Quotes from Guy Windsor

Every martial art, from T'ai Chi Chuan to the nuclear deterrent, is based on a doctrine—an idea of how combat works.

Any position you find yourself in can be considered a guard if you understand its tactical and technical properties. Slavishly copying a position from the treatise is useless unless you have some idea of what the position is for, what openings it leaves and what strengths it possesses.

As a general rule, like counters like. So you can try counterattacking with roverso fendente against roverso fendente, and so forth.

To work on a movement you need: A clear picture or feeling of how it is now A clear picture or feeling of how it should be A real-time feedback mechanism for identifying the difference. And

Four aspects of any action: time, measure, structure, flow p.

It is of course also possible that the attacker is deliberately feinting to draw the parry to bind it, and will strike on the same side if he manages to open the line, or on the other side if not. Feints

The rules of feinting are pretty simple: you must create a credible threat. As your opponent responds, your strike should take less time than his second parry. Your end position should also close the line of his riposte. He may not notice that his parry has failed, and may hit you as you hit him. That he has made a mistake doesn't make his blow any less effective. In

A properly constructed warm-up involves three things: loosening the joints, warming the body, and light stretching. Ideally it will also activate core stabiliser muscles, increase strength, and increase both aerobic and anaerobic endurance.

when entering into measure to strike, there should be a clear threat made.

No one ever throws a perfect blow in the exact line it is supposed to be in—but by having a set of lines with which to classify blows, we can improve our own efforts, and respond more effectively to our opponent's. Fencing principles help us draw general conclusions from a basically chaotic situation.

The optimal mental state for training in is called "the flow state", most famously defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his 1988 book Flow. Buy it, read it, you won't regret it. This book made me realise that the thing I was really trying to teach most of my students was how to develop an autotelic personality, which means a person who is able to set their own goals.