Read on only if you don't mind.
"Recently I've been applying more and more fineness and realism to my RSW sparring with the help of additional extremely controlled sparring with blunts and live blades without any protective gears. I've improved my understanding of swordsmanship after those relatively high risk training. The existence of a fear of death and injury changed the whole dynamic and it showed why a bold swordsman staying on offense would be the winner. Any ordinary person will be more concerning about his life and well being in such environment, and defense comes natural. However, once a person slips into defense mode and only pay attention on where on his body he would get hit, he would forget where to hit on the opponent's body, and it opened up a lot of opportunities for the attackers to exploit, even with some attacks that had given up the center line and traveled around the opponent's sword. It looked unsafe on paper, but actually quite feasible in reality since the one being attacked was more concerned about his safety and had no time to make a counter attack to the attacker who was in fact wide open at that moment.
Another thing is the size of the sword point and the relatively high difficulty to trap the opponent's sword with the guard. In RSW sparring it was easy to trap the opponent's sword with a complex hilt, and easy to get trapped as well. However, the real sword's tip was much smaller and it was very easy to move around the opponent's defense. Thus, the use of thrust and slice with small motion actually worked very well in escaping from a bind, as illustrated in the books. Once understood, these techniques were equally applicable on RSW sparring. Just that if one trains only with RSW all along the time, it would be difficult to understand such fineness.
Another deduction from the above is an experience of using a simple cross guard against a complex hilt sword. The simple cross guard one is in deep disadvantage. It was not that obvious on RSW but it was extremely different with the real sword. The narrow bar of metal is not going to catch as many blows as the RSW wider cross guard and the fingers would be hit very often. Thus the concept of German single time attack and defense comes with a priority of "Attack" being more important than "Defense". If one pays too much attention in trying to catch the opponent's blade, even if he was successful in the contact, his hands would be at risk without a complex hilt. Or his body would be at risk if he has a complex hilt. By putting attention on the attack, the attack would actually force the opponent to distort his action in order to save himself from getting hit, and as a result the defense part would become easier.
All these confirmed the period knowledge of a bold swordsman will always defeat a swordsman without guts, regardless of techniques. And seizing initiative is extremely important, especially when there's a fear of death in play.
Every kind of training tools provide a different version of distortion. RSW provides full speed and force and freedom in training, but training with it alone could lead to lack of fineness and the understanding of the psychology of the fighters. Blunt steel in my case, which was done with extreme control and without protective gears, provides a prolonged training time to understand the fineness and a substantial understanding of fear factor. Live blades provided the actual risk of sword fight and even more understand on how little effort would be need to inflict damage, thus stressing even more fineness and accuracy. Through these distortions, we hope to be able to get the true picture of the historical swordsmanship.
It may be strange to you that I don't hail my product as the holy grail.
But I'm more a swordsman than a merchant."
