for 2026: Don't do things just because there's a general expectation that I should.

Or not. So moving on, let's consider this question:

What comes first, the treatise or the tournament?

For some historical fencers the answer is obvious- we’re here to study the treatises. Tournaments are an occasionally useful tool to test our training methods and to a much lesser extent our interpretations. For others, it’s the other way round. We’re here to compete in tournaments, and the treatises are an occasionally useful repository of tips and tricks to help with that.

This is a false dichotomy, of course. Most “hema” folk lie somewhere between those two extremes. I think it’s worth examining your beliefs and assumptions in this area, as there is an entirely unnecessary and artificial distinction drawn between ‘historical’ folk and ‘tournament’ folk. I personally sit closer to the treatise end than the tournament end, but my own training priorities are (or should be) frankly irrelevant to anyone else. They don’t necessarily affect how or what I teach.

I’ll be visiting Potsdam (again!) in a couple of weeks to attend the Torneo di Spada, run by the same excellent folk that run the Swords of the Renaissance event, and I’ll be teaching a class there. Here's the class description:

Historical Fencing and Tournaments: Which Serves Which?​
Do you train in historical martial arts to perform better in tournaments—or do you use tournaments as a tool to improve your historical fencing?

Both approaches can work, but they lead to different training priorities, tactical choices, and measures of success. This class begins by asking the room which question they most want answered, and then focusing on the majority view.

We will explore either:

• How historical fencing can improve your tournament performance,

or

• How tournament fencing can be used to strengthen your historical practice.

Whichever path we take, the session will focus on mindset, practical decision-making, skill development, and how to align your training with your actual goals.

The Principles and Practices of Solo Training: Why We Sleep update

In my book The Principles and Practices of Solo Training I recommended Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep. Walker is a proper sleep scientist - he’s a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley. But while I think his overall point is good (we need enough good quality sleep to function properly, and most of his advice on how to achieve that is solid), I’ve recently discovered that the book is absolutely riddled with errors, misstatements, and outright misrepresentation of the facts. I’m appalled that I didn’t spot them when I read it. I’m also appalled that Walker is still employed by the University- some of the problems with his book are to my mind academic fraud (such as editing out an inconvenient bit of a bar chart because it doesn’t support a theory of his).

You can read a very long and detailed article by Alexey Guzey covering the errors in just chapter one here.

My apologies to everyone who has read Walker’s book on my recommendation. Fortunately I don’t rely on the book to support any of the points I make about sleep in my own book, but I’ll be more careful in the future.

I have updated The Principles and Practices of Solo Training to remove the recommendation, and tidied up some typos while I was at it. The great advantage of publishing books myself is that I can make changes really quickly. I found out about the problems with Walker two days ago, and the book will be updated on all platforms next week. If you already have the book and want the updated version, ping me an email and I'll send you the ebook, no charge.

On The Sword Guy podcast: Medieval European Body Culture, with Dr Maciej Talaga

Dr Maciej Talaga is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw. His research interests have revolved around premodern European martial traditions, with particular focus on late medieval, Central European and the so-called German School of fighting. His goal is to elevate HEMA studies into a legitimate field of research within academic history and archaeology.

Maciej is a member of HEMAtac, a HEMA coaching organization, and is a qualified Olympic fencing instructor in the Polish Fencing Association. He also runs the Sprechfenster blog on Patreon. I first came across Maciej’s work through his article Probing the Depth of Medieval European Body Culture: Preliminary Research on Methods of Physical Training, 1250 to 1500.

We talk about how Maciej got into historical martial arts, and a bit of background of the development of the HEMA scene in Poland. Both Maciej and I have experience of sport fencing, and we talk about how sport fencing coaching techniques can be beneficial in training historical fencing, giving you a framework for understanding concepts in historical fencing.

Maciej sees HEMA as a grand project, with tournaments having a key place within this project. We discuss the benefits of the competitive environment, how it affects your training, and how it reveals the differences between what’s in the fight books and how we practice sword fighting today.

We also discuss the topic of Maciej’s article about medieval European body culture. What sports did people do, how did they train? What sources do we have to prove what people did?

cheers,

Guy