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Something I often see in HEMA is the idea that ‘technical practice’ can be done with no or minimal gear. Partner exercises for ‘form’ or ‘technique’ in many clubs are done with just masks, or masks and gloves, or even no equipment other than a sword. This is often pretty safe, as long as all participants have reasonable control over their weapon and actions. But it does still lead to some issues, even if there’s no actual injuries caused. I think that this habit is often a factor in complaints we see about how technique seems not to be reflected in sparring.

The key problem with minimal gear drills is transferability. No drills are like fencing - and good drills don’t have to be like fencing - but it’s important that the skills learned in that drill can be easily and effectively transferred to actual fencing. When using minimal/no gear for drilling, there are a number of factors which limit the transferability of the exercise. Since many of these are required for safety, it’s hard to fix them with better drill design - but it’s easy to address most of these simply by drilling with gear.

The first is intent to touch. When my training partner is not wearing gear, I can’t actually touch them with my action. When they’re wearing limited gear, I can touch them - but I have to ensure I don’t miss in any way (we’ll come back to this later). Both of these mean that I’m not concentrating on delivering my touch to the best of my ability - instead I’m practicing not touching, or practicing staying slower than I can to avoid any chance of a mistake. This makes it difficult for me to learn the actual feeling of making my touch, or the commitment required to attack effectively. It also applies to the incoming cues my partner is giving me: the attack they make which I parry/riposte will not actually be an attack that’s going to hit me. I might learn the movement pattern, but the underlying intent in both parties actions is almost certainly going to be missing.

One specific way in which this manifests is distance. Understanding and controlling distance are critical factors in the success of any fencing action, but when drilling with minimal gear, the distance is normally increased for safety. This means participants are learning to associate a particular action with an incorrect distance situation, harming their ability to effectively use it in real fencing. If they try to perform the action in fencing at the distance they’ve practiced it, their opponent is likely to be able to make it fail. So they need to learn to re-adjust it on the fly when fencing, increasing the difficulty of using the action effectively. As a concrete example: say we are practicing a parry/riposte against a thrust. Since we aren’t wearing fencing jackets, my opponent thrusts from slightly wider distance, so that if I miss the parry they will fall just slightly short. I make my nice crisp parry, and riposte with my own thrust - also falling a fraction short. When I try to use this in fencing, I parry at a wider distance than is ideal and my opponent can now likely touch with a disengage. Even when my parry connects and I riposte, the distance is probably a little wide and I’ll fall short or be counter-parried.

Another pair are structure and targeting. In order to shorten the distance without injuring training partners, we see actions like cutting with bent arms, changing the angle of the sword with the hand, shortening the arms in the thrust, slipping away from the target at the last moment, etc. All of these have obvious impacts on what the action will achieve. If my training partner is feeding me weakly structured cuts, I might learn to parry in ways that resist this - but won’t hold up against a properly structured cut that I find from an opponent in sparring. If I learn to change the angle of my thrusts at the last moment to make sure they miss the target for safety reasons, then that is likely to reflect when I try to use the same technique under more pressure.

The common thread here is feedback. A good drill needs to quickly give clear feedback about the success or failure of the student’s actions. The safety requirements of minimal gear technical drills make it much harder for them to give this feedback to the participants - and make it much harder to interpret the feedback which is received. If my counter-cut isn’t strong enough to displace their blade properly, was the problem in the action I made, or was it that I’d deliberately weakened the structure to avoid injuring my partner? If my partner’s thrust falls short, did I evade it successfully, or was their attack intrinsically launched at the wrong distance to avoid hurting me? Successful repetitions are in some ways even worse here, because we are learning that an incorrect execution of the action leads to a successful result. A riposte from out of distance should be punished by a counter-parry, but now it’s allowed to be successful. An attempted counter-cut with bent arms should fail to displace the blade, but the helpful training partner lets their sword be knocked aside because it’s the ‘correct’ way to do it for safety here.

There’s another major aspect to discuss as well: minimal gear exercises are far less accepting of mistakes. Making mistakes is really important in training - it’s how we really learn what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t important to the execution of a technique, etc. When the risk of mistakes is much higher, it’s hard to ‘push the envelope’ and stress test one’s decisions and execution. If I can only thrust into a specific small target area, then I have to slow down the pace of my riposte to make sure it lands there - and my training partner will in turn have to deliberately allow this slow riposte to land successfully. By wearing gear, I can push the speed of my execution while trying to keep the same precision - I will fail at this at first, which is why the equipment is necessary, but I can only learn that precision at speed by training it at speed.

To be clear, none of this means you have to do technical drills by smashing each other at full force. Controlling the intensity and pace of actions is very useful for longer term training - it allows more practice, with less injuries, and more conscious thought about the action. But doing technical drilling in gear allows for correct distance and structure to be safely used, it allows for intent to touch on the part of the participants, lets mistakes be made safely and gives much better feedback about correct or incorrect execution. Using relatively full gear makes it far easier to train techniques in a way that translates to using them under pressure - whether that’s in free fencing, or in ‘real fighting’, or whatever purpose you are training students for.

I welcome questions, comments or feedback on this article. You can reach me by email:

tea at fechtlehre dot org