firstborne said:
Since we seem to have at least one other swordsman here, I was curious as to how any of you learned how to fight; there aren't many formal schools for western martial arts, so I'm pretty much self-taught via lots of trial and error interspersed with a bit of manual study. My question is this: In this day and age, how prevelant are swordsman, amateur or not?
I started with modern sport fencing. Before anyone goes off on me about how it's not "real" swordfighting, there are certain principles that remain the same.
1. You want to hit your opponent with the dangerous part of your weapon.
2. You want to prevent the dangerous part of your opponent's weapon from hitting you.
Sport fencing provides endurance, foot speed, reflexes, and the ability to read body language. Those little pieces of wire move WAY too fast for the average fencer to track so you learn to rely on other cues.
From the SCA, I learned to use both hands (and to fence left handed), to break out of linear movement (although I already had that with TKD training), and one very important concept:
Dead is dead. It doesn't matter if you kill your opponent if you die in the process.
From my fencing buddies, some of whom are involved in some more historically accurate WMA stuff (the Chicago Swordplay Guild), I learn to adapt what I know from my TKD and hapkido classes and what I know from sport and SCA fencing to an even more kill and don't die oriented system.
It's a lot of practice, mainly - learning to adapt what I already know to a variety of situations and incorporating things I pick up along the way.