Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

I went over to Bronzehelm for Schola this last weekend and was pleased to find a good chunk of time set aside for fighter's practice. It was wonderful to have a chance to play around with new people and it gave me a great opportunity to try out what I've been learning with my saber. I was even a good boy and warned them that I was trying out news stuff and apologized in advance for any oopses I might make.

And I apologized each time I made an oops.

And I apologized afterwards for all of the oopses.

You see, they style I'm studying with my saber is almost all sweeping tip cuts. And when they work, they work great, but when I'm off, it's a lot of hacks and hard slaps. And let me tell you, my control with the style is nowhere near ready for prime-time. And no, I didn't use they style during the serious fencing. After all, if I can't control it in practice, there's no way I can control it when the adrenaline is flowing.

The good part (for me, at least) was that after watching for a while, Don Adam took me aside and worked with me one-on-one to try and figure out a way to help take the force out of my attacks. And he came up with a couple of ideas that look very promising. The first is no more two-handing for a while: it just adds too much power to my swings. The second idea was to strike with the flat of the blade initially and then turn it edge-on for the draw. This not only spreads out the force over a broader area, but also uses the flexibility of the blade to absorb the force of the blow. And it worked great in practice, even with my current control level. I definitely still need to work on it, so it'll be a while until I can bring it out in a tournament, but at least I have a direction to go.

Did I mention it was a great event?