We started practicing Meyers longsword transitions in our club.
Looking forward in sharing ideas

Great idea and I would like to join, but I can’t seem to register.
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greetz
Krist

So to practice something like this, you could start without a sword. but keep your hands out in front of you. Make exaggerated steps, and lean deeply with your body offline. This is a great workout too. It works the right muscles. Maybe step first with the right foot deep to the opponents’ left side, and then quickly spring with your left foot pointed at the opponent around to his right, and quickly swinging your right leg behind your left. Your body should ideally remain facing the opponent. So you gotta turn your hips, this is helped by keeping your lead foot open. if you keep practicing this, it will make you quicker. And quicker is better. Also you can add an abzug strike after you have first stepped to your right, then around to your left with the triangle step, you can immediately step backwards, behind your right foot with a full step of the left foot and reverse the process, by turning your right foot open to the opponent and again turning your hips. You end up where you began, and are free to do it again! Practice this without a Sword frequently, and then try it with the Sword. Also reverse it, by starting to the left instead.
Lots of fun. and remember to lean your head and shoulders and try to stay behind your sword. Meyer advised this several times. So it is a prime example of Body mechanics that often affect the Cutting, thrusting and parrying mechanics. Body mechanics are useless though without advantageous stepping. Not only is it the stepping, but the foot placement that affects the body positioning. And lest we forget the most important thing is the feet take us in and out of measure. Footwork and Body mechanics are a great topic for continuous discussion, i think.

It’s worth clarifying that “free-play” can often encapsulate a wide variety of activities. I have seen huge benefit from focused sparring of the kind that is popular in boxing training. Agent attempts to strike Patient with his choice of techniques X,Y, or Z while Patient defends with his choice of techniques A,B, or C- this activity could be called “Free Play” at its higher permutations. “Free Play” with senior students can often approximate this dynamic and closely supervised play between serious-minded beginners can approach this form as well. I have also seen a lot of “bumfights with swords.”

I’d also like to add the caveat that these assumptions are highly sensitive to the end goal you are trying to achieve. If the goal is produce fighters who can win bouts under [insert ruleset here], then early free play might be a great training approach (to paraphrase the entirety of the Bullshido Forum: “if you want to train to be a street-fighter, go pick a lot of fights in bars”). If the goal is to produce martial artists who can smoothly and precisely perform the treatise-derived techniques at speed, then free play is probably not the best use of a marginal training hour at the experience level we’re talking about. Most of us are shooting for some middle ground on that continuum, so it’s understandable if we come up with slightly different answers to this question.

One more caveat- we’re largely arguing about the best use of a marginal hour of training. Given an infinite amount of training time, virtually any sword-related activity has some kind of potential benefit. When I say “I am skeptical of early free play,” I only mean that I can think of uses of that training time that give better results at the margin.

Last thing: free play is fun. HEMA is recreation. A well-run class in 2012 should make more concessions to fun-but-less-useful activities than a well-run class in 1412. If I’d had stricter exercise in my early training, I might have better technique, but I’d have had less fun along the way.

Essentially, back then in the day where they trained for 4-8 hours a day, within the first week of attendance in a fencing school.

Bro. Chris