Consulting Swordsman
Guy Windsor I’ve been practising various forms of breathing exercises for about 30 years now. They are the foundation of all my training, to the point that literally every exercise of any kind is always first and foremost a breathing exercise for me. You can see that in this recording of last Friday’s trainalong class: the topic … Read more
My parents watch the 10 o’clock news every night. While I was staying with them recently I took that as my cue to wander upstairs and do my evening stretching and breathing routines, and read before bed. I just don’t need to see interviews with people complaining about lockdown restrictions, or the latest speculation about … Read more
Watermelon is worse for me than Skittles.* Who’d have thought? If you haven’t read my post on testing blood sugar response to foods, you’d better do that before proceeding. Just to recap briefly, here are the assumptions/opinions/beliefs I’m working from: 1) it is better to avoid spiking your blood sugar levels 2) your blood sugar … Read more
It’s generally accepted that it’s a healthy idea to avoid spiking your blood sugar. Spiking your blood sugar regularly can cause insulin resistance, obesity, cancer, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and so on. Some years ago I came across a study from Drs. Segal and Erinav of the Weizmann Institute which proved to my … Read more
I can’t imagine how this passed me by all these many years. Have you heard of Allen Hemberger’s Alinea Project? It’s a thing of glory. He ate at Alinea, one of the top restaurants in the world, the sort of place where food is magic, theatre, and gastronomic bliss, all rolled into one. (I’ve not … Read more
Meditation is a crucially important practice for martial artists. It enables you to gain control over your state of mind, your level of arousal, and above all teaches you to be able to direct your attention. I have been teaching meditation in one form or another for many years, but never before over the internet. … Read more
In From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice I took the innovative step of using redirect links to video clips instead of photographs to illustrate my interpretation. This is much better in terms of representing movement, but it can be tedious to type out the links in a browser. Given that you need a web browsing device to … Read more
Hello. I’m having trouble making sure I hit all the pain points in my own training. I have a simply enormous variety of exercises and practices that I should be keeping up with. Such as: Meditation: Awareness of Breathing, Body Scan, Mantra, Movement. Breathing exercises: Wim Hof method, standing qigong, the Crane, 9 breaths, the … Read more
Well, anything within reason… I’ll be going live on Reddit this evening at 10pm UK time, which is currently UTC +1, on the “swords” subreddit, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SWORDS/ (note, not the WMA subreddit that I mentioned in my last email, sorry). I’ll be on for an hour, and typing as fast as I can! The first … Read more
There is a lot going on in the House of Windsor. The Sword Guy podcast is live, episode one with Jess Finley is up here. It will trickle through to the normal platforms (such as Apple’s itunes etc.) in due course. The second episode will go live on Friday. I’ve got another 7 episodes in … Read more