Passing Through the Longpoint

Everything comes down to something, I suppose. And in this case, it all comes down to physical conditioning. That’s my longpoint. Everything passes through it.

The end of the point, then, the very tip, is that if someone is at one end of the conditioning continuum but you train them as if they’re at the other end, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Their failure. Or if it’s you, your failure.

So please, don’t do it.

We can predict where those failures will be. We really can have a reasonably accurate idea of it. That’s why we do risk stratifications in my industry. That’s why we use the Australian industry standard risk stratification in GLECA at the start of each year. The thing that’s not as predictable is when the injuries will occur. But that’s okay because we can implement management and conditioning strategies designed to protect against their occurrence regardless of the probability of a hazard occurring.

The Three Areas of Risk

In every fight or training lesson, then, I can generalise the primary areas of risk into one of three categories. The wonderful thing about this is that most of the risks associated with these categories can be significantly reduced (and maybe even eradicated) through an appropriately progressed physical conditioning program that is actually quite simple to incorporate into the weekly training schedule. These articles aren’t designed to give you that program or one like it. They are designed to highlight the areas of risk and how they are impacted through lack of conditioning — and how they lead to injury in the training and competition space. I desperately hope that people will read this material and realise a need to change the way we do things — from the ground up.

Below are the three areas of risk as I see them.

1. Tissue Load

This has to do with the various forces that tissues in the body are placed under. Some examples are friction, tensile force, compressive force, shearing force and torsional force. Then there are the different tissues at play, all of which have different properties. They may be elastic, inelastic, lubricative, excitable, resistant to great compressive forces, able to generate great tensile forces, able to withstand forces through one plane but not another. The ill-conditioned fighter who puts the tissues through too much of these over time is likely to experience some kind of fatigue which can lead to injury of their own body or injury of someone else’s because they can no longer control the tissues well, for a time. And let’s face it, it only takes “a time” for someone to get hurt.

2. Neurological Fatigue

This one is huge, underrated and misunderstood. Learning new material, physically training, feeling emotions, relating to strangers, thinking and making decisions all tax your nervous system’s reserves. Heat, being tired, hungry and dehydrated all do the same. That’s a terrible thing to have happen in something so complex and important as swordplay because the only thing that is managing your body is your nervous system. The only thing. I’ll say it again, but bigger.

The only thing managing your body is your nervous system.

If your nervous system is fatigued and you’re in the middle of the fight, if the thing that has control over your judgment of distance, speed and your control of the movements of your weapons, if that thing is fatigued, is unable to function at its optimum, then we find ourselves in a most unfortunate — and preventable — state. You can’t control your blade — even though you think you can — you aren’t making good decision — even though you think you are — and you are putting yourself and your opponent in danger of being harmed. Do you have a plan to avoid that scenario??

The physically conditioned fighter is one that has trained to develop a higher fatigue threshold and has trained to sustain higher training and combat loads without as much compromise in their control or judgment. It’s a slow process of conditioning and must be done in very small, stepwise progressions.

3. Cardiovascular Fitness

This one seems like a no-brainer, so it’s intriguing that so many people think it has no place in what we do. “Go for a run on your own time,” they say. Well, forgive me, but running is extremely different to fighting, and that’s what this is all about, the specificity of your training.

There is firstly a very real risk of sudden heart event. By this, I mean onset of atrial fibrillation or perhaps heart failure. A sword fight is the perfect place for something like this to happen — a person’s heart is working hard, it’s a highly competitive, slightly dangerous environment where anxiety may be increased and the fighter is dressed in multiple thick layers of clothing. They are likely to be overheated and dehydrated. The heart is working hard and, well, let’s just say that this is the perfect place for an unconditioned body full of cardiac risk factors to experience not just risk, but reality. It’s no different to having people start doing high intensity gym programs after years of inactivity. And like people going to a gym or personal trainer, the risk can be screened and managed very safely.

Or what about taking and using oxygen? If you can’t take the oxygen in, or if your muscles can’t use it efficiently, your tissues get fatigued quicker and you can physically no longer control the muscles well. They are physically incapable of activating properly. It’s impossible. It’s both physics and chemistry and it’s immutable. That’s a big word for, “argue with me and you will look like a fool”. Blunt. A little offensive. But seriously, this stuff has been around for about 100 years. There’s enough science behind it to fuel a trip to the moon. Well, I don’t know about that last bit. But you get my drift.

Increase your fitness for the fight and you’ll increase your chances of success. Not only that, you decrease the chances of you being incapable of sustaining control of your weapon — it’s not just your safety, it’s your opponent’s we’re talking about. And then there’s the problem of lack of oxygen to the brain and how it impairs judgment. And then there’s the problem of hyperventilating to get enough air in, leading to increased CO2 levels, leading to increased anxiety, leading to poor judgment and on it goes. This is no fairytale, peoples, this is real life.

By improving your cardiovascular fitness appropriately, you can significantly improve your performance in the fight and significantly decrease the risk of harming yourself self and others. Seriously, what’s not to be happy about?