Good practice last night.  A fencer who hasn’t been fighting for a while was out.

I did a little bit of work on Swetnam, trying to figure out how his stance would work in SCA style rapier.  It could work but it’s both defensive while not giving ground.  You can only move in a mostly forward arc.  The sword placement allows a lot of interception parries, and is very good at retaliating quickly, but the lack of backwards movement means that there’s very little body voiding available to you.  I’ll be doing more work on it once I’ve gotten back into fencing at full speed, as I suspect the slightly less stable positioning will be a detriment to fencing where you’re not afraid to get stabbed in the face.

Primarily I worked on finding and exploiting openings in guards.  I did a lot of forearm shots and some belly shots.  The angulation work is starting to come back, and I’m remembering what position to put my hand and blade into to take advantage of various openings.  I need some more work on ensuring that I have full control before making an attack, but that will come.


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