When people talk about the sportification of HEMA, they are usually talking about how people fight in tournaments. They rarely talk about cutting, but sportification can creep in to that as well. I continually take steps within my own school and the tournaments I manage to encourage real martial application in cutting, and I will be making further changes to the Longpoint tournament this year to continue aligning competitors towards that goal.

When I set out to bring cutting to US HEMA, the biggest obstacle I had to overcome was convincing people that cutting was relevant to historical European fencing. The second biggest obstacle was making cutting something that people actually wanted to do. My priority was to get people doing it and then worry about the details later. As part of that plan, the cutting tournament at Longpoint is constantly evolving to address the problems I see cropping up in the community. Thus, the tournament in 2016 will be designed to bring an enhanced awareness of how cutting tatami translates to what would have been effective cutting technique in the middle ages. Also, it will attempt to weed out sport cutters.

Sportification in cutting is simple to understand if you know the purpose of cutting practice and how it applies to the art of fencing. For those who don't, I'll provide a simple explanation. Sport cutting is focusing on the medium in the competitions, tatami, rather than on using that medium to demonstrate effective martial cutting technique, just like sport fencing is focusing on training to use a feder or blunt to fence in protective gear, rather than to use a historical weapon in a historical context. For example, consider the stacked tatami feat in the Longpoint 2014 and 2015 cutting tournament finals, where double rolled mats were stacked on top of each other. Competitors had to strike down into the mats and maintain a straight trajectory, with the object of severing as many mats as possible without allowing the sword to turn. This demonstrates your ability to not only deliver sufficient power and velocity to cut deeply into a dense object, but your ability to maintain that power, along with an even grip and proper structure throughout the cutting arc (this is called follow-through). If you've seen the livestream for either of those years, you saw how much mental preparation was required by every competitor and, most importantly, how people who were effortlessly cutting through single standing tatami mats and making it look easy faltered when faced with this challenge (particularly in 2015 when no one did well).

What do you think is closer to a clothed human body? A single tatami mat, or the stacked mats feat? And even then, do you think a double rolled tatami mat (which is what the stack consisted of) is nearly as thick or as dense as a human torso? And why did people who are so good at single mats falter so badly when faced with a more realistic challenge?

The trend in cutting tournaments has been to add fancier and more difficult cuts using single tatami mats. On the West Coast, they focus on random patterns signaled to the competitor with semaphores. On the East Coast, the trend has been to follow along with Longpoint, but to skip the more complicated multi-mat feats. The problem with this trend is that focusing on increasing difficulty using a single mat creates a training focus on cutting single tatami mats, and single tatami mats are not representative of any portion of a historical cutting target (a clothed human being).