What about mutual hits?

[Andrey Lileyev]

Sometimes while sparing opponents hit each other at the same time or in short time one after other. There are two general ideas about this cases:
a) To count that both are hit
b) Anulate the result and not to count these hits at all

I tend to hold the second opinion. A fencer must use not to let his opponent strike him even mutualy. But the first is more realictic. Although it gives a chamce to cheat when sparing. You win one or two hits and farther you bring your opponent to loss simply leting him to strike you while you strike him.

It is interesting to hear as much opinions as possible. What is your common practice on this subject?

[Mark Horobin]

It would be dependant on what sort of results you are aiming for being demonstrated by the combatants, technical skill, speed, physical fitness, 'survivability' or a specific combination of these.

I am fairly sure that in sport fencing there is a machine which stops the bout by registering the first hit as soon as one occurs and stops the second hit from being recorded. This reduces the incidence of double hits for wins or losses being calculated.

In staged combat or sparring that I have experienced if you get hit you lose, regardless of if you both hit at the same time. This promotes a more active defense because you can't afford to let someone past your guard.

As an exercise you can try dueling til 'first blood' its a cagey affair of dancing around in circles poking and ducking and weaving. It's also fun to watch. <img src="/forum/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

[Jake_Norwood]

If both parties get hit, they didn't both win.

They both lost. We punish this sort of thing with push-ups. The double-kill is a very, very, very bad thing in light of technique, etc. It might work fine for kamikaze types, but I believe that most ancient warriors wanted to go home more than they wanted to kill their enemy.

Jake

[Casper Bradak]

Right. If somebody thinks they're "winning" in that situation, they have the wrong idea about what we're trying to do here.

[Scott Anderson]

I rather like the idea (first heard by me from John at a 1.0 seminar) that it's a generally bad idea to let your opponent hit you any time within say, a day and a half of when you kill them. If they are hitting you at the same time as you hit them all it means is that you need to work harder at not getting hit at all. In other words there's no way for you to win if they hit you at all.

SPA

[Shane Smith]

A mutual hit is nothing more or less than a shared failure of skill and is to be avoided and corrected at every turn.

[JeffGentry]

Well dead is dead if you die immediatley or die 5 minute's later your just as dead, i try(key word is try lol) to not get hit. but i am warming to the idea of sparring with wooden weapon's just because it is motivation to realy be aggressive and defend yourself it realy hurt to get hit with a wooden sword. i would recomend a helmut at the least though.i can't realy see to many ancient people owning foam padded sword's but maybe a blanket around a wooden sword but not much else because of the weight. As far as mutual hit's though i think they are very bad again dead is dead.

[Andrey Lileyev]

As I see most are agree with me in principals: mutual hits is a bad practice. But to count the lost for both fencers is good idea if the sparing goes until one resultative hit. Here in Kiev we spar until 3, 5, 7 and 10 hits to avoid accidental win. Fighting until more htan 1 hit is good to reveal better fencer. But to count a hit for both may cause cheating in this system. I see two ways: many sparings until 1 hit or punishing mutuals by not counting this as hit at all right up to disqualification of both opponents for systematic mutual hits.

Unfortunately it's difficult to harden the fight by using wooden swords in spite of padded because we don't use padded swords at all <img src="/forum/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" /> We use wooden, textolite or duralumin swords and standard sportive blades for training and steel for tournaying.

[Steven Engelbach]

I agree with Shane on this point, this is a failure of skill. In a bout, I feel that no one should ever win on a double hit--and if you're in a situation where you have just doubled, you should feel a sense of failure, not success.

There are, however different reasons for double hits:

Sometimes (albeit rarely), both fencers will initiate an attack at exactly the same time, purely by coincidence. While it is sometimes possible to alter your plan when you see this situation, other times it is not possible. This is a double hit just from bad luck.

The second reason would be the opponent who merely attacks into an attack. Beginners are very prone to this, as are "sportsmen." The result is a double when the counter-attackers's hit strikes at almost the same time. Experienced swordsmen will usually read that this is the type of opponent he is facing fairly quickly and take steps to deal with him. The problem with many of these opponents is that they often refuse to realize that "I got you too" is no consolation. Unless they can convince me that they'd attack kamikazee style with no regard (or rather, total disregard) for their personal safety, I'm not buying it.

Steve

[Jay Vail]

the idea of mutual hits is an old one, well known to people who fought for real with sharps. In Japan, the situation was called a mutual slaying, for obvious reasons. Both swordsmen are dead.

[Mike Cartier]

we treat double kills as the absolute worse possible case scenario.

Better to have defended yourself than to both get whacked.

[DavidEvans]

Oddly enough, if you study English Coroner Court reports from the period 1550 to 1620-ish you uncover a lot of incidents where 2, probably untrained or poorly trained, men engage in street brawls and end up killing each other, either at once or overa number of days as they succumb to their wounds!

[Shane Smith]

What are the odds that many of those mutual killings were with the rapier? Silver warns us of such things in his works <img src="/forum/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

[DavidEvans]

Quite a few! Oddly enough the most dangerous common man was the tailor. The most common victim of the tailor was the cobbler. It's odd what little snippets cast light on the past.

[Jared L. Cass]

That's great! Well, maybe not for the tailor and the cobbler <img src="/forum/images/icons/shocked.gif" alt="" /> But for us in the modern day and age, those would be very cool to read.

David, do you know of any places on the web where we can read these reports? I would love to check them out!

Jared L. Cass, ARMA Associate, Wisconsin