Today’s special guest is Guy Windsor. We are chatting about his self-help martial arts book, The Windsor Method: The Principles of Solo Training.
Bio:
Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi’s Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.
Welcome, Guy. Please tell us about your current release.
The Windsor Method: The Principles of Solo Training lays out my philosophy of how to approach improvement in any field, based on my experience as a historical martial arts instructor. I envision training as a tree: your mental health is the roots of the tree. Physical health and fitness is the trunk. Your specific skills are the branches, and (for martial artists) pair drills form the leaves. Actual fighting skill is the fruit.
But it all rests on your mental health, so we start with that. The book includes advice on eating and sleeping, meditation, breathing exercises, conditioning, footwork, and striking practice.
What inspired you to write this book?
All serious artists in any field practice a lot. Most of that practice is done alone. However, in martial arts, it’s easy to get hooked by the pair drills and overlook your solo training, just as a young musician might only want to play guitar with their band, and not spend time alone on fingering exercises and playing scales.
In 2019 I created an online course to teach my students how to usefully train alone, and then in 2020 the plague kept everyone home for months at a time. Suddenly solo training became much more obviously important! So I dropped the price of the course by 95% (and gave it away free to anyone who asked), to help my sword folk stay mentally healthy while stuck at home.
Not everyone learns best from an online course, so I started thinking about what aspects of solo training are best taught through a book. Then, my student Wout contacted me for some advice…
Excerpt from The Windsor Method: The Principles of Solo Training:
For reasons unconnected with training or the pandemic, his right lung had collapsed. The doctors re-inflated it, but he was strictly banned from exercise for six weeks. He used some of my breathing training to help him cope with pain in the hospital, which the doctors encouraged him to continue. But other than that, what should he do? What kind of training is possible when all you’re allowed to do is sit around the house? I suggested meditation. If you can’t move at all, you can still build your ability to focus, expand your inner horizons, and improve your state of mind.
If you are able to moderate your breath, you can practise breathing more efficiently. Breath is the only unconscious process that is easily made conscious. It acts as a bridge between your will and your automatic responses, allowing you some control over stress and your level of neurological and hormonal stimulation. Some breathing exercises require movement, but many don’t. We can adapt those that do; one of my students has his elderly mother doing variations on my breathing exercises while sitting in a chair. I’m told she loves them!
If you can move your body and have a little bit of space to move in, you can work on strength, range of motion, and cardiovascular fitness. You can also look after your joints. This is why you’ll find me at the back of the plane on long-haul flights doing squats, push-ups, and stretches. Yes, I get funny looks, but one advantage of being a professional swordsman in the 21st century is that nobody reasonably expects me to behave like a normal person.
Add a stick and a bit more space (neither of which are usually available on aeroplanes) and you can practice footwork, and putting your sword where you want it to go. Point control, cutting practice, power generation, and most sword handling drills just need a stick of the right length. Sure, it’s more fun to use a proper sword, but this way you get to work your imagination too, which allows you to practise your control of measure and timing against your imaginary training partners. Imaginary partners have many limitations but they have two huge advantages over real ones: they are always available, and you don’t have to worry about their safety.
Add a sword or other bladed weapon and you can train a broader range of handling drills; if you’re using sharps, you can do actual cutting practice, slicing through targets to improve your edge alignment.
With one real-life training partner, you can practise all the techniques and pair drills. Add some protective equipment and you can practise coaching drills, do free-fencing, and — most importantly — get pushed a little outside your comfort zone, without having to do the pushing yourself.
With multiple real-life training partners, you can experience a broader range of responses to the stimuli you provide. You may find that not everyone falls for your best moves, the ones that always worked when you just had one other person to practise with.
With an instructor, you get a more carefully constructed training environment, one that is designed to keep you practising in that sweet spot between “it’s too hard, it’s frustrating”, and “it’s too easy, it’s boring”. If the instructor is doing their job properly you will grow apace in the Art.
But sooner or later you will come across a limitation in yourself that requires something other than pair practice. Maybe your sword isn’t going quite where you want it to, and you need to practise point control in a simpler environment for a while. Perhaps your hamstrings are too short for you to lunge fully so you need to work on your range of motion. Or maybe you get stressed and flustered in competitive environments, and need to learn ways to calm down and mentally prepare. A very common problem that even high-level competitors experience is that their mental approach is not up to the task. Most of the best do some form of meditation to deal with that.
The tools of solo training are clearly essential for all martial artists, regardless of whether they have access to coaches, training partners, and opponents. Often the best solution to a training problem is one from your solo training repertoire. In this book we will cover the principles of solo training, from meditation through to sword practice. If you practise an unarmed art, or a differently armed art, then these principles apply there too. I have organised this book in the order of constraints, starting with what you can do when all you have is your mind, and progressing from there. I have tried to avoid describing specific exercises, because they tend to be applicable to only some people, and some arts, and the goal of this book is to be useful to all martial artists. If you want specifics, you can find a list of resources, including other books and online courses, at the back of this book.
And I’m happy to report that Wout has recovered from his collapsed lung, is fighting fit, training with me regularly, and is still meditating. It’s impossible to measure exactly how it contributed to his recovery, but at the very least it gave him a sense of agency at a very difficult time.
What exciting story are you working on next?
My next book has the working title The Heart of Teaching, about how I approach teaching martial arts, and by extension, how I approach life in general. In short, people are natural learning machines; the trick is to create an environment in which the things they want to learn come naturally, like a baby learning to walk. The combination of people around her showing the baby that walking is a thing, and gravity giving perfect real-time practical feedback on how she is walking when she gets up and tries, and the beaming encouragement from the people around her every time she takes a step, is enough. So, set the example, create the feedback mechanism, and give encouragement.
The book is that idea, expanded on in depth and detail.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
About the time that my fifth book (Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists) was coming out, I had to put ‘occupation’ into a survey form. The real answer would have taken too long, and it wouldn’t have fitted into the available space. So I put down “writer” on a whim, and then realised it was true.
I now have about a dozen books out, but I still don’t think of myself as a writer. Writing books is just another way to organise my thoughts, direct my research, teach my students, and to reach people who can’t make it to my classes. I never set out to “be a writer”, which means I don’t have to contend with imposter syndrome in this regard.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
My books bring in about half my annual income, but I don’t do any one thing full time. In no particular order, my day job includes teaching live classes (which normally involves travel), doing research, writing books, writing blog posts, creating online courses, doing my own training, running the business side of things, interviewing people for my podcast, as well as generally having a life. But at any given time, I usually have one major book in the first draft stage, another nearing completion, and one or two more that are at the “I’ve had an idea and jotted down some notes” stage. When one or other of them start an itch in the back of my mind that won’t go away until I give it some attention, I write.
I’m not a planner in any sense. I don’t usually wake up knowing what I’m going to spend time on that day, I just follow my instinct. Sometimes the book-to-be will wake me up at 5am and I get up and write; other times I might spend most of my working time doing physical training or woodwork. I trust my intuition to let me know when to write, and it seems to work for me- I produce on average one proper book a year, and one major online course a year, as well as several smaller projects.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I do a lot of productive procrastination. For instance, when I was stuck writing my The Medieval Longsword, I thought I’d better build a proper writing desk. It took about three weeks, and turned out quite nicely. And while I was making it, the block shifted and the book came flooding out. I’m also a big fan of moving one major project forwards by one concrete step every day. On difficult days, that might be just send an email to my cover designer asking for a quote, or write one rubbish paragraph. On an easy day that might be edit five chapters or produce 3,000 words of decent first draft. Sometimes, that one rubbish paragraph gets the juices flowing and a thousand decent words come out. But if not it doesn’t matter, so long as the project moves forward by that one step.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I couldn’t decide between being a ninja, a Jedi, or Conan the Barbarian. Then adulthood hit and I decided to be a cabinet maker, but after four years of doing that full-time, switched to teaching historical swordsmanship, which suits me much better, as it’s basically being part ninja, part Jedi, and part Conan!
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
An awful lot of kids love swords, and it’s a pity that so many people feel they have to grow out of it. If you have an inner five-year old leaping about on the sofa swinging a light saber, then perhaps you should seek out your nearest historical martial arts club and have a go at the grown-up version!