Hey again all,
I thought seeming there wasn’t much hema content in my first post on here I would actually delve into what I intend this blog to be about and give my first impressions on Hema from my first month and a bit as well as some “advice” or thoughts for people potentially thinking of starting this as a sport (I am loathe to use the word hobby as everything about Hema feels like a sport to me outside of the reading of historical treatises).
Hema is a sport, treat your approach to it like one
the first thing I would say is that I was woefully underprepared for just how physically demanding Hema would be. It sounds kinda stupid in hindsight as I know how hard sports fencing was and the such but I think it was the association with it being based on historical documents I perhaps thought it was more in kin with living history than a sport.
How wrong I was.
Hema is most definitely a sport, and as such needs a sport level of fitness to be able to perform at a high level. That said please do not let this put you off, like many other sports it is also an excellent way to get fit, which again is part of the reason I am doing it as personally I have found I need to have something to aim at or get fit for to motivate me.
So a general level of aerobic fitness is a bonus just to help you move and not get gassed out while sparring or doing intensive drilling. My club actually does a little bit of circuit training at the start of sessions to help with just this fact, so if you are looking to get fit to do hema this is probably a good way to do it without really having to dedicate hours and hours at the gym.
it will target parts of you you didnt even know you had
this was something I was expecting perhaps a little more having done some sports fencing but Hema will work muscles and body parts you never even thought of using, in particular you will be amazed at how much your wrist, grip, and forearms will ache early on. Unless you are a rock climber or something similar and use these muscles and tendons a lot you would be surprised how much an 800g military sabre will make your arm hurt holding it en garde for any length of time, especially when you start to practice cuts or moulinets with it or parries especially as the impact of the 2 blades down your arm will really test grip and arm strength as you try to arrest the motion to successfully parry.
it isn’t just your arms either, legs and your back get a real workout with lunges and footwork. hema is an explosive sport, rapid movements are what get you in and out of range of your opponent without getting clobbered by their sword so these rapid changes of pace and direction require strong legs, and you will feel this in your calves, quads, and especially your knees as that impact of motion goes through you(especially if you are large like myself).
so make sure you look after yourself and prepare to ache the next day.
Money money money
Hema is not cheap. This is hardly going to be a surprise when you think about the level of protective gear required and what are tantamount to blunt full contact swords that have been properly constructed for combat to hit each other with.
That being said the first thing I would say that the costs to train are some of the best value for money training sessions in basically any sport I have done. my primary club charges £5 per session (About 6 dollars, 5.5 euros currently) and my secondary club charges £10 per session (12 dollars 11 euros) for 2 hour sessions which have the aforementioned circuit training, group lessons in the weapon we are doing that week and then plenty of time for free sparring at the end (the 2 hours at my primary club often runs a good 30 minutes longer due to the free sparring and us all chatting and basically hanging out together). And while I am sure there are more expensive clubs out there in regards to weekly cost for the training sessions the overall cost of the training seems to be on par or cheaper than many other activities.
the cost as mentioned in the first paragraph lies in the equipment required. Hema is a niche sport and as such there is not a huge amount of places to get your equipment from (certainly in the UK) and as such this equipment comes with a cost. couple this with the required level of protection it must offer or safe construction of the weapon you are using and this can quickly mount up. I will do specific reviews on what equipment I chose and why in later posts but broadly speaking I will outlay a rough cost for my equipment below.
as a caveat to the list below I do not own all of this equipment as of yet but what I have listed is what I have already or the specific price of the exact piece of kit I will be buying specifically, so this will be an accurate costing even though some of it has not yet been purchased. I have therefore tagged what I own with (I own this) for clarity.
a second caveat is that all of my equipment listed is priced brand new, you can of course and should of course shop second hand but that brings its own issues, I didnt tend to do this due to my size there simply isnt much kit in my size on the second hand market.
protective equipment
Jacket £170 (I own this)
Mask £70 (I own this)
Mask overlay £60 (I own this)
Heavy Gloves £150
Arm guards £40 (I own this)
Leg guards £40
Thigh Guards £40
Groin Guard £10 (I own this)
Total Protective Equipment £580
The above is all new prices and also isn’t all the cheapest equipment on the market, you can get Gloves for about £60 that are suitable for synthetic weapons or lighter weapon fencing with steel. I have listed the cost of the gloves I will be buying as my club does near exclusively steel fencing and with steel longsword you need heavy gloves. this is also true of the Jacket, there are lighter jackets and cheaper jackets but the costs above are not too far over what you would expect to pay in the UK for a full set of protective kit (ie somewhere between £500-£600)
Weapons
Weapons are a lot harder to price as it depends on what weapon you want to study, whether you are doing multiple weapons, personal preferences (most weapons can be custom ordered) and what it is being used for.
there is also a hugely variation in available suppliers for weaponry, perhaps even more than protective equipment, and this variation obviously comes with differences in price.
What I can say with certainty is that I have ordered 2 weapons, one longsword and one sabre (polish sabre rather than military sabre in this case) and both of these have cost me with delivery somewhere in the £200 mark each. They are coming from within the EU so I should not have to pay any import tax or further duty on these so they should be the final price. I then intend to order at least 2 other weapons in the future (a straight bladed military sabre that can be used as a backsword analogue. and a sidesword for sword and buckler work) both of these will probably cost in the same region again, and I also have a sharp bastard sword ( sometimes called a hand and a half sword) ordered for test cutting purposes which again cost just over £200.
So all in all on top of my protective equipment cost of nearly £600 my sword collection (and it should be called this to be fair as I enjoy these weapons aesthetically as well as for their purpose) will run eventually to around the £1000 mark.
one more thing on weapons I will say is something I have alluded to above. Most Hema weapons are going to have to be imported. they are made by weaponsmiths and forges all over the world but the main ones of these tend to be located in Eastern Europe, The USA, and a few scattered in different countries also. So unless you are lucky and live in the country where they are produced you are going to have to order from the forge directly (I have heard some good and some bad stories from others about this but will not comment further on specifics. I had a good experience ordering mine which I will go into more depth about on a further blog post) or through a re-seller in your country, most of the big forges seem to have this arrangement in most major countries and so if not specifically in yours could perhaps be an easier way of getting your weapon than going through the forge directly.
so all in all regarding cost Hema is not a cheap sport to get started in. but I have not outlayed for everything on my lists all at the same time, nor would I ever unless I had the money for it, and possibly not even then. so building up slowly and when you need/want certain parts of the kit you can keep it as affordable as possible within this framework.
the most important point I would say about equipment is this.
do not buy a single thing before you have to, most clubs (probably all clubs but I dont like to generalise) will have some form of club equipment you can borrow or use while you test out if Hema is for you and while you piece kit together a bit at a time.
I had to buy my jacket early because the club ones were too small for me and as such I needed one to spar. I bought the mask at the same time and the overlay as I sweat a lot and as such wanted my own kit that I could sweat in freely, the same with the groin protection. since then I have started the process of piecing together my own kit.
Also with the cost even of individual pieces, talk to club mates. read around. make sure the piece you are getting will cover you properly and do what you need it to do.
The scholarly side to Hema
the bit of hema that is perhaps a bit different to other Sports is that the purpose of Hema is to recreate the art of swordplay (whichever sword you are studying) from a historical document, a manual on how to use that weapon, or as it is commonly called a Treatise.
Each particular school of fencing has been taken from a treatise (with some exceptions but that is another topic for another post) and as such you get Italian style longsword and German style longsword for example from the treatises of Fiore de Liberi (Italian) and Meyer (German) for example (other treatise on the subject are available of course). Both are longsword but differ in style and teaching due to being from different countries with different conditions and traditions.
This is an aspect of Hema I actually really enjoy, I am fortunate that through my life and education I have had a historical leaning to my study and as such I am used to reading ancient or old text translations. As such I find reading a lot of these treatise on weapons fascinating at an intellectual level.
That being said what I am not good at and what I really wanted to stress is how hard interpreting these treatise into practical techniques is. It of course depends very much on the treatise you are reading as to just how easy it is to understand the information directly from the page into something you can use first hand.
I have found in the Manuals I own the british military sabre manuals are very easy to understand, most likely because they were written with simplicity in mind. they had to be learned in a short time by people who weren’t necessarily natural swordsmen, and as such are written clearly and simply. This is in stark contrast to my German longsword Manual, that if you try to read in a literal translated form it is exceedingly difficult to naturally understand what is being asked and the manoeuvres and techniques contained within it.
So why am I writing this section? and it isn’t because I want to show off that I enjoy reading historical fencing manuals. The point I am trying to make is that I am the exception not the rule. Certainly among beginners.
If you are starting out speak to your coaches/fellow students first before you try to decipher things yourself. this is in the same vein as what I said about equipment. Even if you do want to study a treatise yourself speak to your coaches if they have particular translations they like of the treatise your class is using, and then if there are any others that would compliment this. It is about re-enforcing your learning and not giving yourself too much information to take in. use the treatises to compliment the teaching of classes and teachers not to replace it.
in conclusion
Well in conclusion I have vomited a load more words onto a page for you lovely people to read. I hope you found some of it interesting or informative into the thinking of an unusual student of Hema, but also I hope that some of the “advice” above (for want of a better term) resonated with you into trying something new either by taking up Hema or thinking of something differently to make the most of your own Hema Journey.
if you have any questions specifically about any of the above drop me a question in the comments I will do my best to answer it, I will probably do a questions I had as a beginner post soon too to try and answer some of the things I wanted to know before I started, now that I know them because I have started.
Bye for now.
The Fat Hussar
The Fat Hussar 