Albion Cup? Baking inside a tennis hall this year with broken air conditioning.

Tewkesbury, one of the largest medieval battle re-enactments in the world? Excrutiatingly hot for multiple years in a row, with many combatants last year not even making it onto the field, and others spending the rest of their weekend in and out of the medical tent for heat exhaustion.

It’s not just a “Euro” problem. Raleigh Open, for instance, in my home town in NC struggles with heat each summer despite being hosted at an indoor sportsplex, with the outdoor temperature last year reaching 100F. That’s hot.

It’s not the organizers’ fault. They aren’t in control of global warming, and many of them truly do the best they can to accomodate their participants. And at each event, many participants manage the heat adequately.

The reality is that heat affects everyone differently. Some athletes can tolerate conditions that leave others struggling after only a few bouts, and that's not simply a matter of being "tougher." Fitness, acclimatization, hydration, protective equipment, medical conditions, and even genetics all play a role.

What isn't up for debate is the physiology. Heat places a very real strain on the body, and understanding that physiology can help you recognize the difference between a day that's merely uncomfortable and one that's genuinely unsafe.

Heat isn't just uncomfortable

One of the biggest misconceptions is thinking of heat as something that simply makes exercise feel harder. In reality, heat fundamentally changes your physiology.

Your muscles are surprisingly inefficient. Only about 20–25% of the energy they produce becomes movement. The remaining 75–80% becomes heat. On an average day, your body manages this remarkably well. Blood carries heat from your muscles toward your skin, sweat evaporates, and your core temperature remains tightly controlled.

Until it doesn’t.

Why fencing is uniquely challenging

In many sports, athletes can cool themselves naturally by wearing as few layers as possible. Unfortunately for fencers, we deliberately wrap ourselves in insulating layers specifically designed to not let things pass through them.

Each layer reduces your ability to lose heat. Plastic chest protector, plastron, gambeson or fencing jacket…or for our armored friends, even more.

And while all this is being worn, you’re repeatedly producing short bursts of maximal effort while carrying extra weight. Your cardiovascular system suddenly has two competing jobs:

• Deliver oxygen to working muscles.

• Prevent your body from overheating.

Eventually it can’t optimize both simultaneously. As your core temperature rises, several things happen simultaneously:

• Blood vessels close to the skin’s surface dilate to shed heat into the environment.

• Sweating increases, reducing plasma volume. With less circulating blood available, stroke volume falls. Your heart compensates by beating faster, a phenomenon known as cardiovascular drift.

• Even if you’re producing exactly the same workload (fencing at exactly the same intensity as usual), your heart rate continues climbing.

• Meanwhile, you're also relying more heavily on carbohydrate metabolism, accelerating glycogen depletion, meaning muscles fatigue faster.

• Lastly, rising core temperature has measureable downstream effects on reaction time, concentration, decision-making, motor coordination, and endurance…all things we rely on as fencers.

Heat exhaustion versus heat stroke

These terms often get thrown around interchangeably by non-medical people, but they are two very different conditions. In a nutshell, you can think of it on a spectrum:

It’s hot but i’m coping → Heat Exhaustion → Heat Stroke → Death

Heat Exhaustion: So hot you begin feeling nausea, weakness, headache, or other physical symptoms. You’re mentating normally but feeling awful. Treatment involves taking your gear off, drinking cool water, sitting down for awhile.

Heat Stroke: Core temperature >40°C (104°F) accompanied by evidence the brain is beginning to fail (confusion, disorientation, irritability, slurred speech). Sweating may actually stop as the body fails to regulate itself. Heat stroke is a medical emergency. The person should be cooled with ice packs or submerged in a cold tub if available while awaiting emergency personnel.

Practical Recommendations

Before the event

• Arrive hydrated rather than trying to catch up later.

• Acclimatize in advance by practicing or training in somewhat hotter conditions.

• Come prepared with drinks in a cooler with ice

• Utilize electrolyte-containing drinks for long events.

• Know where shade or cooling areas are located before competition starts.

• Bring a personal battery operated or manual fan

During the event

• Remove your mask whenever possible. If allowed, tilt it up and open when judges are talking between exchanges.

• Continue to drink fluids between bouts

• Open jackets completely between bouts.

• Sit in shade instead of standing in full kit.

• Monitor teammates, not just yourself.

• Bring extra dry clothing to change into as soon as your event is over
  

After the event

Continue cooling after the event rather than assuming you’re “done” once the final bout ends. Seek shade where possible and continue to drink beverages throughout the day.

The NSCA and sports nutrition guidelines recommend replacing approximately 125–150% of the fluid you’ve lost. In practice, that means about 1.25–1.5 L of fluid for every kilogram of body weight lost, ideally along with sodium to improve fluid retention. Ever craved a salty burger and fries after a competition day? That’s your body telling you it needs sodium!

When should I sit it out?

In many collegiate and professional sports, the decision to practice isn’t left up to the athletes, it’s determined by the coaches. Athletic trainers often monitor the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), a specialized measure that accounts for outdoor temperature, humidity, radiant heat from the sun, and even wind speed. Sporting organizations use the WBGT to decide if longer rest breaks, unrestricted access to fluids, modifications to protective equipment, shorter practices, or cancellation of outdoor activity altogether are needed. For instance, an outdoor temperature of 82F may not seem like sufficient heat to cancel an practice, but if humidity is high and wind speed is low, this increases the relative effect of the heat and can still make it dangerously hot to participate.

At the highest levels of sport, heat isn’t treated as a test of toughness. It’s treated as a performance and safety variable that must be managed.

For information on evaluating the WBGT in your area, see the links at the bottom of this article.

The second issue to consider: even if it is theoretically safe based on WBGT to be competing in the summer heat, only YOU ultimately know if you need to sit out of an event anyway.

If you:

• have experienced heat exhaustion in the past in similar circumstances

• have a medical condition that increases your risk

• are already dehydrated or underrecovered on the day of competition

then deciding not to compete isn’t weakness. It’s risk management.

Final Thoughts

One of the things I love most about historical martial arts is the culture of resilience. We celebrate perseverance. We admire grit. We willingly spend hours carrying rediculously overloaded gear bags, wearing 350N everything, and pushing ourselves through demanding training sessions until our arms feel like they’re falling off.

Those qualities are worth preserving. But resilience isn’t measured by how long you can ignore your body’s warning signs. Professional sports organizations don’t monitor heat, modify practices, and cancel sessions because their athletes lack toughness. They do it because they understand the physiology. Heat is another training stressor, which affects performance, recovery, and, at its worst, can become a life-threatening medical emergency.

As athletes, we should approach it the same way we approach any other risk: with preparation, knowledge, and good judgment.

Drink before you’re thirsty. Plan your cooling strategy before you arrive. Pay attention to your training partners as much as yourself. And if the conditions make the risks outweigh the benefits, don’t be afraid to make the call to sit one out.

There will be another tournament.

There will be another battlefield re-enactment.

There will be another chance to step onto the field and show your stuff.

The goal isn’t to prove you can survive one brutally hot weekend.

For further reading:

Wet Bulb Globe Temprerature: Check In the UK and in the USA

The NCAA, the U.S. military, and organizations like the NSCA, American College of Sports Medicine, and National Athletic Trainers' Association all publish heat illness guidance.

Additionally, specific sports organizations such as USA Soccer publish their own guidance. Unfortunately, because fencing is an “indoor sport”, USA and British Fencing do not have as helpful guidance for heat illness.

Once the immediate shell-shock wore off, questions roiled in my mind. I loved competing. It was a high I’d never experienced before despite my poor performance. After being knocked out of the tournament, I watched fencers who seemed better than me in every conceivable way duel it out for victory. I was enamoured.

That night I could barely sleep despite being physically exhausted. I was already thinking about the next tournament, if my parents would let me go, and how I could convince my fencing buddy to join me. But also the One Big Question arose I had no real answer to: how do I actually start winning matches?

Maybe I needed one good technique to spam like some of the more famous fencers I knew.

Maybe my reaction time was just too slow and I needed to start sparring faster fencers in practice who could push me harder.

Maybe there were some tactical secrets everyone else knew that I hadn't figured out yet.

Maybe I needed a better coach.

Looking back, I wasn’t asking bad questions. What I didn't appreciate so early on, however, was that becoming a successful competitor would ultimately never hinge on one specific thing. It would come from hundreds of small decisions made over years: the people I trained with, the tournaments I travelled to, how I looked after my body, and how long I was willing to stick with the process.

If I could sit down with that younger, springier (albeit slightly acne-prone) version of myself today, these are the five things I’d tell her:

1. Your first goal isn’t winning. It’s staying in the game long enough to get good. Tournaments don’t reward enthusiasm. They reward accumulated experience.

   If you want to be a “famous” fencer, your first goal should be staying healthy, motivated, and curious long enough to become the kind of athlete who eventually wins medals.

   I was in such a rush to “get good”, when honestly all I probably needed was more time. There are things that simply can't be learned without cumulative experience, and sometimes, trial-and-error: how to settle your nerves before your last elimination bout. How to adapt when your opponent fences nothing like your regular training partners. How to recover mentally after a loss and still show up ready for the next pools match. Those lessons only come from competing.

   It also means avoiding unnecessary injuries. This could mean pulling out of an event you’ve paid for because your tennis elbow still isn’t better, or saying “no” to just one more pass because you know injury risk is highest when you’re tired, and you’re starting to fence really sloppy. Some fencers never learn this, and are done 3-5 years after starting because too many injuries catch up with them.

   It also means accepting losses. Every great competitor has a list of losses behind them and events that didn’t pan out the way they wanted. The real courage is staying in the game long enough to push past plateaus and disappointments to reach your long-term goals.

2. The best fencers don’t always make the best coaches. I made the mistake after my first tournament of assuming I needed a better coach, so I subsequently to the best fencer I knew and asked them to coach me. Unfortunately, I learned being able to do something and being able to teach it are two different sets of skills. Not only did I immediately realize much of his success relied on his height and body proportions (100% not teachable), I’m honestly not sure he knew exactly what he was doing tactically and why it was so successful. My bad. Much time wasted and an awkward converasation as I begged my old coach to take me back.

   Great coaches notice things you don't. They ask the right questions. They know how to explain the same concept three different ways until it finally clicks. They understand why something works, not just that it works.

   Outside HEMA, some of the most influential coaches in history weren't the greatest competitors. Bill Belichick is one of the most successful coaches in NFL (American Football) history. As an athlete he played college football at a small school and never came close to making it to the NFL draft. Despite this, he’s widely regarded as one of the greatest tactical and developmental coaches ever. There are tons of similar examples in basketball, track an field, football/soccer, you name it.

   Find a coach who you can understand and who motivates you to succeed, regardless of how decorated they are.

3. Spend money on travel, not gear. Once you have a basic set of safe equipment that fits and is in good repair, you’re good to go. Instead of that third gold-handled SIGI sword, invest in travel and opportunities to train with other fencers and clubs. I admit I spent a lot of money on gear in my first few years of training, and ultimately I used only a small portion of it on a weekly basis.

   That $$$ would have been much better spent on some trips to the next county over where they took training seriously. Every new club you visit exposes blind spots in your fencing. Maybe your club loves long, patient fencing, and suddenly you’re faced with an opponent who explodes forward from a distance you thought was safe. Maybe you realize everyone at home leaves their outside line open, and you love spamming a zwerch to the ribs, only to realize that at most tournaments people just counter-attack to the head when you cut around to the torso. Ouch.

   Maybe you discover that something you thought was a strength is actually just a habit your regular partners have learned to accommodate. Every new opponent solves problems differently. The more fencers and ways of thinking about fencing you can expose yourself to, the quicker you’ll understand the limitations of your current fencing algorithm. Fencing in a bubble is really comfortable, but it just isn’t very educational. Although there’s nothing wrong with getting a backup feder for your backup feder, avoid developing bad habits and post-tournament disappointment by spending the time and effort to get out of your region regularly, or at least fence as many different places as you can.

4. Choose your training partners carefully. I’m not referring to intensity levels or safety standards here; instead, find fencers who share your goals. At the time of my tournament, I was training with a handful of very casual fencers who valued post-practice beer time more than their training. Your environment doesn’t determine your ceiling, but it has an enormous influence on how easy it is to reach it. If your goal is to surround yourself with friends and get exercise, spend your time at social fencing events where camraderie is emphasized over uber-competitive tactics. On the other hand, if deep down you truly aspire to win an international tournament, your associates need to reflect that desire. Neither path is superior, but frustration and burnout will arise when your personal expectations don’t match what’s actually happening in practice. Your environment quietly shapes your standards. If everyone around you wants to fence casually, you’ll struggle to ever reach an elite level without a significant investment in time and energy to travel regularly. It will, quite simply, be an uphill battle compared to people who are already fencing at high-intensity competitive clubs. Alternatively, if everyone around you treats every sparring session like the World Championships, you'll burn out if all you really wanted was to have fun with swords.

   And remember: There’s no “one way” to approach training, and it’s ok to change your mind. Priorities shift. Life happens. Just make sure your chosen training environment keeps up.

5. Become a better athlete. It took me years to step foot in a gym after I started fencing, and it was one of the biggest mistakes I made. Athleticism won’t solve every fencing problem, but it makes many fencing problems easier to solve. Stronger legs mean accelerating into and out of distance more effectively. Better conditioning means you still have the physical capacicty to make good tactical decisions in your eighth bout of the day, not just your first. Athleticism also makes it easier to pick up new moves, because you have the balance, neuromuscular coordination, and timing to “do the thing”. It allows you to maximize what you get from each fencing class, because you’re not tired 3/4 the way through and zoning out during instructional time. In sparring, it lets go for longer at a higher intensity. And afterwards, it lets you bounce back faster, getting you back to training at a higher level, sooner.

   No, you can’t change your height or your armspan, but you absolutely can become a stronger, faster, more resilient version of yourself with some dedicated time in the gym.

   In Closing:

   When I left that first tournament back in the 2000s, I had stars in my eyes and a million dreams to accomplish. All I wanted was the answer to, “how do I win matches?” I assumed I needed a better coach, better equipment, and better strategy. In reality, I needed time and experience (ok, and maybe also my strategy sucked). When the right time came, a stronger training environment. Better endurance and strength to last through those long training sessions. And, perhaps most importantly, enough patience to let all of those things compound over time.

   When I look back on my first few years of historical fencing, nothing made me dramatically better overnight. There was no breakthrough tournament where everything suddenly clicked. I didn’t wake up twice as strong one day. Improvements happened gradually, almost quietly, until one day I found myself winning bouts against people who, years earlier, had seemed completely untouchable.

   That’s one of my favorite things about fencing, both historical and modern.

   There are very few shortcuts.

   The people who stay curious, train consistently, look for the right kind of coaching environment, re-evaluate their training goals over time and take care of themselves have a remarkable way of becoming very good over time. Winning matches is the byproduct of these cumulative efforts.

   So if you’re early in your competitive journey, don’t worry too much about whether you’re winning yet. Forget where you'll finish at your next tournament. Stop chasing the next breakthrough. Start building the kind of athlete who keeps (gradually) getting better.

Instead of answering their question (my default answer is, “I don’t know, depends on what you’re bad at”), I often turn the question back around: what do YOU think is “The Best Exercise (TM)”?

The answers are remarkably consistent:

• Indian clubs

• Rotatational cable chops

• Heavy pell work

• Steel maces

• Weighted sword drills

Notice anything? Not once (literally ever) has anyone answered:

• Anything with a barbell

• A plyometric exercise

• Anything focused primarily on the lower body

Why?

Because when most people think about sport-specific training, they instinctively think the exercise should look like the sport. And fencing is waving a sword around, so… surely the best way to get better is to wave something around in the gym too?

It’s an intuitive way to think about training, but in fact, herein lies one of the biggest misconceptions about strength & conditioning. It’s also in part why so many fencers dismiss foundational exercises like squats, Olympic lifts, jumps, or heavy carries as being “not specific enough.” They don’t look like fencing.

HEMA certainly isn’t alone. Athletes in every sport have been a victim of this hyper-specifc mentality. And it’s not really their fault. The logic feels obvious, and social media has amplified it. The algorithm will happily show you endless footage of football players balancing on BOSU balls while catching balls, baseball players swinging weighted bats attached to resistance bands, or golfers standing on unstable surfaces performing increasingly elaborate cable exercises all in the name of sport specificity.

Most of these videos have one thing in common: they look impressive. But whether they're actually the most effective way to improve performance is a completely different question.

What does “sport-specific” actually mean?

The phrase sport-specific gets thrown around constantly, but it’s often misunderstood.

Dan Cleather wrote one of my favorite explanations almost twenty years ago, and it’s just as relevant today. He argues that specificity doesn’t mean every exercise should replicate your sport. Instead, training is specific if it develops a physical quality that contributes to success in your sport.

That’s an important distinction. Put another way, it doesn’t matter how the exercise looks. What matters is what characteristics it develops for the athlete.

That means a heavy squat can be specific. So can a power clean. So can plyometrics. So can anaerobic cardio intervals.

Trying to mimic a sword cut with a cable machine? Not necessarily. If it’s not meaningfully improving a quality that is limiting your fencing performance, it’s just a convincing imitation (although maybe kind of fun).

As Cleather puts it, if the best way to improve athletic performance was simply to mimic the sport in the gym, then strength and conditioning coaches wouldn’t exist at all…we’d all just spend more time practicing our sport (and if you’re reading this, you’ve already figured out why that doesn’t work).

The gym and the salle have different jobs

I like to think of it this way. The salle is where you learn to fence. The gym is where you become a better athlete.

Those are related goals, but they aren’t the same.

The salle teaches:

• timing

• distance

• tactics

• perception

• blade & bind work

• decision making

The gym develops:

• force production

• power

• robustness

• work capacity

• movement options

• resilience to injury

Trying to combine those two environments often means you do neither particularly well.

But Liz, HEMA is unique!

Absolutely.

Historical combat sports have unique movement patterns. Unique equipment (what other sport considers purple & yellow plunderhosen acceptable athletic attire?). Unique tactical demands. Unique injury patterns.

Where I think we go wrong is assuming that because our sport is unique, the principles of athletic development must also be unique.

They aren’t.

Olympic fencers have been arguing back and forth about this for years. Then a few years ago Turner and colleagues robustly compared épée, foil, and sabre fencers across measures including jump performance, reactive strength, change of direction speed, and repeat lunge ability. They also evaluated the work:rest ratios, bout duration, and actions of the different disciplines. Despite the obvious tactical differences between the weapons, and varying work:rest ratios, they found no meaningful differences in the underlying physical qualities required. Their conclusion was straightforward: strength and conditioning should be based on the athlete’s physical profile, not on the weapon they fence.

And yes, I know foil and epee arguably have more in common with each other than longsword & rapier, that’s not the point. The point is that even in a sport where athletes insist, "But my discipline is different!", the underlying principles of physical preparation remained remarkably consistent.

The physiological principles that help you become stronger, more explosive, and more durable do not.

Whether you compete with a feder, rapier, sidesword, or saber, your technical practice should absolutely reflect the demands of your discipline.

Your physical preparation should reflect the qualities that make better athletes.

Those are two different questions.

Don’t copy movements. Train qualities.

This is probably the biggest mindset shift I’d like historical martial artists to make.

Instead of asking: “Does this exercise look like fencing?”

Think about: “What quality is this exercise developing?”

A power clean doesn’t look anything like an advance-lunge. That doesn’t stop it from helping you develop explosive footwork.

A medicine ball throw doesn’t resemble a cut or zwerch. That doesn’t stop it from improving whole-body power.

A pull-up doesn’t resemble a parry. That doesn’t make upper-body strength irrelevant.

Exercises are tools. The goal isn’t to imitate your sport. The goal is to improve the physical qualities that allow you to perform your sport better.

That’s the difference between exercise-specific training and principle-driven training.

And it’s one of the biggest shifts you can make in your approach to performance.

The takeaway

Historical combat sports absolutely deserve sport-specific strength and conditioning.

Just maybe not in the way most people think.

The best programmes aren’t built around making every exercise resemble a sword fight. They’re built around applying the right training principles to the unique demands of our super cool sport.

That’s where sport science becomes truly useful.

Not because it tells us which exercise is “best.”

Because it teaches us how to identify the qualities a specific type of athlete actually needs to develop, and then choose the right tools for the job.

References:

Cleather, D. (2005). Strength and conditioning: What is specificity? Professional Strength & Conditioning, UK Strength and Conditioning Association

Turner, A. N., Bishop, C. J., Cree, J. A., Edwards, M. L., Chavda, S., Read, P. J., & Kirby, D. M. J. (2017). Do fencers require a weapon-specific approach to strength and conditioning training? Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 31(6), 1662–1668. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0000000000001637

Our equipment has improved. No, we still don’t have the perfect heavy glove - but we have much more flexible (and balanced) swords, back-of-the-head protectors that don’t feature “dead” spots prime for a strong blow, and you can actually get a fencing jacket with things like mesh panels that sort of assist with heat dissipation.

Our tournaments have improved. No, HEMA Scorecard isn’t perfect - but there’s a fairly tried-and-true system at this point for judging, scorekeeping, ring management, and the nuts and bolts of a fairly consistent tournament model.

Our coaching has improved. Yes, we still have issues with Safeguarding, making newcomers welcome, and lowering the financial burden of getting started with a new sport, but more and more coaches are aware of the need to, well, coach, and take it as seriously as the BJJ gym or soccer academy down the street.

But in one area, we’re still behind:

How we train our bodies.

Walk into almost any established HEMA club and you'll find passionate, dedicated fencers that show up every class, spar dutifully until their exhausted, and spend weeks before each tournament practicing the ruleset, considering strategy, and checking who will be there.

But when practice ends and fencers leave, many forget about the other 22 hours of the day. The path to excellence, they believe, is simply with more time.

Hoping additional hours will translate into better performance, some fence more and more until tennis elbow drops them out of training completely. Some hit the gym to do a bodybuilding split they saw on TikTok. Others create their own “crosstraining” routine via Orange Theory classes or BJJ. Then there’s a whole other group thinking that reaching the 1000lb club will somehow create HEMARatings glory.

Occasionally those approaches provide a boost. More often, they eventually leave athletes dealing with preventable overuse injuries, chronic soreness, and inconsistent performance.

It’s not that HEMA athletes aren’t training hard enough. Historical combat sports are still developing their own coaching culture and knowedge base. Compared with sports like Olympic fencing, wrestling, rugby, or judo, we simply don’t have decades of established strength and conditioning practice to draw from.

The good news? We don’t have to start from scratch.

The principles that help athletes become stronger, faster, more resilient, and better prepared for competition don't belong to any one sport. Progressive overload. Power development. Fatigue management. Recovery. Motor learning. Injury prevention. These concepts have been studied for decades across countless athletic populations, from ballet dancers to olympic weightlifters.

The challenge isn’t copying another sport’s exercises and training splits. It’s understanding the principles behind the training, and adapting it to the unique physical demands of historical combat sports.

We’re not quite sport fencing. We’re not quite wrestling or judo.

And that’s exactly what this newsletter is about.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore questions like:

• Do historical combat athletes really need “sport-specific” exercises?

• How much strength is enough?

• Why does everyone seem obsessed with mobility?

• Are weighted weapons, maces, and clubs useful or hype?

• What actually makes someone more explosive?

• How should you train around tournaments?

• Which recovery methods are worth your time, and which are just expensive placebo?

Some articles will dive into the science. Others will be practical coaching guides you can take to the salle or gym. Occasionally, I’ll challenge ideas that have become ingrained in many HEMA clubs simply because “it’s what people are comfortable with.”

My promise is simple:

Everything I write will be grounded in the best evidence available, filtered through my experience as a sports medicine doc, strength coach, and active competitor in historical combat sports. If the evidence changes, my recommendations will change too.

Because the goal isn’t to be right. It’s to help you become a stronger, healthier, more resilient athlete.

If that sounds like something worth pursuing, I’d love to have you along for the journey.

Welcome to Sprezzatura Sport Performance.

Let’s train with purpose, build resilience, and perform with confidence.