Strike Point, or How I Learned To Sword More Gooder

After a conversation last Thursday, I'm reordering this post very slightly. Here is the closing paragraph, at the beginning to show off what the hell I'm talking about.

Most people have an understanding of center of percussion, and that is important. If you want to perform cuts, you need to understand where the "sweet spot" is. However, it is a mistake to think that this is a static thing. By controlling rotation, you can improve your sword mechanics and effective strength by a large amount. This will allow you to be a more effective fencer, and will allow you to troubleshoot and improve your own techniques.

This post will teach you one method to understand this, after bringing you through the theoretical underpinnings of this method.

*****

This post is the culmination of a relatively long train of thought, starting with the time I came across this article, perhaps three years ago. This is also the culmination of what I was calling "New Blade Magic" about half a year ago.

That article talks about "Center of Percussion", or the best place to hit with a chop in order to maximize kinetic energy imparted on the target. Since I disagree with that article's definition of "Center of Percussion", I'm going to refer to it here as the strike point.

The strike point is the place on a weapon that you want to hit with in order to impart the most impact possible. Breaking it down - the velocity of a blade, when striking, is primarily rotation. In order to strike most effectively, we want to find the place on the blade that, when we hit with it, we convert all of the rotation into kinetic energy.

Examples of three different strikes, arranged in vertical sequence.

There are arrows. That should help?

What happens when we don't hit in that place? Well, if we hit too far forward, the blade starts rotating in the opposite direction. If we hit too far back, the blade attempts to continue rotating in that same direction! But if we hit in just the right place, it stops. You can verify this by experimentation at home, by hitting things with swords or sticks.

The location of this "correct point" is dictated by the point the weapon is rotating around, and the distribution of weight of the weapon.

For the rest of this discussion, a diagram is necessary.

Rapier was shamelessly traced from somewhere I can't find again on the internet.

There are enough swords on the internet that it could be literally anywhere.

So, this is an example of a rapier. If you read this blog, you should be well familiar with them. For the moment, we will consider the center of balance of this rapier to be at point F.

As an example - if the rapier is rotating around point B, then the strike point could be point I. If that were the case, then when the rapier rotates around point A, then the strike point could be point H, and if it rotated around point C then it could be point J. The reverse is also true - if the blade were rotating around point I, then the strike point would be point B.

So, for this first example, we would have pairings A-H, B-I, C-J, and center of balance F. This covers the parts of the rapier that your hand covers, in general. So, if you throw a cut solely from the wrist at point A, the strike point would be point G. If you throw from the middle of the hand at point B, you would want to strike with point I. And if you were throwing a cut from your fingers at point C, you would want to impact with point J.

But what if you want your strike point to be somewhere farther forward? You could do this by performing a "whipping" motion. Rotate the sword from your wrist and move your arm and hand in the opposite direction, so the whole sword rotates around the point paired with point K. In this case, the point would probably be D. For longer swords, it might be closer to the center of balance, like point E. In either case, you would be making a "whipping" motion with your hand, to imbue the tip of your blade with all of the force in your sword.

What if you want to strike with point G? In that case, you would need to determine where to rotate around. It would be a point to the left of A - you would actually be rotating your sword around a point which is not on the sword itself.

(Feel-free-to-ignore-this musings: The center of balance acts as a lens, distributing what amounts to an image of your hand onto the other side of the weapon. This image continues off into infinity - as you rotate the weapon around a point closer and closer to the center of balance, the strike point moves off into infinity. Similarly, as you rotate around a point closer and closer to infinity, the strike point asymptotically approaches the center of balance, until you're just moving perpendicular to the length of the blade.)

This understanding allows us to classify the blade into parts. The part of the blade to the left of H is the strong, the part between H and J is the middle, and the part to the right of J is the weak.

The properties of the three parts of the blade are as follows:

The Strong is easy to push with.
The Middle is easy to strike with.
The Weak is easy to move.

A particularly pommel-heavy blade might not have a weak part of the blade, only a middle and a strong. A more heavily tapered blade has a smaller middle part, the middle being taken up by having more weak and more strong. So, here are a few example blades:

• My 45" sword with distal taper
• Center of balance F
• Pairings A-G, B-H, C-J, E-K
• My 37" rebar-like destreza blade with almost no taper
• Center of balance E
• Pairings A-H, B-I, C-J, D-K
• Sorcha's pommel-heavy sword
• Center of balance D
• Pairings A-H, B-I/J, C-K
• No weak of the blade.

How do we determine these pairings? Well, we do a little thing called "The Wiggle Test", inspired by this paper and then terribly misused by me.

Pinch the sword at the point you want to determine the pairing of. Then, wiggle it back and forth, parallel to the ground. The sword will rotate around a place on the other side of the center of balance from the pinched point. This is the strike point when rotating around that point.

Note that you can do this for any point on the sword - you can pinch on the quillon block, on the handle, or even on the blade.

(As a brief aside - I believe that when gripping a sword with undue tightness, the strike point is different because your hand becomes part of the rigid system that is being moved by your wrist. I am not sure how to ascertain the strike point there, except by brute-force experimentation and general guesstimation.)

What does this knowledge gain us?

• When performing opposition against an opponent's blade, we want to push with the strike point, since that lets us convert the rotation from our wrist into force in the most effective way.
• This is necessary because the wrist is the weakest part of the sword-to-body system.
• This is essential in such techniques as:
• Pushing thrusts.
• Glisé.
• Ripping the opponent's blade off-line.
• False-edge parries as per Capo Ferro.
• Honestly, almost everything you do with a sword.
• When performing a draw or push cut, we can make sure that we keep the strike point against our opponent's body, so the sword doesn't bounce weirdly.
• When we want to move our tip as fast as possible, this tells us how to do it.

So, this method of determining the strike point allows you to refine your techniques more quickly than you might otherwise do so. Because if you understand where it is, and why it is there, then you can manipulate it and improve your sense of it.

*****

Most people have an understanding of center of percussion, and that is important. If you want to perform cuts, you need to understand where the "sweet spot" is. However, it is a mistake to think that this is a static thing. By controlling rotation, you can improve your sword mechanics and effective strength by a large amount. This will allow you to be a more effective fencer, and will allow you to troubleshoot and improve your own techniques.

Thanks for reading!

Super Productive Practice!

Practice this week ended up being short, because I spent the first part of it working with a new person. They seem to be our sort of people. So, yay.

The practice portion of practice went well. I spent time doing my Italianized Destreza, which operates on a diamond rather than on an octagon. It seemed to go well. The main Destreza-esque thing I am doing is getting in one of the four things-I-call-atajos (Line in Cross, Narrowing, Weak Under Strong, Weak Over Strong) and then transitioning to the corresponding atajo-like-thrust for the attack (In order of the previous parenthesized list: Weak Under Strong, Weak Over Strong, Line in Cross, Narrowing).

So, this means that I go from having my tip under their sword into thrusting through their sword, while pushing down from the top, in the case of Weak Under Strong => Line in Cross.

I continued operating in a very profiled Italian stance, while thinking in terms of body angle when attacking. This seems to have increased the number of times people just miss and can't bring something into a good attack. This is a nice thing.

I also returned to thinking about opposition in terms of strike point. So, the strike point can be determined by gripping a sword, then wiggling it back and forth. The point about which the sword rotates is the strike point. This is the point that is best to push with for opposition, I think. This is different from my previous thoughts about opposition, which were in terms of the strong, weak, and middle of the blade.

The strike point of my weapon is farther back than I expected it to be. When attacking and performing opposition with it, I was more able to push through people's weapons than usual. That was nice!

I also succeeded at adjusting the strike point. So, if you grip farther down the blade but behind the point of balance and then wiggle the blade, that will show where the strike point is if you make the weapon rotate around that point, when striking something. This is accomplished by "whipping" the sword, so that it rotates around a point past the hand but before the center of balance. This is most easily demonstrated in-person or in a video, but lazy.

This has improved my ability to do a glisé. What I do is land with the strike point initially, then "whip" the sword so that the strike point moves with my opponent's sword, pushing it harder than a straight-up cut. This was very effective, and allowed me to cut into my opponent's blade and then detach and thrust a few times. This will also allow me to actually do a subset of opposition with my 45" rapier, which is super exciting.

I need to study this, to see if manipulating the strike point will allow me to perform opposition on "stronger" places, if my opponent doesn't counter with strike-point-manipulation of their own.

This also explains why some of my whipping-shots have been landing harder than expected - if I whip my thrust in a particular way, that puts the strike point right at the tip, meaning that the full force of the rapier will be there. This means if I want to land a face shot, I shouldn't whip it in. I should whip near, and then push it in.

Things to work on for next practice:

• Further strike point manipulation! Experiment at home!
• Maintain the highly-profiled Giganti stance.
• Continue adapting Spanish principles to an Italian game.
• People might grow familiar with where I am attacking. This means that either 
• my attack needs to be un-parry-able due to positioning
• or I need to vary things sometimes. Possibly transferring from between the Weak Under/Over atajos? Possibly also transferring from Line in Cross to Narrowing and back by cutting over their tip?

Quick Practice Post!

Practice was good. A couple of bullet-points:

• I finally am starting to feel like a mid-range short-blade-fighter.
• Giaratas are hard. See the below picture and text for details.
• I'm getting better at changing from "I'm practicing!" into "I'm trying hard to win!" at will.
• I need to use my short sword to push into their sword more, when I am doing opposition. Many people are stronger than me, so I need to compensate with better technique.

*****

Below is described my Problems with Giaratas.

My art continues to be fantastic.

This is a top-view again. 

Of both Weak Under Strong into a thrust,

and of a giarata.

The issue here is the angle of the shoulder, when entering into the thrust at the top of the Spanish Circle, or after performing the void from a giarata. I need that particular body-angle, but in order to land my tip at that body angle I need to bend my shoulder in a way that I'm not sure it actually bends. I'll try working flexibility for a while, but I might need to consider other options.

Italians and Daggers, Spanish and Body Angle

One peculiarity of the Spanish is that they tend to not use daggers. The Spanish masters mention them, and mention how to use them in passing, but in general they state that the single sword can defeat all combined arms. Why is this? Why do the Italians hold onto usage of the dagger so tightly, whereas the Spanish could take it or leave it? The Spanish use body angle and positioning to do the same thing that the Italians use daggers to do.

Such an artist. This depicts a top-view of fencers.

The point of using a dagger is to block your opponent's angle of attack. You want to force them to disengage around your dagger, which adds to the time it takes them to touch you. This, ideally, gives you time to perform actions like attacking.

This means that a dagger is useless unless you spread it outwards, pushing their blade outside of your body and maintain it there. You gain no utility if you just keep the dagger in front of you. Similarly, if you spread your dagger outwards before you are close enough, you just create an open line for your opponent to stab. So, to prevent stabbings, you need to get past your opponent's tip and then create an angle between your dagger and your body, which prevents their tip from reaching you.

(For the following, I am adopting the convention of arbitrarily using male pronouns for the fighter farther upwards, and female pronouns for the fighter farther downwards.)

For an example of this, see the "YES, GOOD" set of fighters. The person with the dagger cannot be stabbed without a disengage, unless her opponent either moves forward and creates an even larger angle with his sword. This can be countered by the dagger-holding fighter pulling her hand back.

I believe that a similar degree of defense can be accomplished simply from body angle. I have two assumptions to which you must ascribe here, to agree with me:

1. A proper chopping cut requires at least a quarter-turn of the blade, whether of the wrist, the elbow, or the shoulder.
2. A proper draw cut is slow, because it requires you to place the blade, then push or pull it while applying pressure. If you don't place and then pull or push, the blade will bounce ineffectually.
3. The thrust is the ideal attack, faster than either cut unless your sword is far off-line.

So, without further ado...

The person on the bottom was drawn without arms to accentuate the point about body angle.

As we can see, the distance matters. If you are past their tip, then you can prevent them from touching you based solely on body angle. This is something that the Italians do as well - a giarata is an attack which twists your body into a position which can't be easily attacked, while countering with your own thrust.

But yes - here, you're creating an angle that can't be dealt with by rotating your own body. In "NO, BAD", she has rotated wrongly and will be stabbed. In "YES, GOOD", she has rotated correctly and will not be stabbed.

So, now that I've given a hasty set of examples that body angle can defend in a way similar to how a dagger defends, let's look at how this applies to the Spanish.

Pronoun-wise, he has the sword, she's stepping around.

This circle is based on the arm and sword of the fencer with the sword. As you can see, the positions shown for the diestro without the sword follow the same angulation shown in the above "YES, GOOD" set of fighters.

Note that here, the fighter without a sword is assumed to start opposite the fighter with the sword.

(As an aside - the diestro realistically would not maintain the same direction all the way around the circle. When she steps from the top position to the upper-left position, she would step and put the left side of her body forward, allowing her to grab her opponent's hilt or blade and perform a Movement of Conclusion.)

Being more specific - a diestro steps around the circle, keeping the front half of her body closer to the line of her opponent's sword than the back half of her body. This means that her opponent must correct their direction first, then thrust. This effect is exacerbated when the diestro has a shorter sword than her opponent - the circle is tighter, and by the time she has crossed one or two steps around the circle, she is past her opponent's tip.

My phone makes interesting choices about which direction to orient images.

The above image shows the arc of "past the tip" for a long, medium, and short sword. As you can see, the diestro is past the tip after two steps. If her opponent were to step forward at the same time, the arc would move and she would be past the tip after one step with a long weapon.

This is the same movement as the Italian giarata, except that the Spanish fencer gets there faster due to her upright posture, rather than the Italian who has to push his leg around behind him, depending on how squarely his body is situated.

The diestro's movement around the circle accomplishes the goal of being safe from thrusts using body angulation alone, without adding anything else, even an off-hand.

(As an aside, I plan to attempt to use this along with explicit taking-of-the-blade to work on my game of fighting against case fighters with single rapier and rapier-and-dagger.)

So, as we've seen above, Italians create safety with their daggers by widening the angle between the tip of their opponent's sword and their body. This relies on positioning - trying to make a wide angle between their tip and your body doesn't matter if you aren't past their tip yet. This is similar to how when a diestro steps around the circle, her body angle creates safety from thrusts after she crosses a certain line. The front half of her body acts as a parrying device, refusing to allow her opponent's tip to touch the rest of her body. In this way, body angulation allows the Spaniard to obtain the same effect as using two implements, where the Italian would prefer to use a dagger. This means that body angulation can be effectively used to act as an additional implement.

(As another aside - I think that Fabris's forward body posture can act on the same principle, and I am eager to try it more after having written this post.)

Stabbings

Not a whole lot to talk about.

New Destreza continues to be good and feel Correct. My gameplan currently is to switch among the four Generals until either:

• My opponent anticipates what I'm going to do and I can capitalize on them being out of position.
• My opponent doesn't react in time to what I am doing, and I can capitalize on them being out of position.

Using a shorter sword means I use the four about equivalently often. Using a longer sword means that I use Weak Over Strong and Weak Under Strong far, far more often.

I think that if I blend a certain amount of Italian-esque body mechanics, I'll be able to use Line in Cross and Narrowing more often. The issue is that, at the point where I could actually gain opposition on my opponent's blade, I am close enough that I only need about one and a half steps to touch them. So, if instead of attempting to do Spanish footwork with my longer sword, I do Italian lunges, it blends better. I still want to be moving diagonally away from their sword if I am using Weak Under Strong or Weak Over Strong, and I still want to be moving through their sword if I'm doing Line in Cross or Narrowing, but one lunge rather than two steps.

One thing I've been having trouble with is people who keep their sword low-ish and point from one side of my body to the other. This makes it so I can't accurately identify which direction to go at any given time, which makes me sad. I think this means I need to make more effective usage of Narrowing, though it might mean that I need to learn how to use the Low General and the High General.

In any case, I've been able to successfully create a mapping between my Italian maneuvers and my Spanish maneuvers, which has allowed me to improve my Italian fencing and more accurately predict what will work, and understand why it will work.

Lunchtime Blogging!

Finally, finally my Destreza feels pretty good.

As per previous post, I've been stepping away from their sword while using Weak Under Strong, and stepping toward their sword while using Line in Cross. It works well, but it seems like certain positions put me into stalemate.

If, for example, my opponent keeps their hand low in an Italian and mostly pointing their sword towards me and disengages readily, this can prevent both Line in Cross and Weak Under. As long as I don't deviate from those stances though, it means my opponent can't really hit me either. It's a stalemate, which relies on one or the other of us to mess up or to decide to stop fighting.

Thinking about the philosophical basis of Destreza, it makes sense that Viedma would make special note to teach us a pair of techniques that can defend us all the time, and not necessarily hit our opponent. Ideally, after a while, we will decide that duels are absurd and then leave without anyone being killed.

However, there are another pair of techniques - Weak Over Strong and Narrowing. I believe that if I used these judiciously, I could create more opportunities to go for the kill.

I suppose we will learn more about this tonight.

Apparently All I Think Is Destreza These Days

Despite having made many draft posts, I haven't actually posted in a bit. Let's remedy that.

*****

So there was a tournament. It is largely not relevant, except for the first bout. In the first bout, I fought as true a Destreza as I could against Doroga. It was fun, but I left the bout frustrated. I did everything I could according to how the masters would have wanted, and I fought a very faithful-to-Destreza game. I still lost though, which made me a bit sad. After all - I am not one of those truly-period fencers. I care about the utility of fencing techniques more than I care about accuracy-to-period. My accuracy comes from the belief that surely, they were doing something right, back in the day.

So, this led me to re-read Viedma.

*****

Reading through Viedma went much, much faster this time. Apparently all of the time I have put into Destreza has finally paid off. I paid the most attention to the techniques section, because that's where the True Art is to be found.

This quicker reading has allowed me to pay more attention to what isn't being said, rather than solely what is being said. As such, I have made the following tentative realizations:

• Viedma explicitly states that Line in Cross should only be done when pushing outwards on (towards) your opponent's blade. So, when their blade is to your blade's right if you are stepping right, and when their blade is to your blade's left if you are performing the general atajo on the left.
• It is not explicitly mentioned, but Viedma shows examples of Weak Under Strong when stepping away from their blade. So, these two facts mean:
• Use Line in Cross and Narrowing when moving toward your opponent's blade.
• Use Weak Under String and Weak Over Strong when moving away from their blade.
• There are several sequences of attack that seem to be somewhat general. They are:
• Movement of Conclusion - grab quillon, cut to face.
• Movement of Conclusion - push blade down, stab.
• Disengage above their quillons to a thrust to the face.
• If they try to catch with their hilt, perform a vertical cut to the head
• If they parry that, disengage to a thrust to the chest.
• Line in Cross doesn't necessarily involve setting your sword at an obtuse angle with your wrist. So that extended-straight Line in Cross might be correct. 

Those bits should solve some of the problems I've been having recently. With K&Q coming up, I need to decide if I am going to be bringing my Destreza game, or if I'm going to be bringing my standard rapier game. A hard choice.