By Susanne Popp (also known as Susine Pomeranz), INDES Salzburg

I feel so blessed to train at INDES Salzburg in many ways. We are a friendly, big team with crazy ideas and lots of love to share. But I especially like it here because of the large amount of female fencers who show a lot of motivation and eagerly come to training . For a while though I had the feeling that we need a certain push towards a little more self confidence and getting ourselves active . It turned out that it only needed a very gentle push. As soon as the idea of our own event for women was shared, I received great approval and support and many ideas as to how to shape it. So all of these points became part of our program:

Sharing goals: If people in a group know what others want and need, it is easier to give each other support. So we all thought and talked about competing in tournaments, becoming a referee, joining the INDES high performance team or about wanting to become more fit.

Strengthening our core: Strong and healthy movements come from your centre. Via Pilates we especially trained our core muscles. How to train efficiently: A method of doing dynamic drills full of variations was showed to us by one of our girls who thought about how to optimise your training method. It gave us an idea as to how we can think of our own drills and practice them together.

Video Analysis: During sparring we filmed each other and afterwards watched the film sequences together with Ingulf, our head trainer, who was able to give us advice. That wasn’t easy for everyone, because he was very honest, but definitely helpful.

Wrestling: There is so much in wrestling that contributes to good sword fighting as well. Good stance, footwork, strength and stamina and a feeling for the principles of being hard or soft. Plus it’s a lot of fun to roll around if noone comments on your play with “Ooooh! Catfight!”

Events 2014: I sometimes felt a bit alone when I accompanied Ingulf and the other guys to seminars and events. The urge to show the world the good female fencers of INDES is still big. So I held a presentation about the upcoming events, showed photos and told stories. We are definitely going to more in the future.

Throwing knives: Not necessarily part of HEMA, but it involves sharp steel blades. One of us taught herself how to do it when she was a child. Now she taught us.

Footwork: Sports fencers have amazing footwork and we can learn a lot of them. With the difference that we also put our left leg in front. A member who also has experience in sports fencing coached us on doing lunges and fast footwork.

The jungle of HEMA terms: Our training is usually focused on movement and less on words. But what is actually behind all these expressions like “zwerch” and “Schielhau” and “Alber”? Luckily, we have our own Linguist-ess who looked these words up in old dictionaries and gave us some background. This helped to understand certain techniques even better.

Thrusts: How to do them, when to do them and what to do against them…a course which also was a lot about footwork and the principle of distance.

Photoshoot: We think swords are beautiful. Most people do a certain sport because they like the way it looks. It’s great to have fun and impressive photos of yourself doing your hobby, so at the end of the seminar, we put on our black dresses and played around, making a lot of cool photographs. Always be careful not to ruin the floor with high heels! 🙂 Don’t get us wrong. We love our fellow guys from our club. But just like men sometimes have to be among themselves in order to live out certain sides of their manhood, so do we! Because it seems to become much easier to talk freely, ask questions and share experiences.

The weekend showed us, how much nicer and more productive it is to work on something together. I am a biologist, an ecologist to be precise, and very early we learn about the survival of the fittest (Darwin). To some this means that it is important to be strong and tough. But it turns out that the most successful species are the ones that interact a lot and show good networking. In my opinion, this counts for HEMA as well. A big thanks to Claudia, Fran and Perica. Esfinges gave us not just a lot of inspiration, but it also does exactly what I was just talking about: networking.