Short piece here on a phenomenon I have observed seems to be an inevitable natural development in modern HEMA practitioners: turning-in one’s cuts. What do I mean by turning-in a cut? My definition is to twist the blade to be perpendicular to the striking surface just before impact. Let’s use attacks against a pell to highlight the phenomenon.
If you strike a pell it is fairly firm, and doesn’t yield to you. In addition if you strike it at an angle to the surface it introduces a torque on your blade, trying to make it twist on impact. In the worst case this leads to the blade skidding off the surface. In the best case we can hold the sword firm and prevent the deflection, but either way we don’t get a satisfying impact feel.
An adaptation that people come up with is to turn their blades into the target as they strike. This reduces the demands on body structure and grip strength, and makes the impact more firm and satisfying.
Note that this is not a conscious adaptation. Movement is a self organizing skill at a subconscious level, and the body will naturally adapt to feedback. If the feedback from a strike is: “feels wobbly” then the body will start to find tweaks it can do to make the impact feel more like a “win”. Turning in the cut is a great adaptation to solve the problem of hitting an off-angle surface.
This doesn’t just apply to hitting a pell, the same phenomenon occurs in sparring. When we land a strike on someone there is far less chance of the blade twisting if we turn the blade in before the strike connects. If you watch most descending cuts to the flank or leg you can see them turn horizontal right before impact.
What Are The Implications?
If you’re just interested in landing touches then the answer is “don’t care”. If you’re more interested in the historical side, that is a more interesting question. Obviously from a cutting mechanics point of view it is bad. But, I would also argue just from a source based point of view it’s bad. Not because the sources explicitly say not to do it, but the targets they seem to emphasize are ones that you’re far less likely to be tempted to hit at these bad angles.
Is that a coincidence? Who knows. But an interesting thought piece.
(I’ve summarized some of the target area percentages here: http://swordstem.com/2019/03/20/how-did-the-sources-say-we-should-weight-targets/)
What Can Be Done?
That is a good question, one which I don’t have a convincing answer for. The implications of something like constraints lead approaches dictate that movement solutions are driven by whatever the constraints are of the activity you are doing. “Not turning in the cut” is not typically a constraint, so I would expect that unless it is explicitly specified people will develop movement solutions that involve turning in the cut.
For doing pell work you can probably help yourself by having a round target rather than an pole. But pell work is really the minority of the time most of us spend striking things so I’m not sure that is a good long term solution.
Test cutting is also billed as a possible solution to the issue. In fact, many instructors have observed that it is harder to teach experienced HEMA-ists to cut than rando’s off the street. This is because the skills (aka movement solutions) they have developed for moving a sword are optimized for what they do all the time: hit blunt targets with no follow through. I think that in addition to the follow-through problem the turning-in problem is a big one. After all, you can swing your sword in the air all you want to learn follow-through. But once you go to impact something (be it a sparring partner or tatami mat) the ‘hitting a thing’ control logic in your brain takes over.
In my opinion the biggest benefit gleaned from test cutting is not that it will “fix” the problem, but that it will at least give you the awareness of when it is happening in other non-cutting contexts. Test cutting won’t correct your turning-in issues in sparring, but it can help you feel when it is happening. And, provided you actually care and feel it’s a failure on your part, your body will find ways to accomplish the task while keeping the sword in line.
This is a little flimsy as a fix, and I’m not particularly happy with it. There is definitely more work and strategies to be developed, and my coaching development journey continues onward. But for now at least I have an article to link to whenever I’m trying to explain the concept to someone.