Episode 216: Making seated longsword work, with Ella Rose

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Ella Rose has been practicing historical martial arts since 2017. In 2023 she founded Black Cat Historical Fencing with co-founder Shane Scallin, where she teaches dagger, rapier and beginner longsword classes. She has competed across the US and internationally, and she has won medals in multiple weapon categories. Ella is the lead tournament organizer of Iron Gate Exhibition, Benedict's Big Day, and Long Tail.

Ella has worked in many minority-focused spaces, both within historical martial arts and in her career as an illustrator. Having dealt with chronic illness and disability her entire martial arts career, she led the creation of BCHF's seated fencing practice, one of the first of its kind. And in 2025 she organized the first seated longsword tournament, and she aims to continue pushing the HEMA community further towards inclusion for all athletes.

In our conversation we talk about dealing with chronic illness, especially within HEMA, and the adaptations that Ella makes to her training and recovery time.

This is a useful conversation for anyone involved in running a club, or thinking of starting one, because we talk about what to charge students, and the ethos that will help make your club inclusive and welcoming. We talk about the adaptations salles should make so they become places where people can hang out and still be part of the community, even if they are not actively taking part in a session.

Most clubs are not going to be equipped with disability accommodations already in place, so we discuss how coaches can support students with different needs, and what a club can do to actively show that people with disabilities are welcome.

We also hear about the fascinating process of adapting historical martial arts to seated fencing: how to adapt the system, how to create suitable seats and where to position people, and how a seated fencer can fence against someone standing up.

 

Links of Interest

BCHF Website: https://www.blackcathistoricalfencing.com/

BCHF Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackcathistoricalfencing/

 

Ella’s art website: https://www.icecubesanddragonfire.com/

Ella’s art Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/icecubesanddragonfire/?hl=en

To see the graphic novel mentioned: https://markosia.com/2025/08/18/emily-corn-vol-2-part-1-finding-the-light-out-now/

 

IGX 2026 Ruleset, which include the most up to date seated fencing rules Ella has written: https://irongateexhibition.com/tournaments-spring/

 

Utah Fencing Federation: https://www.utahfencingfoundation.org/

 

Photos from Long Tail 2026, including photos of their seated longsword tournament:

Transcript

Guy Windsor

I'm here today with Ella Rose, who has been practicing historical martial arts since 2017. In 2023 she founded Black Cat Historical Fencing with co-founder Shane Scallin. Her areas of focus are Fiore's longsword and dagger — we're going to have to talk about that — and she also has an interest in Ringen and rapier. Oh, I'm a bit of a rapier man too. Excellent. Okay. Ella teaches — you can tell when I'm reading it off a script, can't you? — Ella teaches BCHF's dagger, rapier and beginner longsword classes. She has competed across the US and internationally, and she has won medals in multiple weapon categories. Ella is the lead tournament organizer of Iron Gate Exhibition, Benedict's Big Day, and Long Tail. Ella has worked in many minority-focused spaces, both within historical martial arts and in her career as an illustrator. Having dealt with chronic illness and disability her entire martial arts career, Ella cares deeply about making historical martial arts accessible to all people, especially those who have been historically underserved in sports. She led the creation of BCHF's seated fencing practice, one of the first of its kind. And in 2025 she organized the first seated longsword tournament. This is fascinating, and she aims to continue pushing the HEMA community further towards inclusion for all athletes. So without further ado, Ella, welcome to the show.

 

Ella Rose

Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

 

Guy Windsor

It's nice to meet you. I actually noticed, reading the bio that you very kindly sent me, that there are a few bits and pieces that I missed out. So we're going to have to come back to those. My first question just orients everybody. Because again, one of the goals of the show is to get people from all over the place, from all walks of life and all backgrounds and whatnot. So geography matters. Whereabouts in the world are you?

 

Ella Rose

I am in Rhode Island, USA. Warren Rhode Island — for anyone who knows Rhode Island, we're the smallest state in the US, so we are pretty much one of the only HEMA clubs in our area. We're the only nonprofit HEMA club in our state.

 

Guy Windsor

Okay. I did do a seminar in Rhode Island before COVID, for Alexander Reaper at his fencing school.

 

Ella Rose

I'm familiar with Alex.

 

Guy Windsor

It's a tiny wee place, Rhode Island, but that's a big fencing school.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, they're a very large Olympic fencing school, and they do have a small longsword program there. Black Cat, we're a dedicated HEMA school, so we have programs outside of just longsword — we're focused on all sorts of historical martial arts, as opposed to mainly the Olympic fencing thing.

 

Guy Windsor

And talking with Alex — I mean, the Olympic side of things is huge business, because if you do fencing at a high level, it's easy to get scholarships to colleges.

 

Ella Rose

Oh yeah, absolutely.

 

Guy Windsor

So basically, parents are chucking loads of money into having their kids taught sport fencing to help them get into college later on. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'm quite glad historical martial arts hasn't got that kind of get-you-into-college side of things.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, I would agree. I know a lot of people who are in HEMA now — oh, hello, here's one of my cats — who are in HEMA now because they started with Olympic fencing, and I know a lot of them were forced into kind of choosing a sport because their parents wanted something that looked good on a college resume.

 

Guy Windsor

I come from the sport fencing background, but that's only because I've always wanted to fight with swords. And back in the 80s, sword fighting was called fencing, and you did it with white jackets on and pokey-pokey. So I did it because it was the only thing available. My parents certainly didn't push me into it at all, and I don't think it made any difference to my getting into university or not. But yeah, it's actually quite useful — I found it a very useful background, particularly in terms of skill development.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of crossover. I didn't start with Olympic fencing myself. I've done a very small amount of Paralympic modern fencing, but I started doing that well into my HEMA career, and I have looked into modern Olympic fencing teaching methodologies for my work in rapier. I think there is a lot of crossover and it is very useful to cross-train, but there is also a lot of toxic pushing of children into sports they don't want, to get them into good schools.

 

Guy Windsor

And listeners who are interested in how you can use modern sport fencing methodology in historical martial arts — I had a long chat about it with Maciej Talaga in a recent episode, so they can go and have a look at that. But let's leave the fencing for a moment, because I do want to ask you about your illustration work.

 

Ella Rose

Absolutely. That's what I do outside of my work in HEMA. I did not go to college. I did apply to art schools, and then I took a “gap year” that has just lasted forever, and went straight into freelance illustration work. For a while I was selling at art festivals and art markets in person, pretty much every weekend out of the year. I have greatly reduced the amount I do that now because it is so much work, but I am still doing illustration work. I actually put out my first graphic novel earlier this year. I did — I did not write it, I worked with an author. I did the illustrations. It was written by a UK author named Paige Wooller, and the book is called Emily Corn: Finding the Light. It's out through Markosia Comics, but you can find it at most book retailers.

 

Guy Windsor

Emily Corn — is that C-O-R-N?

 

Ella Rose

C-O-R-N, yeah.

 

Guy Windsor

Emily Corn: Finding the Light. Okay.

 

Ella Rose

And that's a young adult science fiction graphic novel.

 

Guy Windsor

I'll find a link and put it in the show notes.

 

Ella Rose

Thank you. I do a lot of illustration work in HEMA as well — I do all the merchandise artwork and logos for Black Cat as well as for Iron Gate Exhibition since I've been working with that team. And I still do some gallery shows every so often. I work with a lot of local gallery spaces in Rhode Island. We have a really great local artist scene in the area, and a really great specifically politically-involved artistic scene in the area. So we have a lot of artistic spaces that are focused on women artists’ work, queer artists and disabled artists, and arts to support things like reproductive justice — which are all things that I'm very interested in being involved in. So I got involved in a lot of those scenes.

 

Guy Windsor

I can imagine. I once hired an editor — he pitched me to edit one of my books, and I scrolled down his LinkedIn bio and saw that this is a guy who volunteers as security in Planned Parenthood clinics. It was like, okay, yes, I will give you money to edit my book. So, obviously I'm going to get you to send us some pictures that we can put in the show notes so people can see examples of your art. But what kind of art do you do?

 

Ella Rose

So I do mixed media work. I mainly focus on traditional work, but I do work in digital illustration as well. Most of my work is mixed media — I usually have a lot of collage work mixed with painted elements and drawn elements. A lot of my work — I wouldn't call it realism. It's definitely more fantastical work. I typically use very vibrant colours. It has, I think, a bit of a graphic style. I wouldn't call it cartoonish — I typically use realistic proportions and everything — but I'm not striving for realism. I'm typically going for — what's the word I'm looking for?

I'm sorry, I'm on a medication that makes me forget words sometimes.

 

Guy Windsor

Is it helpful for me to suggest words, or is it more helpful to wait?

 

Ella Rose

Just wait. Impressionistic is the word I'm looking for.

 

Guy Windsor

Impressionistic. All right, yeah. The French Impressionists are literally my favourite period of art.

 

Ella Rose

Yes, I love Impressionism, and that has had a big influence on the way I paint. I'm not into blending colours and spending all that time getting very minute gradients. I really love Impressionism and I think that's had a big influence on the way I work. But yeah, definitely a lot of fantasy themes. I focus a lot on women's subjects in my work, and I've done a lot of work about my own experience with chronic illness and with disability as well. And of course, swords and armour appear frequently in my art, which I think —

 

Guy Windsor

— is in all the best art.

 

Ella Rose

— that might just be a given.

 

Guy Windsor

But that is actually what's missing from French Impressionism of the late 19th century — they don't do swords and armour at all.

 

Ella Rose

It's very sad.

 

Guy Windsor

So you actually make a living as an artist in this day and age?

 

Ella Rose

I do, yeah. It is very hard, and I don't make a lot of money. I do make some money from my work in HEMA as well — I'm not entirely volunteer-based. I did start that way, but I make sporadic amounts of money from both my art and my work in HEMA that is enough for me to support myself. And I will say that I do live with a partner as well, so I'm not living on a single income.

 

Guy Windsor

That's helpful. Yes, wow. Okay. Where should we go from here? What I actually want to do right now is open up a browser and start looking at your artwork — that's probably not good podcast practice. We'll put links in the show notes so people can go do it themselves. You brought up medication, chronic illness and all that — would you mind giving us some background on where you're coming from medically, so we can get an idea of what you have to accommodate when you do your training?

 

Ella Rose

Absolutely. I've tried to be very open about dealing with chronic illness. I have been chronically ill my entire life, although I did not know it until I was in my late teens and early adulthood. I was undiagnosed with many things throughout my childhood — we just didn't know what was going on. I had a bunch of weird things happening with my body and it was like, ah, you have weird things happening with your body, that sucks. But I have a number of chronic conditions. Probably the biggest thing that affects me daily is that I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome — that is a connective tissue condition that basically makes all of my connective tissues, which is things like ligaments and tendons and even your skin and bones and everything in your body pretty much, a little extra squishy and unstable. So I have issues like joint instability; I have trouble staying solid in certain positions; I tend to hyperextend my joints. I have semi-frequent subluxations and dislocations of joints all over my body. Usually they are just subluxations, which are partial dislocations, which means they can usually just be popped back in and don't require medical attention. A full dislocation is a more major injury, so that is something that is much worse. But for me I usually just have those partial ones, which means I can deal with them on my own and they don't usually require seeing a doctor for them. I also have POTS, which is Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome — that is a form of dysautonomia, which is basically a condition that affects the automatic functions of your nervous system. So things like your heart rate and your blood pressure and your digestion — things that should be happening automatically — it kind of messes with those. The main symptom of POTS is that when you change positions, so from laying down to sitting up, or from sitting to standing, your heart rate spikes really high and your blood pressure drops really low, so that can sometimes lead to fainting. It can lead to dizziness. It means I often have trouble going upstairs — my heart rate gets really high when I go upstairs. I also have trouble getting enough air in sometimes; I can have a lot of shortness of breath because I'm not taking in enough air. I often have to think very consciously about how I am breathing.

 

Guy Windsor

I do an awful lot of deliberate breathing practice, but I'm coming from a completely normal nervous system in that regard. I do it to get extra benefit — I don't do it because I need it to maintain the basics. So I'm very curious: the stuff you have described is potentially disastrous for martial arts practice. What do you do, or what have you done, or what do you find helpful in mitigating the effects?

 

Ella Rose

Absolutely. Actually, really quick — I have a couple of other things I just want to mention. Sorry, I've got a lot of stuff. I also have fibromyalgia, which is just a generalised chronic pain and chronic fatigue condition. I have chronic migraines — which most of us are familiar with migraine attacks, headache, nausea, dizziness, that kind of thing. And I also have a condition called endometriosis, which is where tissue that is similar to what's supposed to grow in the uterus grows in other parts of the body. I've had multiple surgeries to have that removed.

 

Guy Windsor

Well, at least they actually take it seriously. I have a friend who had endometriosis for over a decade, and the fucking doctors were like, oh, you're just moaning about it, it doesn't really hurt — and eventually they went in and found there was actually something there, and it was helpful. But apparently an awful lot of endometriosis patients don't get diagnosed for years and years. It sounds like yours has been actually dealt with seriously.

 

Ella Rose

It has been. The average time to get diagnosed is just under ten years after starting to complain about it.

 

Guy Windsor

That's ridiculous.

 

Ella Rose

I've had symptoms since I was about ten or eleven. I saw my childhood doctor at the time who wasn't really equipped to handle it, so I don't fault her too harshly for not being able to do anything about it. But I was very lucky where I am in the world — we actually have one of the country's leading endometriosis surgeons in Rhode Island. Her name is Dr Foley, she's with Women and Infants, and she is an incredible surgeon. She took me so seriously immediately, and she did a fantastic job with my surgeries. So yeah, I have those conditions, and the common thread between all of them is chronic pain and chronic fatigue. Fatigue tends to be the worst symptom that I have. It's the one that kind of defines everything I do. I tend to have to schedule every activity that I do down to very small activities throughout the day — I have to plan in intentional rest time, and there's a lot of recovery time after very small things. The way I've kind of built those into practice: one is I don't practice as much as I think someone of my age and dedication to HEMA would if I was not chronically ill. I am in the gym probably five days a week; I am actually fencing maybe two of those.

 

Guy Windsor

That’s quite a lot actually.

 

Ella Rose

A lot of the time I'm not always sparring — maybe I'm just drilling, maybe I don't drill and I just spar because I really want to fence a couple of rounds, maybe I am just working with students one on one. But a big part of what has kept me in HEMA, and a big part of what we're trying to do at Black Cat specifically, is keeping people in the gym even when they are not actively doing gym activities. I am there every practice, no matter if I am participating or not, no matter if I'm teaching or fencing or just hanging out. We intentionally have a very big lounge area in our gym — we have couches and a TV and just an area for people to sit. We have a number of other disabled and chronically ill people in our club as well, and the ability to be there and be present with the community has been a huge part of retaining those people. If the only way you can go and be at the gym is if you are physically participating, I think that can deter people who aren't sure if they're going to be able to participate fully that day, even if they're like, oh, maybe I can do a little bit. Where are you going to go and what are you going to do.

 

Guy Windsor

My salles have always had a kind of rest area where you can sit and have a cup of tea and watch training if you need to take a break, or if you don't necessarily want to train today but you just want to come along and see everyone. And there's a fancy Japanese word — I think it's misori geiko — which sounds great when you do it in Japanese and it's like a proper martial arts practice. It's watching practice, when you show up and just watch the class if you're unable to join. But yeah, with martial arts, if you stick a Japanese or Chinese word on it, it sounds a lot more official. I came across it in a book on Aikido, Aikido Sketch Diary or something like that. And I was like, oh my god, there's actually a proper Japanese word for this thing that we do all the time.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, but I think that's really important. The community part of it is really important. And having built a community that's very accepting and doesn't negatively call me out if I'm sitting there not doing anything — I think that has been really important in making me feel comfortable continuing to be at practice regardless of my participation levels. I think I am also privileged in that part of my work is done through HEMA. I also don't have any children, I don't have any large amounts of debt, so I am not forced to work another full-time job other than art, which is also, you know, I'm working two kind of part-time jobs. I'm not forced to work in an office every day of the week, so I have the time to schedule the rest and the recovery that I need in order to prioritise martial arts. So that is a privilege of mine. But a way that I have been able to continue training is making it pretty much the priority in my life — I know this is the thing that I want to continue to do. I'm going to make sure it happens, and I'm going to schedule the rest and the recovery and the treatment and whatever else I need around it to make sure that I stay in the gym.

 

Guy Windsor

Just to get some idea of the scale of it: let's say someone who's normally healthy trains pretty hard for a couple of hours one day — they probably want to train a bit less hard the next day, and then they can go hard again the day after. So it's maybe 24 hours' rest for two hours of serious training. How much extra rest time would you say it costs you? You're not going to get the full two hours to start with — you're probably training for what, half an hour, 40 minutes in those two hours?

 

Ella Rose

It's hard to give exact numbers, because it really is so dependent on the day, and this is something I'm working on — trying to figure out exactly what my limits are. I don't have an answer for myself just yet. But yeah, if it's a two-hour session, I usually try to participate for that full block, but I'm taking a lot more frequent breaks than other people. So maybe I'm getting an hour of active time out of that. Definitely the next day I am not doing any exercise, I'm not doing any fencing. I'm probably not doing what I'd call active stuff — by which I mean I'm not cleaning the house, I'm not cooking, I'm not going on a walk, I'm probably not doing any errands. And if I'm lucky, it's just that one day, and maybe I'm able to do activities the next day but just a little extra tired. But sometimes there's an outsized effect, and what I did for the rest of the day before the training session also has a big effect on what that recovery period is like. Honestly, the interesting thing is those big, super-exertive things are sometimes not that much more difficult than smaller tasks. Often I feel like vacuuming my house and going to fencing take the same amount of energy and will cost me the same amount of recovery time.

 

Guy Windsor

I know which one I would choose. Anyone can vacuum your house, but only you can do your training.

 

Ella Rose

It’s not always like that, but a lot of times those very small things can have the same effect as big things like training. Even showering — I usually take a nap after I shower because that's exhausting.

 

Guy Windsor

Is it the stimulation?

 

Ella Rose

It's the physical effort. It's a little bit the stimulation too. I should also say — I didn't mention this — I'm also autistic, so I do also get emotional and sensory overwhelm, and I do get emotional fatigue from that neurodivergent aspect as well. But the physical fatigue I think is really mainly just the physical exertion. My body is just working extra hard to just exist. With my EDS, all of my connective tissues are very lax and not very stable, so my muscles are working all the time just to keep me sitting up. That's a lot of effort that I'm not even thinking about, but it builds up over the course of the day.

 

Guy Windsor

Oh, and in case it isn't obvious — if, while we're having this conversation, you need to pause for half an hour and have a little nap and then come back to it, we can totally do that.

 

Ella Rose

Oh, I appreciate that. I should be fine, but thank you. I do appreciate the offer. Oh, get out of there — sorry, my other cat is here now. Yeah, that's the other one — hold on, okay, he's running away. That's the black cat. So those community and social aspects, I think, are the biggest parts of allowing me to continue training. But there are also physical things I do — like, for one, taking care of your body, which I think is something everybody should be doing. I stay very hydrated, I take my electrolytes, I take my medication on time, I get lots of sleep every night, and I think we should all be doing those things.

 

Guy Windsor

What sort of medication actually helps with any of that stuff?

 

Ella Rose

With the stuff I have, I unfortunately have all the conditions there are no cures for, but there are treatments for symptoms. I'm on different medications — things that help with just general chronic pain, I'm on muscle relaxers to make my muscles stop tensing so much and help with the fatigue a little bit, I'm on migraine medication to lower the frequency of my migraines, and I'm on a couple of supplements for general things that I need supplementation for.

 

Guy Windsor

And it helps?

 

Ella Rose

It does help. Sometimes I forget that it helps, but if I were to stop taking any of them, I'd realise, oh yeah, it was helping quite a bit. I do have a great team of doctors, and I'm very lucky to have good insurance — because that, unfortunately, is an important factor to getting healthcare in America.

 

Guy Windsor

If you don’t mind my asking too much if I ask how come you have good insurance when you don't have much in the way of, like — I mean, obviously if you were working for a major company with an amazing healthcare package, that would be assumed, but you're a self-employed artist and a self-employed historical martial arts person. How on earth did you end up with good health insurance?

 

Ella Rose

So, I am 23. In the US you are allowed to be on your parents' insurance until you're 26, and my mother works for the state's hospital, so I'm on her healthcare plan, which means we have good access to our state's hospital system.

 

Guy Windsor

Wow. So what's going to happen when you're 26?

 

Ella Rose

I've got to find my own healthcare.

 

Guy Windsor

Fuck. Top tip: move to the UK or Finland or France, or somewhere where it's actually legal to be ill.

 

Ella Rose

Yes, I'm not looking forward to that. We are lucky in Rhode Island compared to other parts of the country in that we have a good Medicaid replacement plan. The whole country has access to Medicaid, which is basically — if you are extremely poor, you can get some state-funded insurance. Rhode Island has their own version of that plan where you can be a little bit less poor and still have access to state-funded insurance, which is very nice. My family was actually on that for a long time before my mom became a little bit too less poor and no longer qualified. So now she has her employer's healthcare coverage. But I'll figure it out in three years, I guess.

 

Guy Windsor

Do you get entirely fed up with people advising you, with no qualifications whatsoever, what you should be doing to feel better about all this? Do you get a lot of that? Like, take ice baths and go on the keto diet and you'll be fine?

 

Ella Rose

Luckily I don't get a ton of that in my personal life anymore. I've surrounded myself with people who don't do that to me. I'm also not a very nice person when people do that, and I have been quite mean to people who have done it, so people have stopped doing that to me in real life. But there is a lot of that I see second-hand — I see a lot of other disabled people in my life getting it, and obviously online. Besides being chronically ill, I'm also a fat person, besides being chronically ill, so I also get plenty of "have you tried the Paleo diet? That could really do something for you." And I'm like, I don't care, I'm dealing with other stuff, I'm good.

 

Guy Windsor

Have you come across the podcast Maintenance Phase?

 

Ella Rose

I have! I really love that podcast. I really like Aubrey Gordon's work.

 

Guy Windsor

I got into it just before Christmas because my assistant Katie mentioned it to me, and I started listening. I was like, oh my god, this is brilliant. And it highlighted some stuff that — obviously I've never been particularly overweight. I mean, I've been heavier than I should be, but never properly overweight. So I just haven't seen or experienced a lot of the stuff that people just get thrown at them all the time. It kind of opened my eyes to the constant — when you see it, it's obvious — the constant barrage of this ghastly attitude that if you're overweight there's something wrong with you, or you're just lazy.

 

Ella Rose

Oh, absolutely. I call myself a fat person — I do identify with that word. I wouldn't call myself extremely fat. I am considered obese medically, even though the BMI scale is shit.

 

Guy Windsor

The BMI scale is so much shit. According to the BMI scale, I am solidly overweight.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, but if someone sees me in real life, I clearly have an overweight body, right? I'm not getting the worst of it — not the most disgusting fatphobia that society has to offer us. But it's been interesting, because I grew up thin and I gained weight actually after developing new chronic illnesses. I believe it was a mixture of multiple medications that have weight gain as a side effect, having lifestyle changes that meant I became a lot less active, and also just becoming an adult and gaining adult weight and no longer having a teenage body.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah, and the metabolism that was making you grow is now just basically — it still makes you grow, but just in other ways. You stop gaining height and you start gaining weight. Which is what happens.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, but it was a very interesting experience to kind of have the experience of becoming a larger person and also becoming an openly chronically ill person at the same time. That was around 17 to 19 that that happened for me. I developed a few new chronic illnesses, I gained a lot of weight, and the conditions I already had became more severe. So it wasn't something I could pretend to people who didn't know me well that I didn’t have anything going on. It was just kind of all at once that I started getting new perceptions of myself thrown at me.

 

Guy Windsor

And that's a pretty vulnerable age. Jesus. I have teenage daughters, and one will be 19 in a few weeks, and the other is 17 now.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, coming right out of high school — and that also coincided with the pandemic. I graduated high school in 2021.

 

Guy Windsor

I forgot how incredibly young you actually are. I'm 52. So I'm more than double your age.

 

Ella Rose

I feel like I've been in this for a while, but I am still very young. It's just because I started HEMA very young — I was very lucky to start doing HEMA when I was very young, I was 14.

 

Guy Windsor

Okay, I was meaning to ask — how did you get into historical martial arts?

 

Ella Rose

I was online as teenagers are, and I saw people sword-fighting online. I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is really cool. And I don't think it was even HEMA that I first saw — I think it was probably some sort of reenactment or buhurt group, which isn't what I'm into these days. But I was like, this is so cool. I want to hit somebody with a sword.

 

Guy Windsor

That is a fundamental human urge. You just want to pick up a sword and smack somebody with it. Some people don't have that urge, but all of the sword people — that's the one thing they have in common. You see a sword, you just want to pick it up and hit somebody with it.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. So it was cool, and then I started looking around, and I found a small longsword group near where I was, and I was like, Mum, please, please, please, please. And they were very expensive — more expensive than I think a HEMA group should be — but she was very kind. She said, you've never asked to do any activity ever. So she let me join, and then I have never stopped since. And that was Fiore's longsword that I first picked up, and I stuck with that.

 

Guy Windsor

Okay, so you were training with this club, doing longsword, at 14. And how was that for your chronic illnesses?

 

Ella Rose

At the time, like I said, I really didn't know I had anything. I definitely had POTS and I definitely had endometriosis, but those were undiagnosed. But I was a lot more physically fit and capable as a teenager than I am now. I also powerlifted in high school, and I also did long-range backpacking.

 

Guy Windsor

So you know what it's like to be really fit and really strong.

 

Ella Rose

Yes. And that was also crazy, because I was extremely athletic and fit right before the worst of my health issues kind of hit.

 

Guy Windsor

Do you think there's a relationship there, or just coincidence?

 

Ella Rose

I don't think there is, actually. A lot of the downturn in things happened around the time I hit adulthood, which is common with a lot of the conditions I have, especially EDS. A lot of the worsening also happened after I had a really serious case of COVID in 2021, which had some really severe effects on my lungs and just my general quality of life in relation to all the other conditions. So I think that's more to do with it.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah, a more likely trigger.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. But I was still taking more time off than other people, mainly for the pain from my endometriosis symptoms, but I was still kind of on my game at that point. I was very fit, very competitive, and I was having a very good time. And the club where I started was where I met both my romantic partner and my business partner Shane, who I later started Black Cat with. We met as teenagers at that first HEMA club we were at.

 

Guy Windsor

You know, the first time two students of mine met in the salle and got married was about 2008.

 

Ella Rose

Oh, wow, that's so sweet.

 

Guy Windsor

And they have kids and everything. It is the sweetest thing. So sword romances — it's a thing. People come along, they love the sword, and if they're at the right age and they meet the right people — I can think of probably a dozen couples now who've gotten together through swords, married and kids and all that sort of stuff.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, that's great. We became friends — we were both like 14 or 15 when we met. That was a really good time. I wasn't practicing nearly as much as I am now, because I was in school and maybe fencing once a week. But it was good.

 

Guy Windsor

They don't let you drop calculus for fencing, unfortunately.

 

Ella Rose

No they don’t! It was funny — my high school had a programme where you could get out of gym class and replace it with a sport as your credit, if you could prove you were doing an extracurricular sport. And my senior year was the first year I was competing. So I was like, okay, I'm doing a competitive sport, let me have the gym credit. And they were like, we don't think this is a real sport — this looks like you're with your friends in some weird place hitting each other with weapons. We don’t think this is a real sport. So I didn't get the gym credit. But it was funny, because the tournament footage I showed them — this was also the first tournament post-COVID, so it was an outdoor tournament — it did just look like I was in the woods in a weird outfit. But it's fine.

 

Guy Windsor

So you and Shane got together decided to start your own club. What prompted that? Because it's a big step — I've started historical fencing clubs myself, and it is not a small undertaking.

 

Ella Rose

No, it's not. We started Black Cat in 2023, towards the end of 2023, and we started it because we had some major issues with the club we were in. We felt they were not as community-focused as we thought they should be, we felt we were not really learning anything new, and we felt there were a lot of issues with diversity and inclusion in the club — just how people of different backgrounds were treated relative to people of other backgrounds. So we left. A great number of the people at that club followed us —

 

Guy Windsor

That can cause problems.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah — but we left and we started Black Cat. Our first location, we were renting out of a juice bar. They had a little workout room attached to it, so we had a little yoga studio that we were practising in, attached to a juice bar that served smoothies and juices and yogurt bowls, which was really funny. We rented from there for maybe two months, and then we moved to renting from a school gymnasium. That was a lot more space. From there we were able to start taking on new people. And then after about a year we were able to get our own location. So we are now renting out of a big renovated mill building where we have our own gym. It’s our permanent location. We have all of our stuff.

 

Guy Windsor

So you have your own dedicated space? Oh my god, that is the game changer. I rented my first full-time salle in 2001 and it was transformative. You could suddenly do so much stuff you couldn't do before. And I made this rule where, if your equipment was dusty or rusty — we had racks and stuff for the swords — we'd put a bit of tape on it, stick it on the beginners' rack, and anyone could borrow it. And then you could come back and reclaim it at any time, because it's your equipment. Just take the tape off, make sure it's clean, stick it back on the regular rack. So literally within a year of opening the place, there were enough dusty longswords and dusty masks that I could equip a beginners' course with steel longswords and steel masks without having to buy any equipment.

 

Ella Rose

Oh my God, that's really funny. But yeah, we're still at that location now. The walls are purple, it's really fun. We've got tons of loaner equipment. Like I mentioned earlier, we have that big lounge area, we've got that front desk reception area. It's a really nice space. We were really lucky to find it, and our club has grown so much. Like I said, we're a little over two years old now. We had our second birthday party back in October, and we just hit over 50 members. And actually — starting today, we're bringing in our newest beginner class. We had a really long wait list, so this month we are running two beginner courses, which I teach. We're calling it "double babies," and we've been referring to it very infamously for the past couple of months because we know it's coming. We're taking in a total of 26 people this month.

 

Guy Windsor

Jesus. That’s a lot.

 

Ella Rose

Yes. We're hopeful a lot of them will stay. We usually have a pretty good retention rate with our beginner classes.

 

Guy Windsor

What do you attribute that to?

 

Ella Rose

I think we're very focused on taking in people who traditionally don't feel very welcome in martial arts spaces. Looking around at the other clubs around us, we have a very high number of women and trans people and just underrepresented categories of people, and we do that very intentionally. We're not discouraging white men from joining us, but we are encouraging people other than able-bodied white men to join us. And I teach our beginners' course, so I think it is very good for new people to come into our gym and see our big purple, girly gym with posters all over the walls and our big pride flags and our cat decorations everywhere, and then be taught how to fight with a sword by a short, fat, disabled woman.

 

Guy Windsor

Honestly, there's a certain sort of person who will self-select out of that.

 

Ella Rose

Oh, they do.

 

Guy Windsor

There are a lot of people who, if they showed up to a class taught by, as you said, a short, fat, disabled woman, they just wouldn't stick around. It wouldn't hit their preconceptions right, if you know what I mean.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. They absolutely just self-select. Usually they don't make it to the class in the first place. For better or worse, we've had a bit of a wait list for our beginner class pretty much since we started.

 

Guy Windsor

Nice problem to have.

 

Ella Rose

So people usually wait a few months before they're able to join one of our classes. By that point they've seen our social media, they've seen our website, they should know what they're getting into if they've done even five minutes of research. But then, you know, they get there, and not everyone stays. But from what I've heard from other club leaders in the area, we do have a pretty high retention rate. I think we're friendly, and I think we also have a pretty low cost to attend our club as well. Financial aid and making our club financially accessible is also a really big goal of ours.

 

Guy Windsor

That's tricky, because if you're paying rent, I’m sure you're not getting special rates on the rent. You are paying rent and you have a facility to run. How do you make the maths work if your fees are particularly low?

 

Ella Rose

So we have a standard rate. It's a suggested rate that we ask everyone to pay if they're able. But we have an opt-up model where anyone who would like to can donate more. Many of our members do — I'd say about 30% of our membership choose to opt up a little bit. But then we also have the ability for people to say, if you need it, tell us, and we will make whatever budget you're working with work. That's probably another 20% of the club that asks for financial aid. So between the opt-up people and the people getting financial aid, it really balances out. We are getting pretty much that standard rate per person.

 

Guy Windsor

What do you charge for a month?

 

Ella Rose

$75 per month is our standard rate, and that is for about 15 hours of practice per week.

 

Guy Windsor

That's a lot of practice for not much money, is what I would say.

 

Ella Rose

And then that also gets you discounts to all of our events, because we charge about half price for all of our members, and club discounts on our vendors and everything. But it balances out. We are also really focused on putting the majority of our money back into the club.

 

Guy Windsor

At this stage in your development, you’d have to.

 

Ella Rose

Most of our money goes to rent, but we're pretty good on loaner gear now because we've spent so much on it that it's not really something we're having to spend much money on anymore. So we are able to have that kind of sitting fund to pull from if someone needs financial aid. The beginner courses are also a nice bump too, when we take in 12 to 15 people every couple of months, we charge $150 for each beginner course. Those are two-month courses.

 

Guy Windsor

It’s fair, but that's a nice chunk of a couple of grand coming in each time.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. Those are eight-week courses, so they're a nice little bump for the club that we can open at any time, and we don’t have to suck more money out of our regular membership.

 

Guy Windsor

I did something similar when I was running my school — we had the base rate everyone paid, and then for people who were students or unemployed or whatever, there was a significantly lower rate, and there was no policing of that. People just picked a rate and paid it. And sometimes someone would come in and say, I'm going to be paying the student rate, do you want to see my student card? And we'd be like, no, just pay the rate you feel comfortable paying. Your people aren’t going to cheat you.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, that's what we've been through too. We've had people ask, like, are you checking if they actually have the financial need? And we're like, no. If they say they need financial aid, I don't think somebody who has the money to pay $75 a month is going to go through the honestly kind of embarrassing process of sending an email saying, hey, I need to switch to a financial aid plan, can you help me? Because we do have a selection form when you first join, but if something changes, you've got to let us know somehow. And I think people generally are good and will not try to cheat us out of their $75 a month.

 

Guy Windsor

And the kind of person who is going to feel like they’ve done the clever thing about getting it cheaper — paying you 50 bucks a month instead of 75 — that sort of person is just not going to feel like they're in the right place anyway, coming to your school.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, exactly. And you know what, if they got one over on us, I don't fucking care. Whatever. We took in a couple of other members this month. It's fine.

 

Guy Windsor

Honestly, it's the same when people pirate my books. Because you know, if you write and publish books, people will get electronic copies and stick them on various websites. When I see it, I send a form take-down letter, just because if you don't do that it can cause problems with copyright violations in other areas. You need to have a record of defending your copyright. But I don't actually care about the outcome, because the thing is, there are only two possible scenarios. One: somebody finds my book for free, decides they don't like it, and I never hear from them anyway. Or they find my book for free and go, oh my god, this is really quite cool and they start digging around, they come to my website, maybe they join my newsletter, and then maybe they end up spending $5,000 over the next ten years on books and courses and whatever else. And there's actually a free book you can get on my website right now, my first book, which came out in 2004. It's way obsolete. I updated it by telling everyone it’s obsolete, and I've labelled it as such, but it's the 20th Anniversary Edition. It's not a modern training manual. It is the old book just with new front matter and back matter. And that's free. Anyone can download it. Inside it, because somebody might have bought the paperback and it’s not the Fiore interpretation training model they thought it was, there's a code where they can go back to the shop with and get the actual book they should have got in the first place for free. So what can happen is people get the free book, and then they get the next book for free. Fine. If they like it, they may go and get the next book in the series, or the one before it, or go buy other stuff. It's fine. People aren’t stealing this stuff. When you find your people, your people won't cheat you, and the people who you care about will be behaving nicely. You don't have to care what everybody else does.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, no, I completely agree.

 

Guy Windsor

There will be people who think they're going to just steal these two books and have them for free. Enjoy your victory, my friend. Enjoy your victory.

 

Ella Rose

Great job. You’re the smartest person.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah, you managed to get it for free. Wow. Good job. I think it's a much stronger attitude.

There will be people listening who have a history of chronic illness or disability, and it is actually quite unusual to have someone who has multiple chronic illnesses who is nonetheless able to run a historical martial arts club and teach beginners’ courses and all that kind of stuff. That is perhaps partly to do with the illnesses themselves — if they were different illnesses, maybe you couldn't do it, and partly to do with how you're managing them. Leaving aside factors you can't control, what advice or suggestions or top tips might you have for someone who has chronic conditions but wants to do swords and is not quite sure they can?

 

Ella Rose

I think the most important thing, whether you are chronically ill or not, is your community. I think finding the right community for what your needs are is so, so important. Not every community is going to be able or willing to support you as a chronically ill or disabled person, and finding the community that is at the very least willing to try is really important. Most places are not going to be equipped with disability accommodations already in place, because we're just not there yet as a sport. But if you reach out and say, hey, this is what I have going on, I want to learn your sport, I want to join your organisation, I want to be a part of what you have going on, and they say, okay, we haven't done this before, but we want to try, let's figure it out. I think that's a really good sign. If they say, that's really not going to work with our style of fencing, that's probably not a great sign.

 

Guy Windsor

Fair enough. If a club is focused on tournament medals and that's how they measure whether they're doing it right or not, and your disabilities mean you're never going to be winning tournaments, then maybe that's not the right club for you.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, maybe not. And even in that situation, if they're unwilling to consider ways that might get you to win medals if you’re a disabled person, and you're like, this is preventing me from joining the sport currently, can you help? And they're like, I don't know about that, no. That's not a great sign. Because I think the least they can do is try. And finding a community that’s willing to try is really important. And maybe that community doesn't exist. For me it didn't, and that's part of why I started my own club, because I felt there was a real lack of community-focused HEMA in my area, and I wanted to make a space for other people like me, and other people who were having similar struggles, to have a place to be able to learn HEMA and exist within the HEMA community. I think the biggest thing is finding a place with an open mind that is willing to at least try. Other than that, it's really going to depend on what your exact issues are. Most chronically ill people will have their own care team — whether that's caretakers, family and friends, doctors, physical therapists, mental health therapists, they will have their own recommendations. But you can also reach out to or research other disabled athletes. This was a big part of me learning how I could adapt certain activities for myself, as well as trying to adapt activities for other disabled people within my club. For me, I have an issue where I have a nerve on the side of my neck that is compressed, so I have a really hard time activating the muscles down the lower side of my right arm. That means I have a really hard time maintaining my grip on my right side. With a two-handed weapon like a longsword, it's not really an issue because I can compensate with my left hand, and if you're wearing clamshells you're kind of fine, you’re probably not going to drop your weapon anyway. But I also fence rapier, and with rapier I'm right-handed. I was just dropping my weapon all the time, or giving myself overuse injuries by squeezing the grip so hard. So I now strap my hand into my rapier.

 

Guy Windsor

That's 100% historical. It's called a martingale. And in fact, the foils I used to fence with in the 80s — the French foils, when we weren't doing electric stuff — they all had a loop to stick your fingers through. And the Italian ones have a hole in the pommel for the strap to go around so you can strap the foil to your hand. Yeah, that's totally historical.

 

Ella Rose

So I've seen people do it around their wrist. I needed to adapt it so that I was physically keeping my pinkie and ring fingers closed. I needed a really wide strap to keep them enclosed at all times.

 

Guy Windsor

So you have a strap that goes over the fingers and around the wrist to keep the hand closed?

 

Ella Rose

I had it so that it covers all of my knuckles to keep them closed, yeah.

 

Guy Windsor

Henry VIII, who was a seriously good jouster and an early 16th-century armoured combat man, had a gauntlet and a special sword where you put the sword in the gauntlet, close the hand, and there's a clip that holds the gauntlet shut. Same thing. So you're just doing the Henry VIII grip.

 

Ella Rose

The Henry VIII grip, exactly. But it took me a stupidly long time to figure out that that's what I needed. And it actually took speaking to a Paralympic coach saying hey, I really can’t hold the one handed weapon. I was trying to learn some seated foil — I was taking a workshop — and he was like, oh, just do this. And I was like, oh, you work with disabled people, you know how to work with a disability, that's awesome. There have been other instances like that where talking to another disabled person who might have a different thing, you pick things up. Like, okay, I'll keep that in mind if I ever work with someone who has a similar issue, or, oh, I have a similar issue, maybe that will help me. So communicating with other disabled athletes is really important. You can find them online. I promise they exist. There aren't enough of them, but they are out there. If you're on any of the millions of HEMA Discord servers, there are people on there who have experience adapting activities and different weapons. Or taking from other sports that do already have disability accommodations in place, and adapting them for HEMA, can be really big. Like I've talked about Paralympic fencing a few times, that's something we've taken a lot from to work on our seated historical fencing at Black Cat.

 

Guy Windsor

Okay, we need to go into the seated historical fencing stuff in some detail. But before we go there, let's say there's an instructor listening who is sufficiently open-minded but has absolutely no idea what they're supposed to be doing to make this work for their less-abled students. Other than "don't be a dick," which is kind of general advice anyway — do you have any specific things you wish general historical martial arts instructors knew, or would say?

 

Ella Rose

Well, one: you can talk to the disabled person. They are a person. And you can ask them, what barrier are you facing? And they will tell you. They might not have the answer to how to fix it, especially if they are a newer athlete. They might not know how to adapt it for your sport, and that's why it's your job as the coach to take that barrier and get a little creative and problem-solve. But they can give you the most detail about what experiences they are facing, and you can have a conversation with them like a person. It doesn't have to be a sensitive topic. For pretty much every disabled person I've met, we're not nervous and scared and squeamish about our disabilities. Most people will talk pretty normally about them. It can be a hard subject for some people, but if they're coming into a sport and they know they have some kind of physical condition going on, they know they're going to have to talk about it and express it. They'll be able to tell you what's going on and talk about it in a normal human kind of way. And having a kind and open and not shocked, not disgusted, and honestly not overly empathetic reaction either — can be nice. It feels a little weird and a little dehumanising whenever someone is like, oh my god, you poor thing, I can't believe you're going through that, you're so strong, when all I said was, oh, I'm in a lot of pain today.

 

Guy Windsor

I once met a guy in one of my rapier classes when I was teaching at an event in America. He was in a wheelchair, and we just made whatever accommodations we could so he could do the exercises. And we were drinking afterwards, and I just asked him why he was in a wheelchair, what happened? And he said he'd been really depressed, so depressed he tried to kill himself by jumping off a balcony. And instead of dying, he broke his back and now he can't use his legs. And it was like, okay. What really struck me about that was that he was fine. I mean, I don't know the ins and outs of his life, but he was clearly in a much better mental place now than he had been when he was jumping off balconies. And it was a long time ago, but it just taught me that you have absolutely no idea what somebody else's experience is actually like. The person may be in all sorts of physical difficulties but absolutely fine, or maybe physically in peak condition but absolutely not fine at all. It kind of helped me stop presuming to know what the person was actually experiencing. So people tell me some very awful things while explaining why they're going to be sitting out for a bit or whatever, my default response is just: okay. And it's actually stood me in very good stead when parenting teenagers, because one thing my teenagers have liked to do is just drop really shocking stuff into conversation. Like somebody was snorting coke in the back of class, or all sorts of things. And I just cultivated this absolutely neutral response: whatever they say, you just accept it and go, okay, and what do you think about that? Or, okay, what did you do next? Just deadpan it. Even if inside you're going, holy fuck, what's going on over there — just deadpan it.

 

Ella Rose

At least for me, and for a lot of the disabled people that I know, that is kind of an ideal reaction if I am sharing medical stuff with you. You don't know how I feel about it. I might be totally fine. Often if I'm sharing something like that, it's to share the actual information: this is what's going on. I'm sharing it because you need to know it for some reason, or because I just want to talk about it if we're friends. Maybe I'm having a terrible reaction to it, there'll probably be some signs that I’m having a terrible reaction to it, or I'll say that. And I think especially if you're in a coaching position and a student comes up to you with a specific problem, it's much better to say, okay, what issues is that causing you? How are you feeling about that? Is there anything you think we can do about it? Instead of having an emotional reaction before you know what their emotions about it even are. If they are looking for emotional support, you can be a great person to provide that. But I don’t think it’s the right reaction to assume that that's what they want from you as a coach.

 

Guy Windsor

And nobody wants to be pitied. And honestly, most disabled people I know don't need pity, because their lives are basically fine. They have to work around some stuff that other people maybe don't have to work around, but they're fine.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. I live differently. I think about my health and my limitations a lot more than able-bodied, and people who are not chronically ill. But I am a happy person. I have a full and happy life. I have a great community, a great family and friends. I don't walk around thinking, oh, my life is terrible, my poor sickly body. I wish someone would tell me how strong I am. I wish someone would notice how sick and feeble I am. That would really make this better. That's not what I'm looking for, at least.

 

Guy Windsor

And the sort of person going to a martial arts class probably is probably not looking for that either. Because why would you go to a martial arts class if you want sympathy?

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, exactly. So if you have a disabled athlete, treat them like you would any other person. I think it's also nice — if they do reveal a specific condition to you, maybe do a little bit of research on it. I think that is a nice thing to do. Do research on it so you are educated but then do not try to educate the disabled person on their own condition. Educate yourself so you know what they are talking about when they speak about it and they don't have to explain everything about it to you, and maybe so you can think about solutions that have worked for other people with similar conditions or with the same condition. But don't do research so you can go back and say, I know what will fix you. But we can go back and say, hey, I thought of a potential solution for the issue we're having within our martial arts practice, what do you think about this? Let's try this out. And then take whatever feedback they have and listen to it. If you give a solution and they say this is working, well then you did a great job and move forward with that. If they say this isn't working, don't take that personally. Step back and find a new solution, because there probably is some kind of solution, even if you think it doesn't give the full experience of what your martial arts experience has been, there probably is a way for them to participate on some level, and there probably is something you can do to help them get there. It can be a conversation back and forth, if they're willing to help give solutions, that's fantastic. But I do think the majority of the labour should not be put on the student though. I think you as the coach, you should be the one primarily researching and presenting solutions for adaptations.

 

Guy Windsor

It's the coach's job to help students solve their sword problems, whatever they may be. That could be: you are a perfectly able-bodied person and you have difficulty closing the outside line at speed under pressure. Or it could be: you are disabled in some way and you're having difficulty adapting the practice to your particular physical needs. Those are fundamentally the same thing. It's the coach's job to go, well, in this situation, we should be trying this. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t, and we have ways of testing whether it works or not. But it's not the student's job, certainly not at the beginning, to know how to solve their own problems. They'll be taught that over time. By they time they’ve been training for a few years, they should know perfectly well what they’ll be doing to solve a fencing problem and they only come to you when things are not working as they should. It’s the coaching practice for the coach to set the exercise. 

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. This is a discussion I've had with a few coaches about this topic, and I feel very strongly about it. The coach should be the one leading. And I think it's fantastic if the student is involved in the solution-creation process.

 

Guy Windsor

They kind of have to be. Because one of your jobs as a coach is to make yourself redundant. At some point in two, five or ten years, you want the student to be able to start their own club and teach their own students and do their own thing. They shouldn’t need you any more. So you have to involve them in the solutions process: how do we analyse this problem, how do we come up with solutions, how do we test and adapt them? That's the process you're teaching anyway. So they have to be involved. But it shouldn't be up to them to figure out the solution in the beginning — that's the coach's job.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. And if it requires any physical objects, if you're needing things to adapt an activity, that labour should be on the coach to get those things together and make sure the environment is accessible to whoever needs it. It's funny, like I said, I've had this conversation with a few other coaches. I used the phrase, it is our job. If I am the coach, it is my job to figure out accommodations. And then I got a couple of texts a few weeks later from coaches being like, I have this student, how should I accommodate this? You said you could figure it out. And I was like, no, it’s not my job for everybody, I meant it's the coach's job. Not my job to fix everybody. I'll help if I can, but I didn't mean that it was my job to fix everyone.

 

Guy Windsor

Now, one of the issues around disability is that when you say "disabled," the symbol of disabilities on bathrooms and parking spaces is a wheelchair. So when you say disabled, a lot of people think wheelchair. But of course most disabilities don't involve wheelchairs, because there are so many possible disabilities, and that's just one category or class. But it does produce a really interesting test case. You mentioned you have a seated longsword tournament. I am fascinated, because I've had students in wheelchairs for brief periods. I had one student who was a very keen rapier fencer for a long time, and then he developed a problem in his ankle unrelated to swords, and for a long time he could only fence sitting down. I did my best to figure out ways to make it work for him, but he knew what it was like to do it with healthy legs and it just didn't work for him in a seated position. And of course I didn't have much experience of it, so there's probably a bunch of stuff I missed. I am fascinated to know how you adapt historical fencing styles to seated fencing.

 

Ella Rose

So this is something we're still figuring out — we're still in this process. We started doing this about a year ago. It was actually because someone contact us and said, I'm a part-time wheelchair user, sometimes in a wheelchair, sometimes using crutches, but he really can't stand and fence on his feet. He was like, can I join you guys? I really want to. And we were like, absolutely. And then behind the scenes we were like, okay, we have to figure this out.

 

Guy Windsor

Like you said, it's your job to figure it out.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, exactly. So we said, sign up for the beginner class, we're going to figure this out. At first it was, you know, this person was a great sport, he was a huge help in figuring the whole thing out, he was such a pivotal part in developing this practice. But in the beginning we were just on folding chairs, and people would just try to do whatever activities we were doing while seated. We didn't really change much about the actual movements. Some things worked and some things didn't.

 

Guy Windsor

A lot of longsword stuff really depends on moving the body.

 

Ella Rose

It does. We found that for longsword specifically, we have developed a pretty solid system. Cuts still work, but a lot more bind-focused stuff and thrust-focused stuff is much better.

 

Guy Windsor

Closer to rapier.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. So most of seated fencing happens in Fiore's First Master of the Longsword, where you're either thrusting through or cutting around to the head or the arms.

 

Guy Windsor

First Master of Zogho Largo.

 

Ella Rose

Yes. So that's where a lot of seated longsword happens. But we found that most of Fiore — at least a lot of the interpretations we work from at Black Cat — actually does translate pretty well to seated fencing. Not all of it, and not the grappling parts of it.

 

Guy Windsor

Fiore’s constantly saying "pass with the cover" and if you're sitting down, you can't pass.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, but the longer-range stuff and a lot of the longer-range theory part of it does work pretty well. We took a lot of our setup and how we go about adapting our teaching practices from Olympic parafencing. That's how we got our setup for finding distance, which is based on the individual user and not on a specific length.

 

Guy Windsor

Okay, let's drill down into that a bit. So you've got somebody sitting down who is six foot tall with long arms, and someone sitting down who is five-foot-four with short arms. How do you position the chairs?

 

Ella Rose

We position them typically at a 45-degree angle, so that each person's dominant side is forward. For the person with the longer reach, we typically look at torso and arm length rather than full height, in case somebody has very long or very short legs. So in this case the six-foot person would sit completely upright, not leaning forward or backwards, and raise their dominant arm out in front of them so the elbow is at a 90-degree angle. The person with the shorter reach is going to sit again just upright, not leaning forward or backwards, and extend their sword out. If it's a longsword they have both hands on the weapon; if it's a one-handed sword they have one hand on the weapon, extended out to touch the elbow. If we're looking at a weapon that thrusts, like a longsword or a rapier...

 

Guy Windsor

So the taller person has their arm level with the shoulder, elbow at 90 degrees, facing their opponent.

 

Ella Rose

Yes, just like that. So then the shorter person extends their weapon out, and if it's a weapon that can thrust, like a longsword or a rapier, we're looking for the weapon tip to just touch the outside of the elbow. And if it's a weapon that only cuts, like a sabre, then it's going to touch the inside crease of the elbow. That's how we find a distance that allows the shorter person to be able to make all the necessary attacks and reach all the targets they need to, by means of leaning their body forward and backwards in the chair. The taller person is obviously within range. It's not perfect, because the shorter person is also within range of the taller person, but that is an artefact of seated fencing.

 

Guy Windsor

But they're also slightly closer than the taller person would like them to be, so that's actually not such a bad thing for the short person.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. There are advantages and disadvantages for each person there, and it just takes practice to strategise around the specific distances we're setting up in seated fencing. We took that directly from Olympic fencing. In sabre they go to the inside crease of the elbow, and in foil and épée they go to the outside of the elbow. So the chairs we use — this is a really important part of it. Like I said, originally we were on folding chairs. You can do drills, but in full-intensity sparring, the chairs fall over. And it also doesn't work well for people who don't have control of their legs, because they can't stay planted. When we started, the only person doing seated fencing wasn't paralysed, he just had a condition that prevented him from standing for very long. So he was able to stabilise himself on a folding chair, so it worked for a short period. We then got what are basically DIY Paralympic fencing chairs from an organisation called the Utah Fencing Federation out in Salt Lake City. They make homemade versions of Olympic parafencing rigs, because the actual ones are about $3,000 per chair, and also require the users to use their own wheelchair — which means we'd either need to provide wheelchairs, or only allow people who have their own wheelchairs to fence on them.

 

Guy Windsor

Everyone can do this. If you have one of these rigs, one thing I've done with fencers in wheelchairs is put the other person in a chair as well, so it's static for everyone. And it's actually an interesting fencing problem: how do I not get hit when I can't get out of the way the way I normally do?

 

Ella Rose

Yes, and that's something that was important to us when we were developing this — all of our people are trained on seated fencing. They all know how to do it. We want to make sure that when we have someone who can only do seated fencing, they are not just working with the same person or with a coach all the time. We want them to have the same experience of rotating through partners.

 

Guy Windsor

They should be part of the class.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. So our chairs — we got them from the Utah Fencing Federation. They were so great. They gave them to us for free. We were like, hey, we want to start a seated fencing thing, and they were like, great, we want everyone to do seated fencing. Come get these chairs. So we flew one of our members out to Salt Lake City and he brought them back for us. They were useful on their own, but an issue we ran into was they were still a little too light to not rock on their own, because we didn't have the connector rig they use in official Paralympic settings. And also we wanted to be able to allow a seated fencer to fence against a standing fencer, because we ran into another issue where we had at least one fencer who could not fence seated because of a spinal issue.

 

So we had to come up with a solution to allow a seated fencer to fence a standing fencer and make it fair. What we ended up doing is we made wooden platforms that were extremely heavy so there would be no rocking, and they're about a foot off the ground. We mounted the chairs onto those and put the platforms on wheels that can come up and down, that way they can be moved and then lowered. That fixed the stability issue, and it got the chairs high enough off the ground that when you're sitting in them you're at about the height of an average-sized person. You’re about 5'8", 5'9".

 

Guy Windsor

Wow, that's quite high up. I’m scared of heights.

 

Ella Rose

It's not that bad. And then for somebody who needs to transition from a wheelchair to that chair, we have another platform with a ramp so they can wheel their wheelchair up and transfer into the seated chair. These chairs have seat belts to keep you stabilised. And for the standing portion — which a lot of our fencers use during practice now — we figured the easiest way to do it would be to just make the standing fencer also confined to a small space. We have a three-by-three square they're allowed to move in.

 

Guy Windsor

Three feet by three feet? About a metre squared for Europeans

 

Ella Rose

Three feet by three feet. And that's about the same amount of movement you can get from full extension forward and full extension backwards in a seated chair. We've done this in class for a while, and we've run tournaments with that option, and it works very, very well.

 

Guy Windsor

How do you mitigate the height problem? I assume the three-by-three square is not off the ground, it’s on the ground itself.

 

Ella Rose

It's on the ground. So we raised the chair.

 

Guy Windsor

In my head they were on a pedestal, but that’s not going to work. I’ve answered my own question. The chair is on the pedestal, so they're up at standing height. Okay, yes.

 

Ella Rose

That way they are tall enough to fence an average standing person. And if there is still a height difference — well, there's a height difference in regular fencing too.

 

Guy Windsor

Short people just have to get used to chopping the arms off tall people.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. I'm five-five. I'm not the shortest, but I fence in open tournaments. So yeah, we've had that practice going for about a year now, and we've done it with a few different weapons. Longsword is definitely our most developed at this point.

 

Guy Windsor

Do you have a video of this?

 

Ella Rose

We do have video, yeah.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah — please send me a link and I'll put it in the show notes, because I want to see this. I want to have a go at it.

 

Ella Rose

Come to Rhode Island!

 

Guy Windsor

Okay, when your country returns to sanity and it's safe for foreigners, I will gladly come back to Rhode Island.

 

Ella Rose

That's really fair. So we've had that practice going, and then in October 2025 we hold our annual tournament called Long Tail, which is our anniversary event — our club was founded in October. Every year we hold Long Tail. It's tournaments but meant to be a really fun event. We get a huge cake, we all get pizza, there are party favours, everybody wears cat ears. It's a fun, silly event. We give out prizes for each of Fiore's attributes — so there's a celerity prize, a fortitude prize, it’s fun. This year we ran open longsword, URG longsword, and then seated longsword. In our regular fencing tournaments, we have an accommodation where seated fencers can compete, and when they’re fencing anyone who has to fence them can choose to fence seated or standing with the setup we've described. In the seated tournament, everyone fenced seated. We had, I think, ten total people compete. Almost all of them were able-bodied people, so it was really cool to get interest across a variety of different ability levels. There were ten of us. I did compete — I placed first. But it was really fun. It went very well. It was a really interesting event. And as far as we're aware, it is the first completely seated, for means of accommodation HEMA tournament that has ever happened.

 

Guy Windsor

I've never heard of one.

 

Ella Rose

There have been seated accommodations for specific people in tournaments before, but as far as we know there's never been one where everyone is expected to be seated, especially in something like longsword. So it was really fun. We had a number of people from different clubs. I've got a ton of photos from that event too — we had a professional photographer there, so I can send some photos as well. It was very well received. We had some friends supporting it from Sword Wind in North Carolina — they're another club that is doing some historical seated fencing. They started around the same time we did, and they have one of their coaches, Beth, she is a wheelchair user. We've been talking for a while, and it's really cool to see another club doing similar stuff, and especially to see another disabled person teaching and spearheading that programme. So we had that at Long Tail. And then, like I said, at all of our tournaments, as well as at Iron Gate Exhibition — which is I am the lead tournament organiser for, and IGX is currently the biggest event in New England for HEMA, we get about 200 competitors each year. That happens twice a year: we have a tournament event in the spring and a workshop-focused event in the fall. Starting last year, we incorporated seated accommodations for all of our tournaments. We don't have a specific seated tournament at IGX just yet, but we do have the accommodations in place for any seated fencer to compete at IGX.

 

Guy Windsor

Excellent, that's fantastic. That is fascinating. I definitely have to have a go at that. All right. Now, the couple of questions I ask almost all my guests. As you know, you can decline any question you don't want to answer, but you didn't decline either of these, so I'll throw them at you. First: what is the best idea you haven't acted on yet?

 

Ella Rose

This is hard. I can be very impulsive, I talked about neurodivergence, I act on my ideas immediately.

 

Guy Windsor

It’s a common thread amongst my guests, because people who've popped up to my notice to get invited on the show have acted on a lot of ideas already.

 

Ella Rose

Yes. I'd say there are two things I'm very interested in working towards within the next couple of years. One is I've spoken about that we have a seated fencing practice, and all of our classes at Black Cat have the seated fencing chairs available and we have adaptable activities planned for every single class. But we do not have a specific seated fencing programme. A specified day of the week where we're going to teach seated fencing. That is something I would like to implement, specifically to cater more to wheelchair users and disabled athletes.

 

Guy Windsor

Right, because there may be people who would like to do swords but, because that doesn't exist, don't feel they can, for whatever reason.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. They are welcome now and we try to reach out to them.

 

Guy Windsor

But there's a big difference between being told you're welcome, and it being clearly expected that people like you will come. Because all this stuff is already there, we expect people like you to come, so of course you're going to come. Why wouldn't you? There's a difference between those two states.

 

Ella Rose

And I think there's also a difference between the standard being that we're standing and we'll adapt the activities to be done seated, versus: we're focusing on seated fencing, we're not going to adapt this to be done standing because it doesn't need to be. We're focused on seated fencing here.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah, it's its own complete thing.

 

Ella Rose

So there's that. And then another thing I'd really love to do at Black Cat — and I've wanted to do this since we started the club — is start a youth programme. I started doing HEMA when I was 14, and I am so, so grateful that I was able to do that. Unfortunately my time at that club ended in not the best way, but I am so grateful they allowed younger people to join. Right now Black Cat is 16-and-up, because that's just what we're equipped to handle.

 

Guy Windsor

In America it's a lot of insurance stuff too. What I always did in Finland, because I never had insurance because we didn’t need it. Insurance isn’t required, martial arts clubs generally didn't bother with it. But I never had a youth programme because my Finnish skills weren't good enough. But if you're under 18, you have to come and watch a class with your legal guardian, parent or whoever. The kid sees what they're getting into and maybe has a go with their parent or guardian sitting there. And at the end of it, the instructor can say no, the kid can say no, and the guardian can say no — but if it's three yeses, then they can join in the regular adult class. And it's up to them whether they bring their guardian with them. We didn't require it. We had one student who started at the age of ten, and he's still training 25 years later. By the time he was 18 he was just incredible, because he was one of those kids who was training an hour a day at home anyway and coming to class three nights a week. If I said, okay, you need to do this exercise for five minutes three times a week, he would do that exercise for five minutes three times a week. It was amazing. If you can get them young, the potential is incredible.

 

Ella Rose

Oh, absolutely. I'd love to start a dedicated 12-or-13-to-16 programme. My little brother is actually part of our club. He joined when he was 13, just before we made the official 16-and-up policy, so he got grandfathered in. Just a tiny bit of nepotism there,

 

Guy Windsor

But it's your club, you can do what you want.

 

Ella Rose

He's great, we're happy to have him. But I would love to teach younger people HEMA. I'd love to make it more accessible to younger people.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah. I love playing with kids — I mean, my kids are now too old, but when they were really little we used to go to the salle and play with swords, which was fantastic. But the process of adapting longsword or rapier to children is a specialised field that I've never had any particular aptitude for. It's the sort of thing I really hope other people will do, and I'll happily support them doing it. It's just not something I've ever felt called to do myself.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, that's totally fair. I think we don't all have to do everything.

 

Guy Windsor

It’s a great idea. A good place to look is judo. Judo does a really good job of getting kids as little as four or five doing “judo” in air quotes, because what they're really doing at the age of five isn't really judo, and safely getting them from the age of four or five up to the adults' classes at 18. They have a really well worked-out system for making it feel real to the kids while still being safe.

 

Ella Rose

Judo does a lot of things really well. We haven't talked about it at all, but we also teach historical wrestling at Black Cat, and we've taken a lot of stuff from judo for our Ringen programme, because they can be so similar.

 

Guy Windsor

I mean, you do Fiore, and Fiore is built on wrestling.

 

Ella Rose

Oh yeah, but we also teach jacketed wrestling from the German system.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah. What sources are you using?

 

Ella Rose

 

Mainly Fabian von Auerswald. We bring in Ott Jud as well. We love Jess Finley's work — she's actually teaching at our club next weekend.

 

Guy Windsor

Ok, do me a favour. Because Jess and I, we're old friends, get her in one of the chairs and get me a video of Jess doing some longsword in a chair. I would love to see that.

 

Ella Rose

Okay! She's coming to our open floor on Saturday, the night before she teaches. I will ask her to do that. I'm going to write that down so I don't forget.

 

Guy Windsor

And give her a great big hug from me.

 

Ella Rose

I will. Jess is fantastic.

 

Guy Windsor

Excellent. Okay. My last question: somebody gives you a million dollars to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide. I think I know where you're going to put the money, but go ahead and answer anyway.

 

Ella Rose

This is a very interesting question, because a million dollars sounds like so much money, but if we're talking worldwide, it's not. It’s going to go so quickly.

 

Guy Windsor

You can have more if you want. It's imaginary money.

 

Ella Rose

Okay, it's imaginary money. I'll give my real answer for a million dollars and then my infinite money answer, because I've thought about this. My million-dollar answer is that I think the most effective form of aid we can give is generally localised. It is generally direct aid to people rather than organisations. So with that money, I believe I would want to give it directly to people for things like gear and club dues and event fees. I think there are a lot of people who are not in HEMA because they can't afford it, and our community would be much enhanced by their participation. We have a similar fund at Black Cat that we're going to be making public very soon. We've been putting away money for a travel fund for our members for years. We're going to have the ability for people to apply for money to go to events and do whatever they need to do. And I think something similar, on a regional scale, with that money would be the most helpful to the actual people doing the sport. My infinite money answer is: every school gets the equipment to have a seated fencing programme.

 

Guy Windsor

That's where I thought you were going.

 

Ella Rose

And if I have infinite money, I guess I could do more: every club also gets infinite loaner gear, and all the instructors get paid so that they can live happy, healthy lives and focus on their martial arts career.

 

Guy Windsor

Where were you 25 years ago when I started doing this for a living? Excellent. Does it require a lot of money to start a seated fencing programme? I’m thinking not.

 

Ella Rose

The biggest expense is the equipment, because you need quality chairs for it to be accessible for people with a variety of disabilities. The lowest amount of money we've been able to budget for one of the platforms and chairs we've designed is about $150–$200 to create the platform, about $50 for the wheels that we found that work best, and then we're trying to find a cheaper option for the chairs. The fancy metal rigs we have are $500 to create, but we're trying to find some kind of low-back shower chair or sport wheelchair option we can get for $200 or less to just mount on them. Because we’re trying to make more of these. Right now we have one full set. So it's within the couple-hundred-dollars realm for just one chair.

 

Guy Windsor

And if you've got 20 people in class, that's $4,000.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah. And it's something you can build up over time. I don't think most places looking to start a seated programme are going to have 20 people all at once.

 

Guy Windsor

Are the plans and instructions for building the platforms available somewhere, on your website?

 

Ella Rose

They are not, because we haven't perfected it yet, and we don't own the plans to our metal chairs. If anyone wants those, they can contact the Utah Fencing Federation. They will give the plans to create their chairs to anyone who asks. I am not able to give that out. They will give it to anyone.

 

Guy Windsor

Your platform, though, when you get the designs the way you want them, make those public.

 

Ella Rose

We absolutely will. It's still really rudimentary. They're really just wooden squares that we made as heavy as possible and put wheels on. But I'm hoping to have a more polished design sometime this spring, and then I absolutely plan to make those public.

 

Guy Windsor

I would like to see wheelchair fencing with those sporty wheelchairs they use for things like wheelchair basketball. That could be really fun.

 

Ella Rose

There is one fencer I know of who does something like that. His name is Noah Hansen. He fenced sabre and singlestick with Maryland KDF, and he's now on the US Paralympic fencing team for sabre. I’m pretty sure he does foil and sabre. I met him earlier this year — he's a fantastic fencer and a very nice guy. When he joined his HEMA club, instead of developing a seated fencing programme, he and his instructors decided that he could just fence everyone free in his wheelchair, and he got extremely good at moving around freely with a sabre in one hand and moving his wheelchair with the other. I wouldn't expect that of most people, I think that's not an accessible way for most people to go about it, but he's frigging fantastic at it. And I think he'd be a great guest for you in the future. He’s a great guy. He's one of the very few wheelchair users I know of who competes in HEMA tournaments.

 

Guy Windsor

So he just goes to regular HEMA tournaments and does it in a wheelchair.

 

Ella Rose

He only does singlestick.

 

Guy Windsor

Sure, it would have to be a one-handed weapon.

 

Ella Rose

He only does singlestick, usually in tournaments where you're supposed to be standing in one place anyway. So that’s usually what he competes in. But yeah, there's him, and now we have the seated fencers within our club who are starting to compete at the events where we have accommodations at now.

 

Guy Windsor

 

Excellent. Now, one thing we haven't even touched on is adapting the historical martial arts to seated fencing. Obviously it's not something Fiore or Capoferro ever considered, or at least if they did, they didn't write anything about it.

 

Ella Rose

Well, Fiore has the one dagger play with the dagger and the stick.

 

Guy Windsor

You mean at the end of the abrazare, the last couple of plays of the dagger where the master is seated? But the instructions are to stand up immediately. So that's clearly you're sitting there having a glass of wine with your friends and some fucker comes at you with a dagger, so up you get. That's not applicable to a seated fencing practice. It's always the case that we have to adapt the historical style to the student, whether they are normally-abled or differently-abled or disabled or whatever. But to what degree do you have to sort of leave the historical stuff behind altogether and just figure out a whole new way of fencing with these weapons while you happen to be sitting down?

 

Ella Rose

There is that give and take. I think there's that give and take with any person, with any organisation: how much do you care about historical accuracy versus how much do you care about the sportification versus competitiveness versus just being active? With our seated programme and the members we currently have, most of them care more about being able to do it, and about being active and competitive, than they do about being 100% faithful to texts. So there is stuff that gets left behind. We always base whatever we are teaching in something historical — whatever concept we're trying to teach, our coaches always have to be able to point to it and say, this has some historical precedent — except when it comes to adaptation, because that is the difference between someone participating or not. When it comes to fencing techniques, is what I mean. So we always have that basis in historical manuscript and historical teaching. But our club culture, I would say we're not the most historian-centred group. That's just not our focus and that’s not what we’re there to do. We're not there to do new research or 100% faithful adaptation. We're there to do the sport, and to get people involved in the sport, and to allow them to go in whatever direction they like. So as an organisation, we're based in historical text and we want to be able to come back to that and to back up what we're teaching with some historical basis, but we do take whatever interpretations we need to make things work. We bring in things from different styles or different time periods or even different martial arts. We've talked about bringing in Olympic fencing methodologies to teach. So that’s where we’re at as an organisation and what our current coaches are doing. And we do that with the hope that our students will form their own opinions, do their own research, and if they choose to delve deeper into historical research, they have the ability to do that and they have the groundwork to do that. Or if they don't care about that and want to go ultra-competitive mode and focus on tournaments only, they also have the groundwork and capability to do that.

 

Guy Windsor

I recently interviewed Jenny Häbry, who does medieval mixed martial arts — basically sword fighting in armour, but like MMA. And I asked her about the historical side of things. She just said flat out she doesn't care about the history. She likes the sword fighting. Her partner does all sorts of historical research and looks into medieval armoured combat methodology, all that sort of stuff. She doesn't bother with any of that — she just likes whacking people with big swords. Fair enough.

 

Ella Rose

Yeah, I think that’s fair. My personal opinion is there's room for all of that within HEMA. I find the historical stuff interesting, that's what first got me into HEMA. I think I care slightly more about the sport part of it, and slightly more about doing it, than being faithful to text. But I do find the history interesting and important.

 

Guy Windsor

There is a fundamental difference between interpretation and practice. I have books on my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice series: where you open it up, there's the picture from Fiore, the text in Italian, my translation, my analysis, and then a video clip of me doing that particular technique. That is just interpretation. You can just copy what's going on in the videos and get an idea of how the fencing might work. But actually training the fencing style Fiore is showing us in the text, I have a whole other series of books for that, because training is not interpretation. The training is what you do to make the interpretation work in practice. It's a whole separate thing. There are plenty of people who are just in it for the history, plenty who are just in it for the martial arts, and people who are just in it for the competitive sport. We need all of them.

 

Ella Rose

100%. I'd say we probably have all three represented at Black Cat. One of our coaches, Catherine, is very much into the history. They've been doing a lot of primary research on things I won't talk about because they're keeping it secret, but they have a level of analysis of old text that I'm just amazed by. And then Shane, who we've talked about, I think he's most interested in just the practice of martial arts, in doing it and teaching it and being there and going through the process of being physically active. Me, for whatever it's worth, I am as competitive as hell, and I really care about competition. I tried to lie to myself about it for a long time, but I really do care about my HEMA ratings. So I care about competition, and now I organise tournaments and I have an outlet for that. I think there's room for all of it, and it's good for students to have role models and people to talk to about all of those different things. And I think, to get back to the original question, I think seated fencing is no different. We approach it in exactly the same way we approach other kinds of fencing: here's the historical basis that we're going to base our lesson in, here's the interpretation we as coaches have come to, we would like you to explore and experiment and come up with what solutions you can to whatever the fencing problem is and take it from there. And you can come up with whatever you need to, to continue fencing going forward.

 

Guy Windsor

Yeah, I think that's probably a brilliant place to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining me today, Ella. It's been lovely to meet you.

 

Ella Rose

Thank you. It was great meeting you, Guy. Thank you so much.