I. Ice Climber Syndrome I am a follower and occasionally (terrible) player of the game Super Smash Brothers Melee, which is a very old game that still has an active competitive scene. As such, it has gone through a lot of changes over the years and many new strategies and exploits have been discovered. There is one exploit in particular that I want to talk about, which is called “wobbling” (named after the player Wobbles, who didn’t discover it but used it to great effect). Wobbling is done with the character Ice Climbers, and it’s an infinite grab combo; basically if you land a grab and do th ..read more

So if you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, or participating in discussions about ecological coaching on venues like Facebook or Discord, you might be curious about how to incorporate some of these approaches into your own coaching. However, if you’re currently running a “traditional” class, you might also be hesitant to radically realign your entire teaching structure in accordance with a set of ideas you’re still exploring – which is very reasonable! Using games based approaches to teaching fencing takes practice as a coach to do well, and radically changing the structure of your cl ..read more

This is my list of my picks for top 10 classic longsword matches. This will be a departure from my normal game design/HEMA theory/ecological approach topics, but it was fun so I did it. My list is highly subjective, it is based on matches that I like or that made an impact on me, or I personally feel made a wider impact on the HEMA community at large. I don’t have any specific criteria, some of them I think are culturally important, some of them are exemplary of a specific style or style shift, and some of them I just thought were cool. They don’t necessarily have to be the best matches or eve ..read more

In traditional coaching, each movement is normally considered to have an ideal or platonic form, which represents the optimal way it should be executed. Deviation from this form is then an error to be corrected, or at best a variation in response to a specific context. Obviously the ecological approach entirely rejects this framing, but that doesn’t mean there’s no concept of a “good” motor solution. Instead, I use the term “invariant” to describe a common characteristic of effective solutions to a given problem1. For example, two invariants of footwork for attacks are: When lunging, the fron ..read more

I am a huge fan of HEMA Ratings, I think it’s an extremely valuable tool for the HEMA community, so much so that I have supported their Patreon since it first became available. However, it is important to remember that HEMA Ratings is a specific tool, and not all tools are useful in all scenarios. There are some use cases at which HEMA Ratings absolutely excels, namely creating initial tournament seedings, and creating skill tiers in tournaments.  There are also some uses that it is not good for, but the layout and idea of the ratings compels our brains to be attracted. A couple of exampl ..read more

I have worked on this article on and off over the past half year or so. I started it right after my club’s tournament Revolution Rumble, because I was fascinated by the variance of skill in the tier of almost all unrated fencers, and also how that shook out in terms of HEMA rating. This led to a bit of a deep dive into how HEMA ratings works, what it’s good for, and what it isn’t. Because of that, I have decided to make this the first of a three part series about HEMA ratings. The second part will be about why HEMA ratings is not the best system for a world ranking, and the third part will be ..read more

Penalties have become a focus of attention for HEMA competition in the last few years, and for good reason. As we grow as a sport we cast a much wider net every tournament, and it’s no longer guaranteed that  an event will be populated exclusively from the same “old boys club” who all have similar standards. (Not that any of us who have been doing this for a while can ever recall someone from the old boys club getting away with behavior because no one was ready to properly have them face consequences for it…) With the higher focus on carding recently (I’ll use the term penalty and card mo ..read more

Defining fencing as the art of time and measure is an age-old trope. In that regard, footwork determines the time and the place of the initial engagement. However, according to the core principles of the ecological approach, footwork cannot be divorced from a tangible goal one tries to achieve and the stimuli to which they are reacting. The point of this article is to discuss how to integrate footwork constraints to improve one’s game design. Attacks with preparatory steps There are plenty of training scenarios that require one of the two fencers to initiate the fight with a committed attack ..read more

Imagine you’re teaching your club about ways to get to the other side of the opponent’s blade. You start with a simple constraint based exercise – one person extends, the other person takes the blade with a nice overbind out to one side, then the first person has to find a way to hit. Then you do a variety of games based on going under and around to the other side, like Falling Upon. You’ll probably see most people doing quite nice disengages (under the hilt) pretty quickly, so time to move onto and teach the coupé (over the point) as well. But then you run into a problem – you’re doing new ga ..read more

Games don’t always work the way you expect them to. That can be serendipitous, leading you and your students to new ideas, but it can also derail a carefully planned class. Here are a few ideas for why things might go wrong, and what you can do about them. I find that there are three common reasons why my games don’t go the way I want: The game is poorly designed and doesn’t encourage the things I wanted it to. Students are stuck in a local maximum because a better solution hasn’t occurred to them. Students are stuck in a local maximum because they lack some prerequisite skill to perform the ..read more