Much of our attention in the last couple of weeks has been focused on the shovel hook. All of the basic punches in pugilism are complicated and non-intuitive movements, but the shovel hook requires even more careful attention than the others because of its complexity. Delivered properly, it should be an upward blow into the opponent’s midsection, powered by the legs. Typically it is delivered while coming up out of a duck. The rope drill is used to give us a fixed object to duck under. The lead foot advances to the side of the adversary, the rear foot drags up behind it and plants, and the pugilist rises up out of a sort of crouch while driving the rear fist up into the target. The footwork can become confused unless all of the four possible permutations are sorted out and practiced separately (right vs. left lead X attacking to right or attacking to left). All four of those permutations are covered by the two different rope drills, but during the 15 May practice we teased them apart and worked them separately in an improvised pad drill as well.

Footwork tweaks

Make a guard stance, either left or right forward. Draw the knee forward over the toe. Now do a pass. The goal is to eliminate the telegraphing of pushing the knee forward before passing — it is already forward, so when you pass you can spring forward with less telegraphing. Obviously, we also want to eliminate the capital crime of repositioning either foot prior to passing. Try working this concept in a group, circling to left or right, passing forward with a fendente from posta di donna on cue from one of the group members.

Four crossings drill

This is a subset of Mr. Windsor’s 13 crossings drill. This one looks at four commonplace mid-sword crosses.

We worked on this quite a bit, playing it as follows:

• For the two largo variants, worker waits with left foot forward
• For the two stretto variants, worker waits with right foot forward
• For largo variants, feeder binds the sword with light pressure and then performs feed.
• For stretto variants, feeder binds the sword with threatening pressure and then performs feeds

We then took the first largo variant, the step offline and fendente against the arms after the feeder leaves the bind. We looked at the situation where the feeder comes in, the swords cross and then the feeder immediately leaves the bind and tries to cut around the other side. Note that this is not a smart action on the part of the feeder, but nevertheless it is something that we see in free play contexts. We tried two variant responses. One that seemed obvious was to offline *left*, thus moving away from the incoming blade to cover and simultaneously counterattack. This proved to be inferior, however, to sticking with the play, which means off lining *right*, cutting to cover the strike, and then transitioning to stretto actions. Super-effective.

Dagger stuff

Somewhat loose drill of trying to interrupt a dagger attack in the measure of the opponent’s entry (catch and simultaneously counter or just counter).

Ended with free play rounds with dagger (Eric, James and William) and then longsword (Eric vs. James).

1. The canonical Fiorean nut kick.

Not all nut kicks are created equal. Note that the nut kicker in this photo has his body weight and energy forward; he’s not leaning back away from the opponent. That’s better form.

2. Up the middle with arm wrap + chicken wing

This works best when the high hands situation has developed up the middle (no bias to either side) as shown here.

Take the left hand off the pommel, reach between the opponent’s arms, wrap the right arm and chicken-wing it across the body.

what to do with the right arm and sword? In the pictures below, the roles are reversed. Blue has performed the chickenwing on Black. Here he uses his sword to control Black’s left arm

and here he draws his sword hand back for a thrust.

3. Open lane on the right; double arm wrap

Here the high hands clinch has ended up on Black’s left, giving him an open lane to his right.

He reaches in and executes a double arm wrap against Blue.

 4. Open lane on the right; hilt/pommel grab

Another option when the clinch is to the left is to reach over with the left hand and grab the opponent’s hilt or pommel, then apply torque with the strong of the blade to twist the opponent’s sword around.

5. Open lane on the left; pommel strike

When the clinch is biased to the right and a lane is available on the left, as is the case for Black here,

the pommel strike becomes an option. The most powerful version of this is a hooking strike through a horizontal plane,

but in a pinch Black could also lever his pommel up and deliver a “freight train” blow.

6. (Bonus) the symmetrical clinch

It commonly happens in free play and tournaments that the combatants end up in a symmetrical clinch with each using his left to control the other’s right.

Here Black’s arm happens to be above Blue’s. He reaches behind Blue to grab his own blade and pull it up into Blue’s spine.

In the case where Black’s arm is beneath Blue’s, he can still grab his own sword behind Blue’s back and then use it for grappling leverage

• Overreaching – attacking from too great a distance, thereby having to stretch the arms out more, resulting in hands at shoulder level
• Attacker fails to nail stance / continues surging forward after pass – in the process of closing very fast you have residual momentum that carries you forward. This tends to drive the strongs together, raising them.
• Leverage – the defender instinctively drives his sword up and forward to get his strong against the attacker’s blade—this turns into a feedback loop as attacker does likewise and you end up crossguard-to-crossguard with hands at or above face level.

P. 119 of this book contains some interesting and useful remarks about the importance of keeping the weapon moving. The spadone was so heavy that starting and stopping it required a lot of effort and entailed some delay, and so normal practice was to keep it swinging around all the time in large circular cuts called molinelli, as shown starting at 1:12 of this video from WMAW 2011.

The grand bâton and the la canne cane don’t weigh as much, but their weight is concentrated at the distal end–they are maces–which makes them unwieldy and obliges the user to keep them moving. That’s why we begin each practice with stick circling exercises and it’s why we have recently begun working on the drill, described in last week’s blog post, in which a failed attack is followed up by a molinello and a second (or third, etc.) attack.

As it happened, this dovetailed nicely with Mr. B’s saber curriculum for the evening. We drilled the case in which the attacker’s first cut misses because the defender steps back out of range. Because the saber is a heavy weapon, the correct response is to keep the blade moving in a molinello while advancing for a second attempt.

We also worked drills showing how these circling movements can be actuated from the wrist; from the elbow; or from the shoulder depending on the tactical situation.

1. A taking of the dagger / play 1 is countered with a hit-around / play 2
2. A lock (middle key) / play 3 is countered with a reinforced counter-lock / play 4
3. A break / play 5 is countered with a strike to the right arm / play 6
4. The catch is countered with an immediate wrist lock / play 9
5. The catch is countered with an immediate parry of the catch-hand and hit / plays 10-11

Maximizing the quality of resistive training with partners

The new mailing list was inaugurated for Victorian-specific discussion that might not be of interest to the general Lonin population. We hope that this will also enable us to attract some new participants.

The physical culture routine continues to develop, and people are getting better at it; transitions from one exercise to the next are becoming quicker, which means we can get more done in the allotted hour. Part of the philosophy behind this drill is that each participant can ramp the intensity up or down by, e.g., using heavier clubs, or standing down and resting for part of the interval. To facilitate that, we may soon need to invest in more clubs and sticks, which is a good sign.

Partly because of the need to explain the new moving-target stick drill, physical culture ran a bit long and we concluded with about 45 minutes of cutlass work under the tutelage of Mr. B., mostly working a drill in which both participants, after an initial attack/defense-by-distance, keep their feet planted and take turns shifting forward to cut at the other’s arm, then shifting back to avoid the counter. Later this was complicated by allowing parries.