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!