Solo Training & Spear Length

Hello sword people and military history enthusiasts.

I am currently doing the paperwork for the upcoming Hedeby Bouts, one of the free training events I have been organising for years now. It is my greatest pleasure to meet like-minded martial artists for a few days of sparring and historical combat experimentation.

However, more often than not you will find yourself without a training partner. That’s when having a good workout routine, and well-designed solo drills is a great asset. The upcoming I.33 online course will contain dozens of solo forms. It will be available by the end of September, so start saving your pennies!

In the endeavour to reconstruct early medieval “shield wall” fighting, I started looking into surviving spears again, preserved shafts in particular. I shared a respective image I had created which is making the rounds on facebook. I have included it below as I know that some of you avoid social media.

Hope you like it.

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The Merits of Solo Training

At a certain point, actual fencing is one of the best ways to improve your skill set. It is also the most fun, I am inclined to say. But I also like pair drills which give me the chance to respond to my partner's actions, sense pressure, judge measure and timing. However, I very much enjoy my solo training, too. That’s when I can focus on myself in a way that is not possible with a partner. I can take as much time to go through a specific action as I need. This helps to spot and address flaws in posture and mechanics. I can also subdivide a given technique into smaller segments, and do as many reps as I please.

One thing that is particularly important to bear in mind is that a solo form without context is but a meaningless choreography. We have to carefully avoid to create inappropriate automatisms. One of Guy Windsor’s favourite anecdotes is about an officer who trained a self-defense disarm over and over. After each repetition, he would hand the training gun back to his partner. So when he eventually ended up in a real life situation, he did disarm the attacker – yet handed the gun back to him. It had been part of his routine, and now it was ingrained in his body!

So be mindful about the context as you train a motion pattern, and break the chain of connected moves by purposefully pausing, practicing at different paces with varying subdivisions, and extending or ending the drill in different ways. I also take occasional breaks, going through a technique and its context in my mind before continuing the physical practice. I guess this is easier an exercise for historical martial artists, as interpreting manuscripts requires a similar approach at times.

Exactly how you do your solo forms is up to you and your needs, and consciously considering them is a great start to get the best out of it.

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Length of Viking Age Spears

This topic is crucial to seriously explore early medieval formation fighting. My friend and fellow swordsman Alexander Martzok has previously compiled all available data, and kindly shared it in a video on his YT channel.

In addition to some partially preserved spear shafts from the period, there are five specimens that I am aware of that have survived the ages in their entirety. You can see reconstructions of three of them in the image above. I plan on expanding the comp, and adding the 2.13 m spear from Lake Lednica, Poland, and a 3.70 m one from the Oerenburg in Lower Saxony, Germany.

See my complete image at a higher resolution, plus many period depictions of spears in my respective post.

Go to image & post

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So, that's it for today. Take care, and keep your blade well-honed, and a spear within reach.

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Yours,

Roland

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