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.

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.