It is intersting to read about your individual ways of dealing with off-hand fighting. As trainers, you both must find the task daunting, to say the least.

Now I am going off-topic:

Jean, my enthusiam is because of my great love for all things Medieval; however, my favorite area of research is Arms and Armor. I am not a fighter in any way. I am an artist running a one-woman-counter-Pre-Raphaelite-war against the historical innacuracies seen in paintings from the 19th, and 20th centuries. Most of those artists re-invented the Middle Ages in their own images; sans-iconic. Hence my interest in this site. Every thread proves the attention to detail, and love of historical accuracy of the membership.

I am aware that many of my posts may seem ignorant, even stupid, but I will learn nothing if I don't allow myself to ask the "stupid" questions. I'm here to learn, and share my insights. I know with absolute certainty that left-handed warriors existed: I have seen their effigies, and read accounts of such men.

By the way. If the off-topic section of this post needs to be moved, please have the moderators PM me, and let me know to which thread those comments should be moved. I will edit this post, and delete them from this discussion. Thank you, gentlemen.

The biggest challenge I generally see right-handers experiencing with left-handers is all about geometry. Against another right-hander, when both of you extend and cross swords the swords extend across the space between the two of you, which means that to push the sword offline to the right, you don't need to move your sword all the way to the right side of your body. Economy of motion is valuable, so most people train to only parry as far as they need to (or close the line as far as they need to, or what have you). Against a lefty though, their sword is coming in straight at you in mirror line, and you need to move your sword further to the right to parry or close the line.

You can adapt to this by changing your stance or widening your parries etc, but in this case your training often works against you. It's hard to break habits that you have trained to be automatic. Meanwhile, the leftie has been trained to deal with this scenario more than the reverse, ie. fighting another leftie. So they have an advantage against a right-hander, but often have trouble with another leftie.

Incidentally, there is also a similar but opposite problem with parrying or closing the line on the left. against a left-hander you need less movement, and lose your economy of motion. This can lead to you moving your sword far enough offline that it no longer presents threat and/or takes too long to recover from, creating an opening that would exist against a right hander.

All of this is, IMO, the source of the often-stated advantage lefties have against righties.

Getting back to the topic of sword and shield however, the dynamic changes somewhat, because you have tools on both sides dealing with your opponent's tools on both sides. This changes the lines of combat enough to reduce the geometrical advantage of the leftie, except in a few specific instances (like the shield pin I mentioned in my previous post). But there is also the basic rethinking you need to do when the default positioning puts your defensive tool against their defensive tool, and your offensive tool likewise against their offensive tool. In this case, in my experience, you need to learn some new ways of doing things, but those new ways are different enough that you won't fall into your standard pattern brought on by training against right-handers. It's not just a matter of slightly changing angles, it's a matter of holding your sword with the point to the right instead of to the left.

I hope that's useful information

Craig Shackleton wrote:

"...there is also the basic rethinking you need to do when the default positioning puts your defensive tool against their defensive tool, and your offensive tool likewise against their offensive tool. In this case, in my experience, you need to learn some new ways of doing things, but those new ways are different enough that you won't fall into your standard pattern brought on by training against right-handers It's not just a matter of slightly changing angles, it's a matter of holding your sword with the point to the right instead of to the left.

I hope that's useful information"
_________________

Very useful information, Craig. When I sketch, a skirmishing pair of ground troopers (possibly as an element in a larger battle scene), I will keep the positioning of the blade angle in mind. Is there a specific tactical difference in mounted combat, or would the same sword-angle adjustment still apply?

Hmmm... mounted combat would have its own issues, partly because the horse occupies part of the space where combatants on foot would normally stand. Unfortunately, I can't comment further than that, except as speculation, since I only do foot combat. I know that there are folks out there doing mounted stuff, maybe one of them can chime in.

Interesting topic for interesting situation, i have a friend a starting fencer and hes lefty, we tried to fight with heater shields and swords and we found out the shields for this LH and RH fight are almost useless in blocking because they are on same side and not on side of opponents weapon. So we used shields only for bashing and pushing and all blocking was mainly with swords (and very awkward). Its very strange to fight against LH opponent everything is reversed and mirrored when you face the opponent. Shield and weapon on same side as yours. I tried often to block his blows with shield but it was kinda unnatural for me but a great practice ALMOST like to fight against someone who has totally different style like kendo.
Thats just my point of view about this kind of fight.

Well, we had our practice session and here's the videos. They're the first two on the page. My appologies for the non-professional style. But most of these videos were shot on the fly during practices and many are unofficial whereas they don't adhire to the rules of sport combat in the group.

http://www.orderoftherouseclan.org/Fighting-Videos.html

Just to let everyone know, these are youtube videos and can be found on there by searching for The Most Noble Order of the Rouse Clan.

It's worth noting that in the sport fencing world, while at the low level there are more righties than lefties, at the high-competitive and Olympic level the ratio is actually just about dead even. This, to me, shows that it's only a matter of inexperience that makes it difficult to fight a southpaw--clearly the pros have figured it out pretty well to the point where the advantage is greatly diminished.

I would agree that in cases of RH vs. LH sword and shield combat that there would likely be a lot more lateral/circling action as each combatant tried to slip past the other's sword. This would put both in a more exposed position, so the bout might be a bit more brief as a result. When I fenced regularly one of my friends in the group was a lefty, but it actually took me a while to realize it, as I focused on exposed target area and my own defense rather than on the fact that she was coming at me a different angle than usual. I found that I often was able to sneak a thrust in quite nicely by approaching with a circular motion, making contact with the opposing blade and using it as an axle to "spin" my blade around and attack from a higher or lower outside angle.

Many (most?) of those high-level lefties are right-handed people who fence left-handed (often because that's what their coach decided once upon a time). At lower levels, fewer left-handed fencers, so fencers get less practice against them. So, left-handed fencers have an advantage.

But it is largely a matter of less experience against left-handed opponents, so at higher levels, the advantage gained from going lefty is less. But at higher levels, everything else tends to be very even - general skill level, conditioning, athleticism, tactics - so a small advantage can make a big difference.

At lower levels, opponents tend to be less evenly matched, so even if the "lefty advantage" is bigger, it matters less often.

(The "lefty advantage" works best against other left-handed fighters, since they have even fewer left-handed opponents to practice against on average.)

The practical matters of angles of attack and defense are symmetric, so don't favour either fighter in the absence of difference in experience.

I haven't been on in a while, so I have missed many of the posts from you wonderful members.

I really want to say thanks for all the interest you have shown in this discussion thread. Your replies are very informative, and I am hoping I can apply some of your comments concerning Left-Hand Fighting Technique to some of my artworks.

From the look of things, many of you are double-handed, and can utilize (and teach) both dexter or sinister styles for fencing. I wonder if this was typical of sword-wielders since the fist edged weapon was developed? It could certainly apply to most people of European descent. I was particularly interested to learn that the percentage of left-handed people varies by region, and continent.

:D So let me lift my mug of ale to:

Ben Bouchard
Craig Shackleton
Jan J. Gahy
Jean Thibodeau
Justin Lee Hunt
Kurt Scholz
Johann M
Riki KTimo Nieminen
Vassilis Tsafatinos

Your comments were very helpful, and insightful. :)

Cheers! :~}

And if I missed a member in my list: :blush: My sincere apologies. :

I find this thread interesting because due to a series of injuries to my right arm, I am unable to hold a sword right handed. I can use a light shield in my right hand with a guige as long as I don't fight its inertia and move around the shield instead of moving it around me. It has been very surprising how quickly I have been able to adapt to fighting left-handed. I always wanted to be ambidextrous, too bad it had to happen this way. Last weekend my reenactment group held its first combat practice and I won every single bout. I am sure that eventually the others will learn how to fight a lefty, but initially their unfamiliarity with fighting LH gave me an incredible advantage, even though I was as unused to fighting LH as they were to fighting a LH.

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The prime is one of the fencing positions for switching hands. You can grab your opponent or your weapon with the other hand. Such left-right switches give a tremendous advantages advantage in combat. There was somewhere in the Iceland(?) Sagas a remark about a guy doing this with sword and shield in combat as a sudden surprise maneuver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance and switch handed are good starting point if you have to train the other hand. A lot of people can tell you that they may be self-perceived right or left handed, but can do certain things much better with the other hand (Cross-dominance does include different lateralizations of capabilities of the same organ/limb, not just a simple general organ/limb laterality and even things like jumping high or wide can be on different legs for whatever reason.) Listen to them carefully and find out yourself where you have these specific capabilities and with what train of thought you can use them. If you use a certain limb emphasize the capabilities you have on this limb in order to enhance performance (for some limbs this is on autopilot).
After a while, you might be even able to train members of your group how they can switch in combat for some surprise advantages (to compensate and win against otherwise superior enemies). What you should not attempt, is to turn life upside down by trying to do everything with the other hand as long as you can avoid it. This is difficult and can mentally exhaust you. Always keep it an easy game. Just ask a drummer about the problems if he tries to switch the main beat hand because they are under most stress and quickly feel the backlash. However, one drummer told me a way out, he uses a back-hand beating with left dominance and a normal beat for right hand dominance.

There is lots of training advice about becoming ambidextrous/switch handed written by people who have not a clue and heeding their ideas will have negligible effects or can harm you. If you are ever unsure about negative effects ask a drummer, their job is under tremendous stress to do the beat with their correct personally dominant capability and very few of them can switch. Playing the guitar favours cross-dominance of different hand/arm capabilities because many people have their finger motoric skill on one hand and the beat hand on the other - best combination for guitar hero. These people will normally just know that they can and do things this way without bothering to categorize themselves as "special handed" in any way - quite reasonable because most human beings have some kind of cross dominant capabilities.