I attended a class with Portland Swordguild, a group that studies HEMA. The head instructor, Jason, gave me a 15 minute orientation on the basics (four guard positions, some offensive defense perspective, some attack lines) and did a little bit of saber-like stick fighting (some kind of bamboo or rattan like stick, approximately a yard in length, with a leather cup hand guard at one end, with us wearing fencing masks, and sports protective gloves and elbows). The standard class format is to start with a 15 minutes study session focusing on a single technique, then break off into sparring pairs to for the remainder of the time, learning by doing and having the more experienced critiquing the less experienced as they spar. I think they have some good concepts and ideas that have been pulled from the historical texts, but this is the same style of learning I have observed in some previous groups (particularly the couple SCA groups I've visited) and I feel it is not beneficial for beginners. However, as I am not a beginner with the sword and martial arts in general, I may return myself at least on occasion if they are open to me using a better helmet (I despise fencing masks) and to me possibly questioning things they wouldn't normally question.
\nAdditionally, Jason suggested that Indes may be a better fit if I'm looking for more structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I attended a class with Portland Swordguild, a group that studies HEMA. The head instructor, Jason, gave me a 15 minute orientation on the basics (four guard positions, some offensive defense perspective, some attack lines) and did a little bit of saber-like stick fighting (some kind of bamboo or rattan like stick, approximately a yard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,33],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hema","tag-sword"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/swordfighter.org\/trainingjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}