Upcoming course announcement

A bit over a week ago we finished photo and videography for the first of our new courses. While we work on editing the videos, finishing the written parts and processing images it is a good time to talk a bit about what the course will include, how we are progressing and what are our motivations behind this first in a series of new material.

Guard Lessons

The upcoming course has a simple foundation, but it is packed with ideas and example drills. It is tighter in focus than the Fundamentals course, but also goes into more depth in the subjects it covers. It is also different in that it takes its structure directly from the writings of Marozzo. Instead of being just word-to-word interpretation we do expand a bit however and do our best to render an idea of how you can really use the text to not only replicate but to create sound fencing sequences and actions that follow Marozzo's principles.

The course is built around the so-called progression of guard positions that Marozzo gives us, and it will go through the individual lessons attributed to each position. Depending on the guard, there are cutting exercises, tactical instruction, solo sequences and pair drills shown that closely tie into what Marozzo had to say about the given position.

Therefore the course will be named Guard Lessons.

The process

A deeper look into the progression of guards is a good starting point for us as it has been a while since the previous larger course was made. It is based on fundamental concepts so it gives us an opportunity to provide an update on those without having to overhaul any of the previous courses. It also directly builds on the Footwork course we already have so it acts as a more advanced option.

We chose not to explain all the details we have already covered in the Fundamentals course, so if you will need any further instruction on the terms and concepts covered here, you can refer back to the Fundamentals course.

This particular subject is also something that I have always wanted to have a closer look at, and this project gave me the perfect opportunity to do so. And of course it is great to be able to share the results.

For the course we decided to use an empty warehouse as a studio, relying on equipment we had at our disposal. A dedicated studio would have been more convenient, but at least we now had an entire weekend to use for shooting throughout day and night, and lots of space. We are happy with the results and might use the venue again for upcoming courses.

In this video I decided to improvise with the sword, throwing cuts and actions that simply naturally followed one another. While improvisation is not the subject of this course, it gives an idea of how important the guards and the actions they provide for are to learn – this kind of flow is only possible if you are consciously moving from guard to guard.

After launching this course we are planning on doing some work with the two-handed sword, and in preparation for that we took photos using our new Caino Doiman swords.

We will keep you updated on our progress with the new Guard Lessons course, as well as the other material we are working on. 🙂 Meanwhile, brush up your skills with the fundamentals, keep practicing and enjoy the summer.