Episode 211: Embodying martial arts in an aging body, with Jess Finley
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The inestimable Jess Finley is back on the podcast! If you’re not aware of her work, she has written a wonderful book about medieval wrestling, starred in several of my online courses, and we recently collaborated on an online course about Von Baumann’s wrestling. On her Patreon account, she produces translations, interpretations, previews of books in progress and videos. She also teaches swords around the world.
We start by talking about travelling with knives and guns, before moving onto the main topic, which is looking at the ways to mitigate the downsides of aging as we train and get older. One of the main things to work out is understanding the difference between discomfort and dysfunction, i.e. is this pain OK, or have I catastrophically injured myself? And at what point should I listen to the fear? We talk about what lessons a long term martial arts practice has given us in our daily lives, especially when dealing with life’s big moments.
Links of interest:
Jess Finley on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jessfinley/
Books and publications: https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Jessica_Finley
Von Baumann wrestling course: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/medieval-german-wrestling-the-twirchringen-of-von-baumann
How Emotions are Made, by Lisa Feldman Barrett: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
The book that Jess and Guy discuss about the Olympic athletes was Howard Schatz’s Athlete.
Here’s a photo of Guy’s New Zealand knife:
Transcript
Guy Windsor
This is how I introduced you back in 2020, the episode went live on the 26th of June, 2020, so it was, “Hello everyone. This is Guy Windsor, also known as The Sword Guy.” My god, I've improved that introduction. “I'm here today with the inestimable Jessica Finley, I think inestimable is an excellent adjective, who may be known to you from her wonderful book about medieval wrestling. Those of you who are enrolled on my solo training course may have sweated and grunted through her solo training for wrestlers section of the course. And if you know her, on her Patreon account, she produces translations, interpretations, previews of books in progress and videos. Also for her patrons,” my God, I didn't say that very well. And you can find her there at www. oh my god, we were still using www… “patreon.com/JessFinley.” So Jess, how would you like that updated?
Jessica Finley
Oh, my goodness, yeah. Well, 2020 I mean, that kind of overwhelmed me a little bit, thinking about the state of the things June, 2020 when we began this, huh? But updating, a couple of books have come out, which were presented first in draft versions to my Patreon. So that has been successful work.
Guy Windsor
What books?
Jessica Finley
We did a translation and transcription. Well, I didn't do the transcription. I did the translation of Von Baumann's wrestling book, which you and I have talked about before.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, we did. We did an online course about Von Baumann's wrestling.
Jessica Finley
We did. And so that came out under HEMA Bookshelf with our friend Michael Chidester, along with his facsimiles and things he was doing there. So that's the big one. That's the big one. There's more in process. Also still working with Michael Chidester, but we'll leave that for a surprise. More forthcoming wrestling translation goodness.
Guy Windsor
So any other cool stuff in the last five years? I mean, well, I mean, you've starred in several of my online courses.
Jessica Finley
That's true. That's true. Those have been quite busy, and were so much fun to produce.
Guy Windsor
It's kind of rude to get paid for that sort of thing, because it was like, we hung out in your salle for like, three days and just went through all the cool stuff. I mean, the editing was work, and the organising was work, and the planning was work, but the actual shooting was that really work? Not really.
Jessica Finley
And we had developed such a tight system that at this point it's like, do you know your part? Do you know your part? Go.
Guy Windsor
And almost all of it was done in a single take. Super fun.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, really incredible. Yeah, yeah. So other than that, what other things have been going on? It's hard to think of five years. I've been prepping things for an imminent move, that's definitely on my move.
Guy Windsor
Where are you moving to?
Jessica Finley
I am moving to the Greater Toronto Area. Probably not Toronto proper.
Guy Windsor
Toronto proper is very expensive. It is very expensive, very nice.
Jessica Finley
It's super nice. I will enjoy taking the train to Toronto.
Guy Windsor
Lee Valley tools are in Toronto. Are they really they make woodworking tools. It is one of the best woodworking shops in the world for, like, seriously high end new woodworking tools. And they are in the middle of Toronto, at least they were last time I was in Toronto. And yes, so if you need woodworking tools, you are covered.
Jessica Finley
Excellent. And frankly, if you didn't want to come see me, you would come to see the woodworking tools.
Guy Windsor
And also our mutual friend Siobhan is there. So you can, you can bish bash bosh, quite a bit.
Jessica Finley
Which I'm quite excited about getting to work with her more, because she is a lovely swordswoman and stunt person, fight director, just person.
Guy Windsor
I've interviewed her for the show. It was a long time ago. I definitely should get her back on soon. We're having a catch up chat next week. So I will say, Siobhan, come back on the show. And she'll probably say, okay.
Jessica Finley
I've done quite a bit of, quite a bit of traveling, both nationally and internationally, in the last five years. I spent a month in Australia last year.
Guy Windsor
Really? Yeah. What were you doing in Australia.
Jessica Finley
Teaching swords, of course.
Guy Windsor
Well, sure, like, like, where and for whom? Yeah.
Jessica Finley
So I taught at the sword camp with our mutual friend Gindi. That was actually what brought me the opportunity to go down there.
Guy Windsor
Does Gindi still have a picture of me up in his salle?
Jessica Finley
Oh, absolutely. I asked questions. I asked questions and had a little laugh. It’s not quite a shrine to you, but it hints at that in a very Eastern style dojo way. And I loved it.
Guy Windsor
I mean, he came and trained with me in Finland, and he stayed for quite a while, and I've taught at his place a few times, so I think I was sort of influential in getting him started doing it for a living, so I think that's what that's about.
Jessica Finley
It was adorable. But yeah, so Gindi was hosting an event along with a couple of other people, and so I went down. I taught at that event. I taught some longsword and wrestling, some armour. So a great, a great few days there and then did some vacationing sorts of things. Climbed some rocks, which was lovely, went out to Arapiles and got to climb up that which is a beautiful, I guess, mountain, beautiful mountain, but in that Australian way where it kind of like just goes straight up and then kind of flat topped, you know.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, incredible. I've not been there, where is that?
Jessica Finley
It's about a three hour drive, I guess that would be west of Melbourne.
Guy Windsor
So, right, yeah. So basically, next to Melbourne by Australian standards.
Jessica Finley
Yes, and Midwestern standards, frankly, because I was like, oh, we'll just jaunt over there and do some climbs. It wasn't quite jaunting, but it was still lovely. And then I ended up connecting with Lyndal Grant, who is a friend of mine, and also Siobhan’s. Lyndal is big in the stage and film scene in Melbourne, and so I taught a three day course for her students. So it was lovely. It was wonderful. I had a great time.
Guy Windsor
I haven't been to Australia since the year before last. I had the luxury, because I'd been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks doing swordy stuff. I went to Melbourne just to hang out with friends. I didn't do any work at all. It was great. Almost always when I'm traveling anywhere, it's like, I have to work. And, you know, which is a great thing. I mean, I like my work. My job is about the coolest job you can possibly have, but still, it's nice sometimes, just to go to a place just to see the people, and not have that kind of, I'm here to teach, sort of excuse. Yeah, it's purer somehow.
Jessica Finley
It is. It's really nice and a rare treat, I agree. Yeah, even just travelling, like not having to bring gear bags is incredible.
Guy Windsor
Well, I usually don't bring gear bags because they're a pain. And everywhere you go, they already have swords. Yeah, you can fit a mask and, like, protective gear, whatever, into a regular suitcase. You can have checked baggage if you want. And you know, have all the other stuff. You might have a pen knife or whatever that can't go in the cabin, but it's allowed in the hold. So you can have all the sort of the extra conveniences of checked baggage without having to haul a bloody great long thing around and flying to Victoria. You have to have paperwork to get your swords through customs. Did you take swords through?
Jessica Finley
And armour. Because they asked me to teach. That's the thing, Guy, I have to think about. If I'm teaching armour, I can’t just show up.
Guy Windsor
You have to take your armour. But did you take swords as well?
Jessica Finley
Yeah, I did. Gindi had sent paperwork to me, right? And they actually didn't question me about it. I didn't stop. It just went right through.
Guy Windsor
But did you have to go and take it through, through a scanner, or anything.
Jessica Finley
Yes, I believe so.
Guy Windsor
Because the first time I went to Melbourne, I had swords with me, and so I come off the flight absolutely knackered after like 24 hours of flying. You know exactly what that's like. On the landing card thing, you have to check a box saying, if you're bringing anything sort of restricted into the country. So I checked the box. And so this desk where there's this immigration officer, this sort of grumpy old woman, right? And she looks and goes, “What are you saying Yes to?” I'm sorry. What the fuck? I didn't say that. I was like, I'm sorry. I don't understand. “What are you saying yes to?” I'm like, I don't know, life? And she goes, “is it drugs, weapons or porn?” right? Those are the three things. Like, there's one checkbox say you are bringing, you know, if you are bringing drugs, weapons or porn, and you have to check the box and declare it and whatever, right? Yes. So, because I'd filled this out like, five hours earlier, on an international flight, and I hadn't slept properly in like, 24 hours, and you know, I was just tired and not thinking properly, oh, right, weapons. Oh, okay, take your bag through there, and she stamps my passport. Off I go. So I dragged this sword bag through, and there was this tiny little woman. She must have been five foot tall. And you know, I had the paperwork from Scott, who had organized the trip. And I said, she said, Well, so what are you what are you bringing? I said, I've got swords in the bag. And I have this paperwork to go with it. She goes, all right, let's get it on the scanner. So we put it on the scanner, and it trundles through the scanner, and when the swords appear on the screen, she goes, Oh, they're beautiful.
Jessica Finley
And you were like, they are.
Guy Windsor
Yes, maybe you should come to my seminar this weekend.
Jessica Finley
That's wild.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So there was absolutely no problem at all, right? Basically had his bullshit paperwork saying they would be kept in a safe manner. Yeah, I like in a bag in my bedroom in Scott's house, in accordance with the relevant law, which is basically they just need that kind of legal bullshit to kind of let it through. Yeah, but if you fly into like Sydney, it's legal. You can just, you only need to declare them, you can just wander through, I was told, because swords were restricted in Victoria, and again, the last time I went to Melbourne, I was coming from New Zealand, and I bought this gorgeous little knife. Let me just grab it.
Jessica Finley
Yes, show me your knife.
Guy Windsor
It’s one of very many, but it's this tiny wee thing. I'll stick a photograph in the show notes, and it's really handy size for, like, a practical little kind of camping knife, utility knife, you could do whittling with it. You could cut a steak. It's a bit short for cutting a steak, but you could do it. And it is a lovely little handmade thing that I bought off a friend of mine in New Zealand. And he was like, make sure you declare it. Okay, so when I get to customs and I say, you know, I've got a knife in my bag, Oh, really? What sort of knife? And I describe this thing, and it's like, you know, the blade is, like, I guess, two and a half inches long, and it's not a folding knife, it's not a flick knife, it's not a lock knife, it's a little utility knife for camping and whatnot. And they didn't even look at it. They're like, oh yeah, that's fine. Stamp. Off you go. So the trick with those places is, if in any doubt, declare it, because if you declare it and it's against the rules, they might take it off you, but there won't be any consequences. Obviously, yes, this is heroin, right? But if you don't declare it and they find it, you are in serious shit.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I probably had flown for three or four years with this little like, when I went to Switzerland to teach in like, 2015 I got this little bitty Swiss Army Knife, right? Like the very much souvenir, tiny little, I don't even know, inch and a half, yeah, ridiculous Swiss Army Knife, right? Just as a souvenir, you know? And I had it on my keys, and I had, like, had my keys in my pocket or whatever, and flown dozens of times.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and it usually lives on my keys, except I travel so much I take it off. I've taken it off my keys because sometimes I would forget to take it off my keys. I've got away with it so far, but I don't want to lose it, right?
Jessica Finley
And that was it. I got away with it for however, long, 3, 4, 5, years, and then all of a sudden, coming back. I don't remember. I must have been coming through Philly or something, but I was coming back from a trip, and the guy's like, nope, you can't have that. And I was like, you let me fly here with it, like, gosh darn it. And nope, right in the trash. And what can I do? Nobody's there with me that I can hand it to. So I was like, nah.
Guy Windsor
One thing I've done, I found my Swiss Army Knife, a sort of regular travel Swiss Army Knife in my pocket, in the queue to there was a bit of a queue to get to the point where you scan your boarding pass and go through to security. And I was like shit, so I hid it in a pot plant in the airport, yes, and when I came back a week later, there it was. But in Germany, they're very civilized about this. Last time I flew out of I think it was Frankfurt or Cologne, something like that. Wherever it was, it was close to Cologne, because I'd been hanging out with my friend Stefan Deke, and I’d flown into Germany, not realizing that my Leatherman that my brother gave me for my 21st birthday was in my bag. I got through security in London without anybody seeing it. And I discovered it by accident when I was repacking my bag in Germany, fuck what do I do? It's the worst. Well, well, I'll just sort of, I don't know, risk it. So I mean, I was in the airport when I found it, but in in Frankfurt Airport, they have this thing where you can put it in a special bag, yeah, and hand it in, and they'll keep it for you for three months, and somebody can just come and collect it for you, or you can collect it when you come back, right? So, so I put it in this bag and took the details and whatnot, and then I just emailed the details of Stefan, and he went and picked it up for me and posted it back. It might have been cheaper just to buy a new Leatherman, but it's the one that my brother gave me for my 21st birthday. So, you know, it's worth it.
Jessica Finley
Oh, my goodness, you know. And the Atlanta airport, they have signs in the in the queue to get scanned, reminding women to check their handbags for their weapons. Remember to check your handbags ladies for your little pistol you have hiding in there, because we'll have to take it.
Guy Windsor
Well, honestly, fair enough. I mean, you know, of course, you have a handbag gun in your handbag. That's what handbag guns are for.
Speaker 1
Little Derringer, just a little pew pew.
Guy Windsor
Well, yeah, it only takes one 22 calibre bullet to make a solid argument against, you know, messing with you. Honestly, you can see that. You can see the justification for it.
Jessica Finley
I mean, we're laughing about forgetting that you have a souvenir knife in your bag. I can't imagine forgetting I had a handgun.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. Hand guns are a bit different. You know, when I used to live in Finland and I had handguns, and I had them in a safe in the house, and, yeah, you know, they're all very carefully stored on my because I have kids and whatnot, there's absolutely no way the kids could get at them, right? They're in a safe. The safe had an electric lock with a 10 digit combination. So the first thing to get the guns, the first thing you have to do is find four AA batteries that work.
Jessica Finley
Oh, that's a struggle.
Guy Windsor
And load those into the lock, and then put in the 10 digit combination that is not written down anywhere, yeah. And then get the guns out, and then load the guns, and then they're ready to fire. So yes, there was no plausible mechanism by which the children could have got hold of those guns, right? But when I was carrying them to and from the range, it was always legal, because I have a license for those guns and I'm going to the range, but going from the range to the salle to home, slightly greyer area. I'm not going directly home, where they will be stored properly, right? And one time I was in the salle, and I just come back from the range, and I had my 22 calibre target pistol. Takes 10 rounds. So Ruger Mark 2 22/45 has the same kind of grip configuration as the Colt 1911 so you can practice those sorts of reload drills and whatnot. Anyway. So I've got the gun in the bag. Obviously, it's unloaded and it's in a case, and the bullets are kept separate. They are in the same bag, but they're in their boxes and stuff that you can't just take clip out and shove it in, right? It’s properly legal. It's being transported in a completely legal way, yes. And I mean, at the salle, which is in a kind of this industrial, you remember it? I mean, it's really industrial kind of grotty area in Helsinki because it was cheap. I heard gunshots, which is not normal in Finland, right? And I'm like, what the fuck? Right? Like, gunshots so, I don't want to be the only person here without a gun, so I get the gun out, load it just in case. And so I've got it down by my side, and I kind of sidle up to the edge of the window to look out, and I see a soldier crouched with a rifle at the corner of the building. So obviously, I put a bead on him, because, I mean, I don't know soldier from what army, I can't make out his insignia or anything, so I have a loaded gun pointed at this bloke through the window, just in case. Finger off the trigger. But if that rifle points towards me, I have no choice. Yeah, right. And then I shall take a deep breath and look really carefully, and I can just make out he's got this yellow thing on the end of the rifle, which is, when you shoot a blank, what it does, it breaks up the wad that comes out with the blank to make it safer. Yes, so I pull the gun back in, not pointing at him anymore, and I’m like, this is a fucking army exercise. They're practicing urban warfare, yes, but there was no notification. There was no letter through my letterbox saying the army will be doing manoeuvres around here. Don't worry if you see blokes with rifles running around and hear shots. Nothing like there was no warning of any kind. It wasn't made public in any way that I was aware of, right? So this poor soldier had a loaded gun pointed at his head. He knew nothing about it, but he had a loaded gun pointed at his head for a couple of seconds, just because those idiots in the army hadn't told the residents and the people working in the area that there was going to be military exercises happening around their houses. Isn't that mad? Yes, if they tried that in America, he would have just got shot.
Jessica Finley
Oh, yeah, likely so. Well.
Guy Windsor
You're much more likely to have houses with loaded guns in them than you are in Finland.
Jessica Finley
I would think, so, yeah, unregulated guns for sure.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. So, yeah. So I unloaded the gun and put it back in the bag and sort of calmed down a bit of like, oh well, yeah.
Jessica Finley
Bonkers. What a wild experience.
Guy Windsor
Yes, I wouldn't want to repeat it. It was horrible. No, but that feeling of, oh my god, there are people shooting, round the building that I'm in, right? You know, right. It was weird.
Jessica Finley
That's super weird. No, on the regular, it's like, almost to the point that it's a joke for our local subreddit is like, the thread fireworks or gunshots, right? It's so frequent here that, like, we're all like, oh.
Guy Windsor
Now, we did think that we were going to discuss a little bit about aging in martial arts. So let me just throw a bit of context in there for the listener who's maybe not aware of what's going on. I sent out a thing in my newsletter, basically saying, is there anything you would particularly like me to address in my work in the next year or so? Right? And one of the more popular requests was something that addresses aging, because historical martial artists age like everyone else, and there are people who are doing this in their 50s,60s, 70s, 80s. I don't know if we've got any nonagenarians in the community, but we certainly have people in their 80s. And I've been doing this professionally since I was 27 and I'm now 52, so I've learned a bit about it from experience, and I think you're a similar age to me.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, I’m 48. And I started it like 17.
Guy Windsor
I do have someone slated to be interviewed soon who is 74, she can maybe give us what happens in the next couple of decades. But what are your thoughts on ways to mitigate the downsides of aging as we train and get older?
Jessica Finley
Oh, there's so many ways we can attack this question. Because I think it's, it's huge. Maybe just because of my own mindset about things, what I've really noticed is there's a certain crunch that really hits people, kind of between 35 and 45, where I've noticed that that that's about the first time, particularly men, I think women, it comes on slower, but it feels like men hit what they feel like is some sort of precipice, or some sort of wall where all of a sudden they're like, I'm not 18. My body doesn't magically recover with the powers of testosterone, you know, and have a little bit of a mental like, freak out about it.
Guy Windsor
Okay, here's where I'm coming from. Obviously I've done the whole 35 to 45 bit. I was never particularly physically robust. When I had awful tendinitis in my wrists, for example, in the mid 90s, and my friend Num fixed them with hideous massage and exercises and whatnot, which is kind of the basis of my forearm conditioning stuff, right? So in my 20s, I wasn't robust, right? The archetypal martial arts teacher is some little old Chinese dude who's either 60 or 160 it's impossible to say which, but it's nonetheless incredibly fluid and beautiful moving and just lovely to watch, right? So the archetype I've been working towards is that sort of peaks at 65. Right? So my training since I was in my 20s has been explicitly and deliberately aimed at mitigating the downsides of aging as I've gotten older, starting when I was in my 20s and hopefully peaking at 65. Now, peaking at 65 is not necessarily a realistic goal, but it's a realistic direction to work in. I mean, the one place I do feel like I am not where I was when I was 30 is my knees, but that's because of an injury I sustained on a hike about four years ago. Right? And that sort of messes up a little bit, and I've had trouble with my knees since then, which is now better than it was. So my knees are much better now than they were three years ago. But they're not where they were when I was 30, which is irritating to me, so I'm sorting it out. But the thing is, my experience is not the common one, and you can't say to somebody who's 45, well, what you need to do is, when you're 25 start doing this, right? So this is an area where I don't really have useful experience to offer because of my own training process and training history. What should somebody do if they're finding it at 35 or 40, or maybe, maybe starting martial arts when they're 40?
Jessica Finley
I think if you're starting martial arts older, at least in my experience, then then people do naturally fall into that kind of, like, I classified it as like a slow cooker, right? What you were describing, right? I don't need to get this roast done in one hour. I can get it done in six. You know, it's fine. So I think when people start older, they naturally fall into that, because it just kind of is part of what is already happening. You already know you're not going to be an Olympic athlete. You're not overwhelmed with these ideas.
Guy Windsor
Are you saying I have no chance of getting Olympic gold medal in gymnastics?
Jessica Finley
I would be impressed to see the outfit.
Guy Windsor
I don't think it's just the outfit or lack of the outfit that is standing in the way of me and Olympic glory in gymnastics.
Jessica Finley
There may be one or two other things. But I think maybe, when we start younger, and it depends on people's mindsets, and their in their habits of thought about things. But it's easier to not know your body well enough and like, burn through these boundaries that you maybe didn't know you had. So for instance, when I was young and first started doing Messer, oh god, I was probably 20, 21, 22 something like that. And I'm five seven, not super short, but you know, when everyone you fence is six foot two dudes, you feel really short, maybe not you. But what I did was I was constantly trying to get that one little more inch, and so I would extend my shoulder extend, you've seen it. We've all seen it. I would overextend everything in my back, my scapula, everything move out to try to get that thrust, and then I pull it back. Which maybe, I mean, it's still fucking bad form with a foil, but you'd probably get away with it with a foil for a very long time. But like an early 2000s Messer, it was not a solid plan to be doing and so I ended up, with a whole shoulder situation that then I had to rehab, right? And then with the rehab, it's like, oh, God, not only can I not do this thing that that I've been doing right? Just throwing my Messer around now hurts, but I have to go back and relearn these micro movement patterns that I didn't even know I created. Right? And if, if you are a HEMA person who doesn't have somebody who's been around the block a lot longer than you, or a good physio to go to, or whatever, now you're trying to self-diagnose this movement pattern, it can be so hard.
Guy Windsor
I know my movement patterns pretty fucking well compared to, should we say, the general population, yeah. And still, my physio spots things I'm doing that I had no idea about.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you always need someone out there with an eye and with a professional eye.
Guy Windsor
So, like step one, therefore, might be study body mechanics and understand the correct supported range of motion for the thing that you are trying to do.
Jessica Finley
Yes, yes.
Guy Windsor
Okay, right. That's a solid bit of advice, and something, again, that I've been sort of incorporating in the stuff that I teach since forever, but most of the people who listen to this show are not coming to my classes because I don't have regular classes at the moment. So okay, so mechanics, study them, understand how your body needs to make these actions for this art that you're practicing, and how to do that in a way that is correct for the way that your body moves.
Jessica Finley
Perfect. Yes, that was going to be the addition I was going to throw on to what you're saying until you slid it in there, like a pro.
Guy Windsor
The make it specific to a person?
Jessica Finley
That took me a long time to learn, both as a practitioner and as a teacher.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely. And I can tell you who flagged it up for me most clearly. Yeah, it was my friend and student, a guy called Petri Vestman in Finland. He was into rapier, what have you. And he just was never getting the proper turnout. You know, where your thighs are like 90 degrees to each other, and you're sort of sitting there on the back leg with the thighs turned out, and he just couldn't do it, and he just couldn't do it. And he did the stretches. I was convinced that if you just do the flexibility and strength training stuff, you will get to that position. And then he came in and showed me a photograph of lots of X rays of different people's hip joints. And the variety there was extreme, right? All healthy people. These are not disability related. This is people with completely normal ability, right? For ordinary stuff like walking and going upstairs and going for a run and doing a squat or whatever else, right? Their hips will never allow a range of motion in the turnout past about, should we say? In Petri’s case, it was probably about 70 degrees. So I was like fuck. It took me a while because I was quite young and relatively inexperienced, and it took me a while to kind of see that specific example and extrapolate it into a general principle of every body is different, and one training method is not going to work for every body. So one has to have a lot of different approaches. And in terms of rapier, if your hips do not do turnout like that, you simply are physically incapable of ever doing Capoferro’s guard position canonically correctly. But this is like a hard wired phenotype thing. There were people like that in 1610, guaranteed, some of them did rapier, guaranteed they had some work around so they couldn't get in the canonically perfect guard position, but they would do something similar. So my solution to it is you turn the back foot in so the front foot is still going forward. So when your weight goes forward onto the front foot, everything is moving in one nice straight line, and you accommodate for the hip issue by having your pelvis turned slightly away from the line, so you're sort of turning towards your opponent slightly and bringing the back foot round, so you can work within that slightly limited range of motion, right? And I don't think there's any other reasonable way to do it, but it's like just the notion of, kind of accepting that there are people who are not actually disabled, but who are nonetheless will never have the capacity to do this specific canonical historical fencing action. That was a bit of a mind fuck for me.
Jessica Finley
Right, right. I'm sure you probably have, but there was a famous photo shoot of Olympic athletes, again, in a line.
Guy Windsor
It’s a whole book, there’s like 140 of them, and funnily enough, shot putters and swimmers and sprinters and high jumpers all look different. Because the optimum body type for any given particular skill is going to be different.
Jessica Finley
I mean, it's kind of a ludicrous example to bring in, but you can visualize that, like, if you're struggling with, oh my god, I cannot get my guard form as beautiful as I want it to be, like I have this vision of what I want it to be, and I cannot get there. And I've done the work. I think you know to deal with the mental side of martial arts and aging and body limitations, you can look to that as, like, hey, you know, not everybody can be everything. And you take yourself towards that ideal and then let it go, because that's you've reached, you know.
Guy Windsor
And, but also, like, I think the big takeaway from that which I'll look it up and put the details in the show notes, but the big takeaway for me, for that book, is that every body type has a performance for which it is adapted, right, for which it is the optimal, right. So if you're a sumo wrestler, you want a very different sort of power to mass ratio than if you are a gymnast, right. And one of them looks more like our sort of cultural ideal of what an athlete should look like than the other, but they're both extremely high level athletes in their particular disciplines, right? And guaranteed that that world champion gymnast doesn't have the mass necessary to be a decent sumo wrestler, right?
Jessica Finley
And maybe couldn't develop. Of it, no matter how hard they tried.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, no Big Macs will compensate for that genetic disadvantage in this in this arena, yeah. So I think it's also kind of useful for people to think about not what is their body not well adapted for, but what is, what is that adaptation good for? I mean, yeah, in my case, relative to my back, I have very short legs, right, right. Short legs and a long back is useful for some kinds of wrestling, and it's useful for horse riding, it has disadvantages in other areas, like it shortens my lunge ridiculously, so I have to compensate for it in some areas, but it's an advantage in others, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. So, you know, complaining about it is pointless. I mean, the one thing that annoyed me the most about it is I couldn't buy a flight suit, because if the flight suit fitted in the back, the legs were just completely wrong. They were, like, a foot longer than they should be, and all the pockets were in the wrong place. And if they and if they fit my legs, then I just could not get it on over my shoulders because my back was too long. I was wedging myself trying to get in. So flight suits would have to be tailor made, or they're out.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, that's frustrating,
Guy Windsor
But I don't need a flight suit. I just wanted one.
Jessica Finley
That would be cool, though. And thinking about pushing yourself towards an ideal, whatever that is, with regards to, like, aging and getting to keep doing martial arts like, it occurs to me also that understanding the difference between discomfort and dysfunction is a good thing to work on.
Guy Windsor
Say more about that.
Jessica Finley
Because I think we can make errors on both sides of this equation, right? So, one could say, you know, like I could go out for a 10 mile jog this morning. Now, the last time I did that, I was 21. Could I get through it? Yes. Would it be a healthy choice? Would that discomfort be in the dysfunction range? Absolutely yes.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. You need to build up to it a bit.
Jessica Finley
Correct, right? So I would need to know what is this is the discomfort of I am increasing my cardiac capacity. I am increasing my lower body's chain ability to keep on this run, etc, etc, etc, and what is I'm about to pull a muscle, I'm about to blow up my knee. That's one way people do commonly error, right? So the error into, like I said earlier, with my Messer, like I'm throwing that thrust out as far as I can get it, even though that's now in the dysfunction range, right? And the first moment it felt uncomfortable, I should have stopped and recreated it or recalled it back.
Guy Windsor
But the thing is, how do you know if the pain is discomfort or dysfunction? I have rules for it, which is sort of heuristics for me and mine is, if it's pain in a large muscle, like in the body of a large muscle, I ignore it. If it's pain in a joint, I stop straight away, right? So that's my general rule of thumb. So it's the location of the pain rather than the intensity of it. Because you will have experiences where you shoot a bit far, and you actually do get a small injury or something, and learning to distinguish between the pain of discomfort and the pain of dysfunction, because they are kind of different. So if you learn to distinguish between those different kinds of pain, unfortunately, that means you have to experience the pain of dysfunction to learn that. But hopefully you only have to have it a couple of times. You will get it. If you train enough, you will get it at some point, because you will make mistakes. But yes, so distinguishing those two kinds of pain, and then with the aerobic stuff, I think if you want to vomit, you've gone too far. If you don't need to vomit, you can probably keep going right, right. That's me. This is my personal heuristics for my personal training. Other people may have a different physiological signal saying, don’t do this.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, no, I like both of those, and, I think cardio some people never get the vomit urge. I actually vomit early and often.
Guy Windsor
I'm so maybe it's not a good signal for you, because it comes too easy.
Jessica Finley
It comes so easy. But for me, if I need to piss myself, okay, and I've gone too far, right? Like, the feeling for me that, like, now it's not okay.
Guy Windsor
So when we're training together, like, super hard, and I know you've had kids, right, what I have to do is, when we're training really hard and you're sort of at the edge, I need to make you laugh. And then you’ll definitely wet yourself.
Jessica Finley
Oh, but Guy, I have done all of my post children, pelvic floor training, because dysfunction. You’ve got to do it.
Guy Windsor
Sure, but I have a suspicion that it's still easier to make you wet yourself than it would have been before children.
Jessica Finley
It's probably true.
Guy Windsor
That is the general tendency.
Jessica Finley
So, yeah, but so everyone's going to have, like, a different internal signal for what exactly the flavour of cardio pushing is where you're going too far. But I really like your joint versus large muscle idea, I think that straight up, holds true. If your joint doesn't feel good, stop, because all of the little things in there don't have a lot of blood flow to them, and it takes them a really long time to recover, even if you do something small.
Guy Windsor
And when you're doing stuff, for example, for my Achilles tendon, I do calf raises on a single leg, but where you stand on the bottom step of a staircase, hold on the banister, drop your weight all the way down on your heel. So a heel is way below horizontal. And you get a full stretch on the calf muscle, and then come into a full, sort of fully toes down, calf raise from there, right? So it’s maximum range calf raises, right? And I'm doing that mostly to condition the tendon rather than the actual calf muscle, because, the thing is, the place where I feel that is the muscle, not the tendon, right? And while that is true, I think it is safe to proceed. If I start to feel it in the tendon, it suggests that there's something wrong with the tendon. It doesn't mean that, even though I feel it in the calf muscle rather than the tendon, it doesn't mean that the tendon is not getting the training that it needs. It's that there's just a lot more nerve endings in muscle than there is in tendons. So you're going to feel it there before you feel it in the tendon. So you can do sort of tendon training, without feeling it in the tendon, which I think is a kind of a useful distinction to have. So you can be training the joint itself, or the bits that attach around the joint, without feeling the training effect in the joint. The training effect is there, but as you don't feel it there, you feel it somewhere else.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, I've had a on and off through sword life and wrestling life like my wrists have caused me trouble. Because I have just an ever so slightly kind of lax setting in them, for whatever reason,
Guy Windsor
Slightly hyper mobile.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, just ever so slightly not as much as many people I've met, but enough that the stuff we do, if I don't keep up on wrist specific forearm strengthening exercises, I will start to feel it in my wrist all of a sudden, right? And so for me at this point, I don't get anywhere near a bad injury in my wrist, because the moment I've kind of slacked off or whatever, I feel that first little twinge and I go, okay.
Guy Windsor
I have the same and I neglect my wrist maintenance stuff for more than a week, then if I'm typing for a few hours or doing computery shit for a few hours, I will start to feel it in my wrists, and that tells me that I've neglected my practice. You can sort of power through and just keep going and get yourself a raging case of tendinitis in both wrists, if you want. Or you go, oh, this isn't going well. I'm going to stop and do some stretching and some weight exercises and my massage and whatnot. And literally, like five minutes of that, and I can get back to what I was doing, and there's no problem.
Jessica Finley
But to wrap up that idea of discomfort versus dysfunction, so the error on the other side is I won't push myself into any discomfort.
Guy Windsor
I was going to say, because most people don't get anywhere close to puking before they, I'm going to say, wimp out on the cardio stuff. And I am absolutely 100% in that group. My cardio is shit. My cardio level is actually okay, but my cardio training is pretty... I tend to focus on using my breathing training to restrict air, rather than working harder. And the thing is, I've used like, like those smart watch type things to measure heart rate and whatnot, while I'm doing the training. And, you know, I can be doing like a brisk walk with my walking poles, which should be kind of comfortably zone two, right. And my heart rate doesn't get over 90, right? It should be 120. So my cardio is fine in that regard. I can work at a level that for most people would be zone two, and for me it isn't even close to it, right, but getting my heart rate to go really high is difficult, because it just isn't trained to do that. All of my training is about when you're really, really tired, remain calm, keep your breathing calm so that you can do the thing you're supposed to do under the stress, rather than just getting your heart rate up for health reasons, right. I nearly killed myself with a cardio thing on a test. I mean, I say nearly kill myself, I'm exaggerating, but basically, I pretty much wanted to puke. I was doing like, squats and push ups and stuff until I was basically dead. And my heart rate got up to 135, right. It's like, it's supposed to be like 180, 190. I don't know what I can do to get it up to those levels. But I think for like most people, most of the time, you get these bits of advice on the internet, like, you know, well, if you're doing cold exposure and you're doing weight training to build muscle, you shouldn't do cold exposure on the same day to do the weight training, the inflammation response that after the weight training is what builds the muscle, and the cold bath will blunt that, right. Yes, that is true, but at the level most people are training at it makes no fucking difference at all. If you are, if you are a serious bodybuilder, absolutely. If you do strength training and cardio, you're not supposed to them on the same day, because the cardio will blunt the neurological adaptation in the strength training. That is true, and it's relevant when you are a serious, competitive power lifter. It is not relevant if you are training the way most people train, which is, you know, I do weights a couple of times a week, and I do some calisthenics three or four times a week, and I go for long walks every now and then. At that level, it makes no difference at all. And yeah, and the positive benefit of doing the weight training will be there whether you go for a walk in the afternoon or not. I think, like, one of the things we should maybe make explicit and flag up in Guy and Jess’s get old disgracefully advice podcast is, don't try to optimize too much. Because unless you're really at the very highest level of athletic performance, it isn't going to make any difference. And a good program that you actually follow is much, much better than a perfect program that is really difficult to follow, and so you quit.
Jessica Finley
Yes, absolutely, and I've certainly seen at tournaments or events, that people are hitting these weird little gel cap, sugar, caffeine things, or looking towards, you know what I don't know Michael Phelps, does as a part of his swimming training and going, you know what, I think I should follow his coach's advice.
Guy Windsor
You should. You should, which means you're training about seven hours a day, and you don't have a proper job.
Jessica Finley
And if that's the case, you might need a little hit of some sugar and caffeine before you get in the pool on our 6.45, right?
Guy Windsor
And, you know, like serious Olympians train for four years, in a careful program that is designed to make them hit their peak on the day of the actual race, or the whatever it is at the Olympics, right? So they're aiming to peak at that specific point. Doesn't matter what happens immediately afterwards, and it doesn't matter how they perform on the way up to it. So long as they qualify to get in, obviously, but the training is designed to get them there and then for them to peak on that day. It is incredibly delicate, right? Incredibly complicated. I honestly think, like for martial artists, that's all a bit fussy. Okay, if somebody knocked on my door right now, said Guy, right, let's have a sword fight, and it was an appropriate thing to do, I would say, yeah, sure, and we put our gear on and we'd fight, right? It is not the martial artists way to need half an hour of warm up and special nutrition to practice their art. Now, obviously, to do it at the highest possible level, absolutely. And if you're a serious competitor in like, I don't know, the Helsinki longsword open or whatever, where you've got 200 longsword people all in the open tournament, right? It's going to require some pretty serious training to compete successfully in that crowd. And it's not a coincidence I think that most people who win tournaments like that tend to be men in their 20s to early 30s. That is not a coincidence, right? But, I am actually going to a tournament for the first time in 25 years in a couple of weeks in Germany. Okay, the preparation I'm doing for it, I am making sure that I practice the ranges of motion I'm going to need, because I do lots of different styles, right? So all of my footwork training for like two weeks leading up to the tournament is in rapier, because I'm doing side sword on the first day, rapier on the second day. Side sword mechanics are very similar to Fiore mechanics, and basically, they don't require extreme ranges of motion, right? Rapier is the is the one where you're much more likely to blow out a knee or pull a hamstring or something. So for like the two weeks leading up to it, whenever I do footwork, I'm doing rapier footwork, just to make sure my body is used to it. Other than that, I'm training as usual. That is the full extent of my tournament preparation. I'm not eating specially. I'll probably take a bag of nuts or something with me just in case I get hungry. I'm not timing my protein intake and doing any of that crap at all, because I don't want to know what my artificial peak is. I want to know what my what the level I can hit on any given day is. That is a more useful measurement for a martial artist, I think, than for a competitor, like for a serious athletic competitor, they need to know what their artificial peak is with all the extra support they're allowed, yes, what is the maximum they can hit, right? Because that's what they're competing on, right? Whereas, for me, I'm going for this thing just to see, well, I haven't been to a tournament since. I think 2002 was the last one I competed in. And I just thought it's time that I just experience a historical martial arts tournament as they are now, just because I get asked about it a lot, and I talk about it a lot, and I really ought to have some hands-on experience of it in its current form, just to see what it's like from the inside.
Jessica Finley
Update it, do it. Have fun. But I want to circle back to that, because I think that really does highlight, maybe a way to think about, how do I keep doing this thing I love as I age, which is a mental switch from, am I a high level specialist competitor, or am I a lifelong practitioner? And so if you are mentally attached to I'm a high level, sport specific competitor you will, you will age out. That's just a real fact.
Guy Windsor
That's why they have so called Masters Tournaments.
Jessica Finley
Yes, exactly, and there are the occasional specimens who keep going at a high professional level, you know, when they're quote, unquote old.
Guy Windsor
Like 45.
Jessica Finley
Old is always 45 or younger. So, that’s maybe a thing that you could think about if you're finding yourself struggling with, like, oh, man, I can't do this the way I used to do it, that's probably true. So what can you be doing?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and you can switch from one to the other. You can start out as a competitor and become a more lifelong sort of person. And you can start out intending to be a sort of lifelong sort of person, get bitten by the athletic bug and become a serious competitor. But you should maybe be aware of the natural limitations that come with that. Both approaches have their limitations. But the limitations of the athletic stuff is sort of externally mandated stuff you can't control. The limitations of the lifelong stuff are much more internal.
Jessica Finley
Yes, yes, I completely agree. I completely agree.
Guy Windsor
Okay, that brings me on to something that you said in a WhatsApp chat with me a little while ago. I'm just going to throw this sentence at you and see what you do with it. Are you ready?
Jessica Finley
I'm ready.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I'm just reading your words back to you because I wasn't 100% sure what you meant.
Jessica Finley
Lord knows.
Guy Windsor
Well, we'll find out soon enough. “What is it to be embodied through the study of martial arts, and how does this journey benefit us?” Okay, I think I know what you mean, but go with it.
Jessica Finley
Well, I think when I first threw it out like kind of, what I was thinking about is how many of us live so intensely intellectual or intellectualised lives. To the point that people talk about their brains and bodies as being separate things, as though your brain is not your body.
Guy Windsor
Well, your brain is as much your body as your liver is.
Jessica Finley
Correct, but we don't conceive them that way.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I think you conceive them as one thing, and I conceive them as one thing, but should we say people in general conceive them as different.
Jessica Finley
I meant the broad “we” of modern, Western, weird culture. Anyways. So, I was thinking about, like, at least for me personally, how much learning to stop the litany of words about the thing I want to do that is just going in my brain and instead dropping into my body and becoming even the language I use there, dropping into my body. Where was I, if not in my body, right? But that's it, because we have such intense, fucking cool imaginations, right, that we can do this weird stuff to ourselves, which is useful and good, but anyways, the ability, whether you want to think about it as meditatively or whatever, whatever framework you want to put around it, but be in the body and become, then embodied through martial arts practice. And being able to take the lessons from martial arts practice, not just obviously the good, physical and mental benefits, and not how am I going to use this on the streets? Because I'm desperately uninterested in that.
Guy Windsor
What fucking streets are those?
Jessica Finley
I don't know.
Guy Windsor
Where I live, apart from, obviously, that, encounter with a rifleman in the wild streets of Jakomäki, generally speaking. And technically, I wasn't in the street at the time. I was literally inside my salle, but the whole street thing is a massive irrelevance.
Jessica Finley
It’s very silly. How can I how can I say this succinctly to get you going on it, here's what I will say. How has your martial arts practice, including all of the meditative work of controlling your breathing, which you've discussed before, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How does that go out into your daily life in ways that benefit you in your interactions, but aren't necessarily specifically about being in your body, if you see what I mean, because you could say I can go for a walk gently and easily with my kids whenever I want. Well, I mean, that's cool, but,
Guy Windsor
That's a fitness thing. That's not a martial arts thing.
Jessica Finley
That’s exactly that's what I'm saying.
Guy Windsor
Okay, this isn't martial arts specific. It is paying attention to movement specific. So I would imagine that dancers have the same thing and gymnasts and kinds of athletes, but if you if you spend time concentrating on the feeling of the movement that you're doing, then you have access to noticing how your body is feeling at any given time much more easily than people who don't do it regularly. Because it's something that our culture doesn't tend to pay much attention to, right? And it's useful. For example, my 17-year-old daughter is still at home, thank God. And sometimes she'll say something that sort of sets us off in some sort of a disagreement about things, right? And sometimes that spirals into an argument where she gets really cross and storms off upstairs. And that is never a good outcome. That is never the desired outcome. Yeah, right. So I'm not perfect at this, by any means, but sometimes I notice that something about what she's saying is causing me to feel a certain way that is making me treat her like an opponent rather than like a daughter, right? And when I notice that feeling, I can recognise its inappropriateness to the situation and cut off its influence. And so the conversation doesn't end with my daughter getting cross from me and storming off upstairs. It ends with the conversation being redirected into a more constructive place, right? I don't think I would be able to do that if I didn't have that kind of extensive practice of paying attention to how a movement feels.
Jessica Finley
What does it feel like when you switch from, I'll say connection to disconnection, right?
Guy Windsor
Okay, it isn't that. Because the feeling is still there. It's the ability actually to because, I mean, everybody has feelings, and everybody acts on their feelings. We are feeling machines, and most of what we do, most of our decisions, are emotional and not rational. Okay, what's going on there is noticing the feeling that is generating the behaviour and recognising it for what it is, and therefore being able to curb the behaviour, right? So it's actually less embodied in a way, but because instead of being unconsciously embodied, I become consciously embodied. And so it isn't a binary thing of you are embodied or not, because everyone is embodied all the time. It's just one doesn't always realize it. We think we're away with the fairies and whatever, but it's still the body doing the whole thing. And still an awful lot of what would of our decisions are coming from emotional states. In the same way that if you are doing a rapier lunge, for example, or longsword swing, mandritto fendente or whatever, right. If you can feel how that feels to do it, you can adjust the action so that it feels better and is better. If you have a clear sense of what it should feel like, and a clear sense of what it does feel like, you can adjust the motion until it feels like what it should feel like, right? That skill of basically paying attention to how it feels and how that affects the external form of what you're doing, that skill of paying attention to how it feels translates to things like conversations with my child. I don't always get to it in time, but if I get to it in time and I go, oh, hang on, I'm feeling this way. This is leading in a bad direction, whatever. And sure enough, when I do change things so that I am no longer leading us down, that leading is the wrong word. I'm no longer accompanying her on the path to perdition, then the feeling tends to go away, right? Because whatever was triggering it is no longer triggering it, right. Either the trigger has gone away, or the trigger is no longer getting the response on those two things. I mean, martial arts practice helps me avoid getting into stupid arguments with my daughter. That’s one benefit.
Jessica Finley
I love that. I would hazard a guess that like that particular scenario, though it feels very different, is not dissimilar to the kinds of regulation you have to do when working with a student, because it's very easy sometimes for students to put us in like, I know I've hit that where all of a sudden, like shivers and sparkles go down my whole body, and suddenly I'm just fucking pissed at this student, because they did or said something, and Lord knows why, but it hit me in a way, that, like, that thing happens right? And now I'm like, fuck you. Let's go. And then I'm like, oh, that's inappropriate. I'm going to go check in on a different student for the next 30 to 45 seconds, and then I'll circle back around.
Guy Windsor
I had that when the whole boarding school thing kicked off 10 years ago, and when I was in the midst of all of that shit, I was fencing one of my students, and I realized that I couldn't distinguish between friendly fencing, which is what it was, and them actually trying to hit me for real, right. I didn't confuse the weapons for being sharp or anything, but it felt like a fight at school, where that fucker just wants to stick you in a laundry basket and shove you down the stairs, right? So I stopped. I was like, okay, we just stopped. I took my gear off, and I was like, what the fuck was that, right? And I figured out what it was, and was like, well, no more fencing for me until I get this shit in my head sorted out. It took about five years. It's hard, so I literally didn't fence anyone for about five years until I could reliably get into that situation, and it not feel like a real fight in any way, shape or form, right? And then, of course, covid hit. So, yeah, another reason I'll go to this tournament, because I’m fucking out of practice, I need to kind of get some pokey, pokey in. In a way in which I can be as reasonably sure as anyone can be that is not going to trigger anything unpleasant, either in inside me or triggering some kind of negative behaviour. I feel I have to be particularly careful about that sort of thing.
Jessica Finley
Strict on yourself.
Guy Windsor
Because it's okay to make mistakes, but it's not okay for a professional to make predictable mistakes. And it's like people who turn into arseholes when they drink, shouldn't drink. It may be completely unfair that it has this effect on you, but actually, let me tell you another story about Stefan Deke, the guy who sent me the Leatherman back from Frankfurt. Okay, he and I were at an event in America. We were sharing a hotel room. And on the first night, in the morning, I was like, Stefan, you were fucking snoring all night. He was like, I don't snore. So on the second night I had, this is early days of video phones, right? My phone had a camera, and the camera could take video. And it was like, a tiny, little, thing.
Jessica Finley
A tiny little grainy potato video.
Guy Windsor
So, he was snoring, and I was whacking him over the head, and he'd roll over, and then he'd start snoring again and wake me up again. So I got my phone out and I videoed him snoring, right? And Stefan is German. This is an important part of the story. Literally in Germany, beer is considered a food. It is what you drink with dinner. Okay? So in the morning I show Stefan a video, and he goes, oh my god, I snore. I'm so sorry. It must be when I'm drinking. So for the rest of the event, he had one beer with dinner, and that was it for alcohol, and he didn't snore again any other night. Okay, that's responsible drinking. If this thing you're doing has this negative effect, you should stop doing it. It's hard. And so when people like Stefan, I mean, this is at a sword fighty event, and it's at the same sword fighty event where we actually drank the bar dry. Back in the days when we would all drink a lot of events that those days seem to have gone. People are a lot more serious now, but like this is like maybe 2005 or something like that. And we were young, and the beer was cheap, and we all just got tanked, and it was great, but like, if it causes a bad outcome, and it's clear there's a relationship between the two, you need to stop doing it.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'm sure I've told you about it, but have you read How Emotions Are Made?
Guy Windsor
No
It’s by Lisa Feldman Barrett, it's on your list now you're required reading, because you will absolutely lose your mind love this book, but How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, talking about how emotions are made in our brains and what their purposes are, and the best of our scientific knowledge, you know, circa, I guess it's probably a five year old book now. One of the things she talks about is that our brains are prediction machines, right? And the purpose of an emotion is to help us reach homeostasis inside our body and keep us alive. That's its only purpose. And because we are such intensely social creatures, our homeostasis inside our body depends upon what's happening with our partner next to us. And so it becomes this very convoluted sense that maybe other animals don't have in the same way, because their social structure is being different. So thinking about your example of paying attention to your body in your sword cut, allowing you to then predict and adjust your sword cut right, your experience of not living in the prediction, but putting your attention on the I predicted this sword cut to go this way. How are the ways that it's not what my brain imagined, as a martial artist, right, and being in in the receptive side of that. Then we can turn that and hone that earlier and earlier and earlier in our prediction cycles, right? And I think that's something that really struck me as you were speaking, even about your relationship with your daughter. It's the same thing you're honing your prediction cycles, like you're learning earlier and earlier and earlier. And it's probably something very silly, like, all of a sudden, your rhomboids go in your back, and then you're like, oh shit, I'm about to fight somebody right. And you're not actively saying, oh my rhomboids are going or maybe you are right, depends on how much you're paying attention in that sense. But those are our cues that we have, through socialisation, learned to call anger or learn to call sadness.
Guy Windsor
I mean different emotions have different physical sensations in the body, for sure. And I mean, sometimes it doesn't really matter what the emotion is long as you can tell what the feeling is. Like to go back to that whole boarding school stuff, one of the things that that manifested itself was I would be in the kitchen making a cup of tea or whatever, and I'd be hit by a wave of grief. Which is just bizarre. But like, bodies do these things. Recognising the feeling for what it was, knowing where it was coming from, all I could do is just sort of stand there, or sometimes sit down for a bit and just let the feeling be there and then it would go away. And that felt very different to, for example, rage, right? It's a totally different feeling, and it's different to sadness, grief and sadness, not the same. Sometimes these different emotions, they disguise themselves as other things. And sometimes rage is actually coming from grief. If you sit with the rage long enough, it disappears, and then the grief is underneath, for instance. But I any martial artist who trains internal stuff for long enough you have the skill to just sit and notice. That was probably the single most useful thing, in the whole recovery process, is just being able to, and again, this is a feeling. It's like, if you get hit in the leg when you're getting out of your car and you just drop something or whatever and it or you accidentally slam the car door on your arm or something, yeah, right. It's just fucking painful, and it's awful. The same feeling in a different context is entirely different. The same thing, if you're in the middle of a fencing match and somebody whacks you a bit harder than the leg, you might not care. You might get angry. You might get angry with them for hitting you too hard. You might get angry with yourself for not parrying properly, whatever it is, you might be afraid that you've just been injured. There's lots of different feelings you can have about it, but at the end of the day, it's just a whack on the leg.
Jessica Finley
Yes, right? But the story is the only thing that matters.
Guy Windsor
The story is exactly the thing that matters. It's like, you know my three broken legs analogy?
Jessica Finley
Yes, I think you've said it before. Say it again, though.
Guy Windsor
Say you have a broken leg. One possibility is you went skiing or whatever, having a nice time, and you had an accident and you broke your leg. That sucks. Another is somebody comes out to you in the street with a baseball bat and says horrible things about you, then smashes your leg with a baseball bat, right? And another is there's a kid crossing the road, or whatever lorry comes along, you leap into action, save the child from the lorry, and the lorry breaks your leg, right? It's the exact same injury in this thought experiment, but the consequences of the injury are completely different, right? The skiing accident becomes a funny story after a while, and you might even forget it ever happened, right? The personal assault is the sort of thing you're probably going to need therapy to get over, right? And the sacrifice to a higher cause is, again, it’s a positive thing.
Jessica Finley
You may get an award.
Guy Windsor
It’s not even that, just you'll feel good about forever, one would imagine. So, the story that there's the actual broken leg, which needs attention and needs to be fixed, and it's going to hurt, and there's going to be physical pain, and there's going to be annoyance that you can't do the things you wanted to do because maybe you have to, like, cancel going to a fencing match or fencing tournament or something because your leg is broken, right? Yes, there's all those sort of practical things, and there's the feelings, and there's the annoyance, and there's the inconvenience, whatever, those all stay the same, yes, but the story makes all the difference in the world.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, right. And I think this, to circle back to the beginning of our conversation, applies to injuries and or negative physical experiences you are having in in your martial arts experience, as a result of you aging. Because that story is that story can be basically a pointer to, oh, my God, I'm mortal. It brings up so much for people.
Guy Windsor
This is the weird thing, right? I started watching a film where it has an amazing cast, and it's about this old lady who's had cancer for three years, or whatever, and she has a she kind of collapses at home. She's taken to the hospital, and her four adult children are there in the hospital, and they are freaking the fuck out because they think their mother is dying, right? Well, what the fuck did you think would happen? Yeah, I honestly couldn't watch it, because when my father was dying back in 2023, right? He had this thing where the bile ducts in his liver started to collapse. There's no treatment for it except the liver transplant. He was 83 he wasn't even on the list. He would not have been eligible for a transplant, and would have refused it, even if he if they'd offered him one, right? And he was a vet, veterinary surgeon, not a military veteran. For the American listeners, the veterinary surgeon, animal doctor. So he’d been dealing with life and death stuff his whole career, and he wanted to go home to finish writing the last volume of his memoirs, which was almost finished, but just needed a few tweaks. So he wanted to go home and do that and then die at home. That's what he wanted. And so I asked the nurse, well, can he go home? And I was obviously tired and stressed. And, you know, this is all quite a big event. As you can imagine, right. So I wasn't really thinking as clearly as I should have been. And so I said to the nurse, he wants to go home. Can we just take him home? And she was like, well, see, we have to make sure he's safe. And that was the expression she used. And I thought at the time, he's dying, what the hell do you mean, safe, right? And it took me a day to figure out what was actually going on. The doctors and nurses in the hospital are not used to families who recognise that their loved one is dying, and the person who's doing the dying recognises that they're dying, understands that medical treatment is now a question of just palliative care and nothing else, right? And so decisions should be made with those expectations. What is the best thing for the patient, given the fact that we can't fix it, right? So I realised that these doctors, nurses, they were not used to people accepting that. And they didn't want to send him home if the people around him did not understand what was going on. So I spoke to the consultant, and I said, he knows he's dying. We know he's dying. He wants to go home to die at home. Is there any reason to keep him in the hospital? And he was like, well… I said, you're doing this test this afternoon. Why are you going to find anything that you can actually fix right? No. I said, so, why are you doing the test? And he said, fair point. And he thought about it. He said, Yeah, okay, yeah, he can go home. It'll take us a day or so to do the paperwork and stuff, and my dad was like, I want to go home today. Well, fine, we'll take you home. And rather than wait till the next day, when they could have arranged an ambulance, take him home and everything else, so they sort of scurried about, and it took him some hours to kind of get the medication for pain control and whatever, set things up with the district nurse so she could come around and help with the whole palliative care stuff, the good drugs, which are legally quite constrained for good reason. And so I drove him home that night, and with the help of a neighbour, we got him up the stairs and into his bedroom, and he died two weeks later. But the key thing there, the reason he was able to have the last couple of weeks that he wanted, right, was because the people around him accepted the fact that he was dying. And he had accepted the fact that he was dying. And I think this is one of the great benefits of martial arts training. If you do it with this approach, you confront your own mortality and you get okay with it. You don't seek it out, necessarily, but it's like, we're all going to die. It’s going to happen sooner or later. You could die tomorrow. I mean, my kids think I'm weird because I won't let them leave the house, even just to get it around the corner for the shops without saying goodbye, because there's because there's a non-zero chance that that's the last time I'll ever see them, right? It's not likely. I'm not, like, worried about it. I don't stop them going to the shop around the corner, because they might die on the way or die on the way back. But it's like, it's every interaction with every person you ever meet could well be the last time you ever interact with that person.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, crushingly so.
Guy Windsor
And I think again, that's one of the benefits of martial arts training, if you approach it as a martial art in which you're training to kill people, is you have to think about the ethics of mortal violence, and you have to think about the fact that the mortal violence might happen to you, and I mean, a lot of people do martial arts without ever thinking about this stuff at all, and that’s fine, but the way I do it, and the way I the way I get value from it, one of the values I get is this sort of comfort with the notion.
Jessica Finley
You know, I don't often think about actively killing or being killed in martial arts. I've certainly thought about the ramifications of what I'm doing if I fuck it up. So I guess I've thought about it that way.
Guy Windsor
But we're training to kill people, you swing a sword of somebody's head, the probable outcome is they die.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, no, no, that's true. That's true.
Guy Windsor
And what do we see in the treatises? Okay, Fiore is very nice. He stops the action right before the person gets injured. But a lot of the German sources you work with, there are literally limbs on the ground and blood spurting. Capoferro illustrates swords coming out the back of people's heads. That is not usually a survivable injury.
Jessica Finley
No, it's not. It's not. And certainly in my practice, I think about it a lot with the armoured stuff, because it's absolutely unavoidable there, right? Because you have to apply so much force of your own will to injure someone once they're in armour, you have to have thought through.
Guy Windsor
You can't do it by accident. Well, you can, but it's a really freak accident.
Jessica Finley
It's a freak accident. Realistically, you have to, like, open their visor, look gently and lovingly into their eye, and then drag the dagger into it, right? It's a horror, so that I actually have thought about quite a bit. But you know, what did it for me was birthing my kids. Going through childbirth was, for me very much like living on the precipice of life and death.
Guy Windsor
Well, it's the most dangerous thing that most people ever do, yeah, at least historically speaking. And I've been in the room where it happens, obviously, I haven't done it myself, but yeah, it is utterly primal.
Jessica Finley
Very much, very much. Well, I mean, martial arts helped me in that, as far as meditatively doing martial arts, understanding the difference between pain and injury, understanding like, oh, I'm about to puke right now, but that just means I'm exerting a whole lot of physical effort, because I've felt this before, and you know what I mean, and it kept the fear down to a good extent for me, because I could understand.
Guy Windsor
That's a really useful thing. Yeah, fear is the mind killer.
Jessica Finley
Oh, absolutely, right.
Guy Windsor
As Kaja Sadowski famously wrote.
Jessica Finley
I'd much rather credit him. But yeah, I think it could be really useful in when we do encounter life or death situations, whether they be like you know what people assume, which is violence, interpersonal violence, but really, your dad was literally a life or death situation. It was a death situation in that case. But, like that, was it, or birthing, or whatever, and not having that fear blocking you from seeing what is happening, is absolutely invaluable.
Guy Windsor
And the fear can still be there.
Jessica Finley
Oh, yeah, it got scary, birthing. It did get scary, sure, but I've been scared.
Guy Windsor
And again, fear is something you can train to deal with. So I'm scared of heights, which is really useful because I go climbing. And twice, I've had panic attacks on the bouldering wall, like, literally, five feet off the ground, which is great, because there's nothing you can do about it except sort your shit out and climb down. But there is a temptation just to fall, just not deal with it, and thing is, in a bouldering situation, that's actually not that dangerous.
Jessica Finley
No, it's actually fine.
Guy Windsor
But I mean, if you jump down, that's relatively safe. If you fall, there is a risk of injury, but it's not that likely to be that bad. The worst I've ever seen is a broken ankle, in the bouldering gym, but there's that, like, hanging off the wall. Literally, it's like your hands won't let go, because you know that if you let go, you're going to die. Yeah, it's weird.
Jessica Finley
I've been climbing quite a bit both inside and outside, yeah, and I don't have a fear of heights, but when I get inverted, because I had two falls that were almost bad, I didn't get hurt in either one, but in both cases, it was this moment, right when you're cresting over this ledge right in that final push. You know, we've all climbed out of a pool or whatever, like in that final push, and I slipped.
Guy Windsor
Oh god, yeah, that's the worst feeling.
Jessica Finley
And it just happens, and so our brains are prediction machines. So for a year, year and a half, every time I climbed where I began to go into an overhang, I couldn't do it, nothing. I could not make myself make the next move. There was no way I could. And it was stupid. And I would experience, like that movie trick where they fish eye lens and then the hallway grows longer, I would experience that and be like, it is impossible for me to reach that next hold that is so far away? My perceptions were not working, but I couldn't make them work, because you can't override that weird thing.
Guy Windsor
I get that on the wall all the time. I know what I'm supposed to do next, but I just, my hand will not let go. I know I'm going to fall, and if I fall, I know I'm going to die. I'm not going to die. And again, it's really useful to have these irrational fears where, yes, actually facing the fear, I mean being afraid of wrestling sharks, or jumping off base jumping or something that's rational, because that's going to kill you. But, you know, falling off the wall at the bouldering gym, well, I have actually done it, and it didn't kill me at all. It's an irrational fear. So, using it to train dealing with fear is not a dangerous thing to. So it's a really useful thing to have training like, but I think it's worth thinking about going back to the difference between discomfort and dysfunction. Just to keep our dichotomies the same. Often people will stop before they need to stop because they're afraid of injury, right, and that fear is there for a good reason. But I think it's maybe a useful question to think about is, how do we know when the fear is there too early, right? And we should push through it. And how do we know when the fear is there for a good reason, then we should stop, right. I mean, Gavin de Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, is really useful for telling you to listen to your fear. And if you know, if walking in, going into that elevator with that dodgy looking bloke feels scary, you probably shouldn't do it. He may be a perfectly nice person, right? But listen to your fear, right? That's useful. But I mean personally, on the injury, sort of training injury front, I err on the side of caution, right? And one of the things I've had to learn is to overcome the fear of injury when doing certain training things, because actually, they're not dangerous. They're not as dangerous as I feel they are. Okay, so how do you think about this perfectly rational fear of injury? But what do we do about it?
Jessica Finley
Yeah, so a couple other thoughts come to my mind. I think that there's a fine line between fear and anxiety, right? Anxiety is like a fear that has generalised to uselessness, or even to harmfulness sometimes, you know. So, my fear of being overhung had become anxiety. That wasn't fear anymore. That was just wild anxiety, because I know. It would be like if suddenly I was afraid to get on the elevator with you, Guy, that isn't logical, because I know you. I know you. Well, I know there will be no injury. In fact, I know you're likely to injure someone else that tries to hurt me, right? So if I suddenly felt that, I would be like, oh, this has to be an anxiety about something, right?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, okay, but, but let's, let's try and make it more specifically useful to, shall we say, somebody who's 45 years old and is doing, I know, rapier or something, and they're worried about hurting their knees. That is stopping them from doing training at the level that they are capable of doing, and that they know they're capable of doing, and that will give them the results that they want. So they're not getting the results that they want because of this fear. How do how do you distinguish between this is a fear to be overcome and this is a fear to be listened to?
Jessica Finley
For me, this is about knowledge and playful boundary testing. So for one to get stronger, I have to injure myself like I have to have micro injuries. That's how our bodies build, right? You want to build muscle, you micro injure your muscle. That's why you're sore. You build stronger muscle. Ish. Yes, I know.
Guy Windsor
That is technically true. It's not a useful framing because, because it's not actually injury, and that it doesn't stop you doing the thing, it doesn't cause any harm. It is a stimulus to adaptation. It's not something that is going to diminish your performance.
Jessica Finley
Within reason.
Guy Windsor
Yes, of course. But a performance increasing thing, not a performance diminishing thing, like, maybe not today, but in like three days’ time or a week's time, you'll perform better because of that. It’s a different thing if you strain a ligament in your knee or tear your ACL or something, right, that might permanently reduce, permanently change your knee, right?
Jessica Finley
And so, yes, obviously. But I say that because we were discussing also, like all these ideas have gotten conflated in my mind at this point in our conversation, but because we were also discussing discomfort, right?
Guy Windsor
No, I get that. It could be useful to if you think of injury as a spectrum, as it were, from useful micro injury at one end to life alteringly the bad injury at the other.
Jessica Finley
Thank you. Yes, that's what I was kind of trying to hint around. If you're a person that's running with anxiety about injury, right?
Guy Windsor
Because then actually you're seeking out certain kinds of injury and just avoiding others.
Jessica Finley
Yes, exactly, which allows you some discernment. So it's just on that fear training. So, fear isn't your problem now, it's actual legitimate concern of man, I'm getting older. I know I have a bum wrist. I know if I push super hard, maybe I won't be using my wrist for the next six weeks while I go to PT, it's going to be a bad time, right? So for that, then, for me, like I say, the key is to keep playfulness. Because for me, playfulness is mindfulness. You cannot have a good tea party with a four year old girl if you aren't in the tea party.
Guy Windsor
That's right, that's very true. I've had many, many tea parties with four year old girls. I can precisely understand exactly what you mean. You have to be there and you have to believe it. And that tea is delicious.
Jessica Finley
It is delicious. And let's talk about the boy next door. So for me, playfulness, why I say that is, is all of the things that it implies. But really, really being there and being like, oh, you know what? Like man, I really want to hit that 100 lunges a day goal, right? I'm 45 and I've heretofore done 20 lunges a week, right? So my goal today isn't to hit my 100, because that would not be a playful, good time where I was in in my space and really being, being present with what's happening with me. I'm going to go, I don't know, let's see how many I can do. And put on some good tunes and put it in a good space and play for a minute with it. And play means I also don't have expectation of the outcome. The outcome no longer is irrelevant, but it's going to get me there. And then continuing to play as a way to invite yourself to go a little bit further each time, right? Rather than this being a horrific like, I've got this job to get done, or else I've got to turn my man card in, because I told somebody I made a goal, and now I'm not achieving it. How horrible am I? And also I'm dying, right?
Guy Windsor
That's the thing I don't like about these challenges, it is why I don't usually do them. I might set them for myself and publish them. I mean, a bunch of these podcast episodes are monthly challenges from like, 2001 or something. But yeah, here's a classic example, right? There was this couple that wanted to be the first vegan couple to make it to the top of Everest, right?
Jessica Finley
I have so many questions and thoughts, but continue.
Guy Windsor
I haven't fact checked this, yeah, but this is a story somebody told me recently, and I have no reason to doubt them. Maybe I should fact check it before this episode goes live. And then I'll say something about it if it's if it's true or not anyway. So the story is they get very close to the top, within like, 10 meters or 20 meters or something at the top, yeah. And the woman simply cannot continue. And so the chap leaves his wife there to get the top and back again. And by the time he gets back, she's dead, right. And he makes it off the mountain. And I think tries to persuade people to kind of help him take his wife off. I forget how the story continues, but the point is that goal should have been we both get off the mountain alive. Not, we both get to Everest, like, how far up the mountain can we get and both get back alive. Rather than we want to get to the top, that's the goal. And so how you frame the goal, I think matters really, very much. If my goal is to improve my lunging, that is achievable in a safe and sensible manner, if my goal is to hit 100 lunges when I can currently do 10, then anytime I don't get to 100 that is a failure. But if I'm training towards 100, maybe I do 10, the first day 12, the second day 14, 16, 18, and then maybe I come back down to 16 and 18, 20, I sort of interval my way up as a sensible person would do, and maybe I'll actually still pretty stiff, because I've been going at this for like a week or so. I'm going to take an extra day off to recover and then come back. That is all progress towards the goal, right. And if the goal is progress, each one of those days is successful, even, and especially, perhaps the day you took off. But if the goal is 100, every day that you don't hit 100 you have failed. So I think, how we frame the goals can maybe also be an important part of how people approach training towards them.
Jessica Finley
I think so. And I think I think that's a great callback to continuing to practice martial arts as we age. Because the goal is continual movement, continual practice, continual growth, continual learning, and not winning the Helsinki open tomorrow.
Guy Windsor
So maybe we should aim to peak at 90.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, I love it. I love it,
Guy Windsor
All right, I think we should probably wrap that there. Now you may have noticed that I didn't bring my usual questions because, we just decided we were going to talk about aging and this embodiment thing, and I think it went just fine.
Jessica Finley
Yeah, I enjoyed it. I hope someone else did.
Guy Windsor
So the whole best idea you haven't acted on and how you spend a million dollars is up. We'll leave those for some future time.
Jessica Finley
Yes, yes, that sounds lovely. Well, thank
Guy Windsor
Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Jess, it's lovely to see you again.
Jessica Finley
Thank you, Guy.
