Guy Windsor QUOTES

1 " Some martial arts, or combat sports at least, offer a career path that includes fame and riches. An Olympic gold medal, perhaps. But that is not true of ours. I train martial arts because they can offer moments of utter transcendence. The ineffable made manifest. This is traditionally described as “beyond words” or “indescribable” but, as a martial artist and a writer, that would feel like a cop-out. I will take this feeling and wrestle it down onto the page, or at least give it my best shot. It is a moment when every atom in your body is exactly where it should be. Every step you have taken on life’s path makes sense, and is part of a coherent story. The pain of every mistake is made worthwhile by the lessons contained within. There is a feeling of physical power without limit; strength without stiffness; flow without randomness; precision without pedantry; focus without blinkers; breadth and depth; massive destructive capability, but utter gentleness; self-awareness without self-consciousness; force without fury; your body alive as it has never been, all fear and pain burned away in a moment of absolute clarity; certainty without dogma; and an overpowering love, even for your enemies, that enables you to destroy them without degrading them. For a religious person it is the breath of God within you; for an atheist it is a moment of attaining perfection as a human being. "

― Guy Windsor , Swordfighting, for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists

3 " Any position you find yourself in can be considered a guard if you understand its tactical and technical properties. Slavishly copying a position from the treatise is useless unless you have some idea of what the position is for, what openings it leaves and what strengths it possesses. "

― Guy Windsor , The Medieval Longsword: A Training Manual

5 " To work on a movement you need: A clear picture or feeling of how it is now A clear picture or feeling of how it should be A real-time feedback mechanism for identifying the difference. And "

― Guy Windsor , The Medieval Longsword: A Training Manual

7 " Four aspects of any action: time, measure, structure, flow p. "

― Guy Windsor , The Medieval Longsword: A Training Manual

9 " The rules of feinting are pretty simple: you must create a credible threat. As your opponent responds, your strike should take less time than his second parry. Your end position should also close the line of his riposte. He may not notice that his parry has failed, and may hit you as you hit him. That he has made a mistake doesn’t make his blow any less effective. In "

― Guy Windsor , The Medieval Longsword: A Training Manual

11 " when entering into measure to strike, there should be a clear threat made. "

― Guy Windsor , The Medieval Longsword: A Training Manual

13 " The optimal mental state for training in is called “the flow state”, most famously defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his 1988 book Flow. Buy it, read it, you won’t regret it. This book made me realise that the thing I was really trying to teach most of my students was how to develop an autotelic personality, which means a person who is able to set their own goals. "

― Guy Windsor , The Seven Principles of Mastery (The Swordsman's Quick Guide Book 1)

15 " I hope that one day the audience will demand the same degree of martial realism in a fight as it demands visual realism in special effects. The "

― Guy Windsor , The Swordsman's Companion