HEMA Gear: A Year in Review
Intro
About one year ago, I decided I was going to make a significant investment in HEMA gear. I had been fencing for maybe a year and a half by then, but I had been using mostly light DIY equipment, with affordability as my highest priority. When I decided to shift my priorities instead to safety and durability, my entire kit changed, and my fencing skill improved drastically.
It’s hard for me to overstate the role of quality, safe, and durable gear in my personal experience of acquiring greater skill in fencing. The more protected I felt, I found, the more confident I was in experimenting with new unfamiliar techniques, as well as with ramping up intensity to the levels I would need at competitions such as SoCal Swordfight 2024. The best gear was able to do its job of protecting me while at the same time affording the greatest possible agility and range of motion. All protective gear is a trade-off between protectiveness and mobility, but some pieces of gear achieve this trade-off with much closer tolerances than others.
What follows will be a series of discussions about gear categories, comparative reviews of the pieces I have personally tried or closely witnessed being used at Masterless Fencing, and my views on where protective HEMA equipment might go in the future.
Please do note: the opinions stated in these posts are my personal views, and don’t necessarily reflect official club recommendations or even a consensus at our club. Take them with a grain of salt!