Shield Combat Intro Class

Welcome to this class on shield combat in which I'm going to guide you through a couple of solo exercises for fighting with various forms of shield. Solo practice is a great supplement for your training in which you can focus on the individual details that make up any given technique and so that you can correct yourself, you can train it, rehearse it and condition your bodies to create kind of a toolbox which is at your disposal in fencing so that you don't have to think about these moves anymore but you do them almost instinctively. Now you have then replaced your instinctive moves with martially sound ones and this is what solo training is really really good for. We're going to look at fundamentals and the first thing that we are going to practice is footwork. Now footwork, good footwork is supposed to safely bring you from your starting position to your final destination. Now as bridging distance also means time passing this time is also at your opponent's disposal and naturally he will try to keep you from whatever you are about to do. That means that he will try to launch a specific counter and while this time is passing as you are closing in you have to be flexible to be able to respond to any change of situation. You will not be able to do so if you commit to say striking a blow early on so if say you are in the process of entering then decide for a specific action and leap in to strike then a long time passes in which you have no technical flexibility when you cannot respond to any counter. So that means that you want to delay the decision the commitment to concluding a technique until the very very end so that when you finally do so this time frame is so short that your opponent cannot do anything about it anymore. So any footwork that you use should provide you with the opportunity with the chance to stay to remain in control and have this flexibility to respond to any change of situation until you finally decide to strike thrust or whatever you want to do or whatever is required in that situation to win you the fight. Okay so I hope you are properly warmed up as we're going to look at posture first. Adopt the shoulder wide stance. Stand straight by bringing forward your hip. Engage the core muscles in your abdomen to keep the hip in place and relax your buttocks. Straighten your back. Relax the shoulders. Do not pump up the chest so don't bring the chest forward. Instead straighten your neck. Now place the feet about a step's length apart from each other. Make sure that feet are pointing outwards at about a 45 degrees angle. Lower yourself by making a motion as if sitting down onto a stool. This will result in folding the body in the hip. Lift your arms and lift hands to about shoulder height or maybe face height. Make sure that the arms are extended and that the elbows are not sticking out to the side. Your hip and your torso are square on. Do not move the hip so that one side is pointing forwards. Instead keep the hip locked. Of course this could either be a right leg forward stance or a left leg forward stance. This kind of posture and the respective footwork is informed by historical sources. You can see it in the Fechtbücher but also in high medieval miniatures and even in early medieval sources such as the Utrecht Psalter. So it bears testament to a particular European culture of motion that is used in physical activities such as dancing and combat. So next we're going to prepare to enter to get closer to our opponent without giving away that we are about to do so. So we are cutting down our opponent's reaction time. He usually is focused on the overall frame of his adversary, namely us, and we are simply just extending the front leg and placing the heel in a new position. See that the body is not moving at all. So do this. Extend the leg, place the heel on the ground and pull it back again to original position. So your body, your torso, your head, your shoulders, all this should remain static, stationary and it's just the leg that is moving. The weight is on the back leg here or else the front leg couldn't move freely. In this exercise we are pretending that we are already in range to make contact with the opposing weapons in order to gain control. However we are not yet in hitting range. Now the idea here is that first you gain control being on the safe side because you're not yet in hitting range. This also implies that in order to get so close that you can use your advantage and land the hit you need to bridge even more distance. And this step here is preparing this final move. So if something goes wrong in between you can still recover and you have not yet committed to the actual step. So let's move on and do this final step. So we are assuming that we have entered, we have gained control, we have prepared our step and as we have done so we realize it's safe to bridge the last bit of distance and land the hit and conclude our technique. In order to do so we roll the foot over the heel adopting a new position with the front foot and shift the weight forward towards the target. Finally we conclude the whole action by recovering the rear foot, collecting the rear foot and we are back in our original posture. The situation can change as you cover final distance regardless of whether there is a crossing of blades or any weapon contact or not. So stick to this very careful and cautious approach even if your opponent is not doing anything. Starting from a position where we are already in weapon range is all fine, however how did we get there in the first place? So start from an upright position and now with a passing step you are going to reach fencing distance. So as you take this step lower yourself, raise your arms and adopt exactly the position that we have practiced before and then proceed as we have trained earlier. The great advantage of the kind of distance management that is advocated in this workshop is that you can gain control over the fight at a range at which your opponent cannot hit you. So this makes for an extremely safe approach to combat. Only when you have gained complete control you move in to land a hit. Now it's time to bring in the weapons. We're first going to start with the earliest form of shield that's going to be covered in this little tutorial and that's going to be the viking round shield or the germanic round shield. If you don't have a viking shield at hand you can just as well use a stick or use a scabbard. Maybe it's a good idea to use a stick first anyway because it's going to tire out your shoulder and you want to get the mechanics right before you learn to cope with the weight of your shield. Okay so the one thing that's important about all forms of shield particularly those that are center grip is that you grip them pretty much exactly as you grip a weapon anyway like for instance your sword. So this is the kind of grip that you want to adopt and that I use most of the time. Okay now so what we're going to do next we are going to use this shield to cover ourselves as we are entering. So we are probably going to make contact as soon as we are in weapon range with the opposing shield. We are sensing the pressure that we receive through the shield which informs us about the opponent's next move and we are pretending that we are stronger here so we are levering open his shield just a little bit in order to get a line for an attack. When you do this with a viking shield make sure that the shield is correctly angled as you close in. The lower edge of the shield must not be too far away from your body because then this will create an opening for an Unterhau for a back edge strike that can attack your hand and of course you should not go to the other extreme either that means if the lower edge is too close to your body then your head is no longer safely protected by this nice roof which is your shield. Of course you can do the same exercise with your 14th century heater shields that is a very light type of heater shaped shield and there are various ways that you can hold such shields they have very versatile strapping systems and they come in a variety of strap arrangements. Now for our purposes the elongated grip that we have just applied to our stick or a viking shield serves our purpose best for this particular exercise in which we are going to use the shield actively offensively. So I'm using exactly the same grip as you can see is the thumb is slipped through one of the straps and the other fingers are holding the remaining strap and then I'm aiming with that corner over there this is later on also going to protect my sword hand. Mind you that kite shaped shields appear to have been used somewhat differently more like mobile armor so don't actually try this with a large kite shield that wouldn't be appropriate to that form of shield. And now for the blow in many situations in shield combat the right Twerhau is a great solution it's a blow that is most appropriate to circumvent the opposing shield which is the obstacle right in front of you. The Twerhau opens up new attack lines behind the shield it can be launched from your right shoulder and strikes from your left that makes it a sophisticated and rather intricate blow and there are a number of details to pay attention to. What is so cool about the sword is that the sword is a labor-saving device so you should not try to put a lot of body power into your blow but rather work with the sword and let it move according to its physics. It is supposed to turn around its pivot points there are plenty of videos about pivot points if you've never heard about them and these are the points that the sword wants to naturally turn around and don't try to force it turn around any other spots. This will make for weak blows and will come with all kinds of disadvantages. So in order to strike a really nice and powerful sword blow you should think about using say a riding whip or something like that. Cracking a whip that has the same kind of explosiveness that you should try to implement with your sword blows. And the same is true for our Twerhau here it's a really powerful blow and it's best if it feels totally effortless. Now to get to that stage you have to train a lot but I'm going to show you how I do it and note that in accordance with the body mechanics and the stepping that we were training earlier my body my shoulders are not moving at all. So I'm striking this blow and it's only the sword that does the job. You're going to negatively change pivot points if your shoulder moves. You are going to lose all the energy of that whip cracking explosiveness that you are trying to achieve. When I strike this blow I also move my hip. Actually it's more like a contraction because you don't see much hip movement from the outside. Instead of moving the sword side hip I move the shield side hip forward. So there is a kind of a counter motion and that locks my torso but also gives extra acceleration to the sword. Instead of turning the whole blade so that the thumb is on the bottom side as I strike I just place the thumb on the opposing side. So because my sword is held and controlled by the ring finger and the little finger the pinky as I start my initial motion this kind of thrusting motion to the side I can safely remove the thumb from its original position and place it on the opposing side. So that as I strike the thumb is on the bottom side. So this is an alternative way of striking your Twerhau. At any rate when striking a Twerhau with an axe you have to do the thumb shift or else you would have to rotate the complete shaft of the weapon and that would result in striking with the back of the axe head instead of its edge. So finally we combine all these elements. It's a fundamental move, a fundamental motion and remember that you pay attention to each single step. So you don't want to weld it into one unchangeable and fixed entity. You should be conscious of each and every stage because the whole point of these exercises is that you pay attention to the order of events which will guarantee that you have the flexibility to respond to a change of situation in fencing. 133 aficionados will have already noticed that the exercises that we have been practicing nicely tie in with 133's schützen or cover versus second wall and it is very likely that medieval buckler systems of the 13th and 14th century were informed by contemporary military shields. Of course when you are using a buckler it will be the blades the swords that make contact first and you have to position your sword in such a fashion that it forms a barrier against any incoming attack. The posture which we have trained is also great for using a spear in conjunction with your shield. Because the torso is not moving you can keep the shield in position to cover you as you shoot forward your spear. We have already learned that if we bring forward the opposing hip namely the shield hip we can lock the torso but also help accelerate our weapon. Slight thrusts are seen quite often in period art however oftentimes it's quite confusing to see both the starting position of the hand and the end position of the weapon in one and the same illustration. Slight thrusts generate a lot of power and because our torso remains stationary we do not overcome it and we do not expose ourselves as we shoot forward the spear. First we train to lift the spear into the overarm position and then lower it again into the underarm position. Try to keep the spearhead in one position all the time so the shaft is actually moving around the spearhead as you lift your hand. Fine motor skills are quite challenging here so coming from an underarm position clamping the shaft with your thumb and your index as you lift the spear position the other fingers below the spear shaft. Now as you move your thumb back let the spear shaft drop onto your palm and index finger and thumb are pointing backwards now. To go back extend the index finger so that the spear is clamped between your middle finger and your index finger reposition the thumb so it's underneath the shaft and as you lower it fold the middle finger the ring finger and the pinky over the spear half to go back to underarm position. I hope you found this workshop helpful for your training. Thank you very much for your attention and hope to see you from behind the shield at one point.