Armoured practices have been happening but your knight marshal has been slacking with her reporting on them.

Tonight we had myself, Cernac and Duncan in armour, and Aodh and Jasper out of armour. We started out by admiring Duncan’s new arm protection courtesy of Lord Alexander of Derlington, and we look forward to seeing the new armour in action.

Cernac, Duncan and I went through the things each of us were focusing on practing at the moment: me on creating quick flow and snappy double taps through a very loose grip on the sword hilt; Duncan on throwing blows with his left hand, creating flow through his two swords; and Cernac on creating openings and following through. We figured out that we could all learn from the same drill, and spent an extended period of time following a threeway drill called “perfect defence”, which Cernac had learned for Sir Wilfric and Viscount Krake. This involved person A throwing a number of shots in quick succession, keeping the flow going, and person B focusing on minimal defence.

Time flew past, and Cernac had to get out of armour for his HEMA class, so Duncan and I worked for a while on a three-step drill, where person A throws three blows in succession, stepping while they’re doing so, focusing on gaps appearing and closing, and person B only defends.

Aodh and Jasper had been doing slow work, and I joined Aodh to do more slow practice in the corridor. He was working on getting shots through to the body, and I now focused on straight lines of my shot technique.

So no fighting this week, but super super useful drills and a lot of thinking.