Now days there is a lot of HEMA equipment that can be purchased at a push of a button. I have had many discussions about safety and the balance between protection and freedom of movement. Simply put, the more padding and protection, the more limited your techniques become. Fighters with elbow, forearm, plated gloves, masks with bulky neck protection, and heavy jackets don’t freeplay like those who don’t wear all that stuff.
Many articles have been written about this and I have seen the advice of the more experienced members of our community become validated many times. If your opponent is not going to exercise control or is going to ignore hits that are not hard then you might as well suit up into a bunch of gear and club each other. And by the way, the worst injuries I have seen in my study groups have all involved protective equipment we thought was going to protect from the injury that happened.
In the early years of doing this we had no confidence in our protective equipment. In fact, we hardly had any suitable protective equipment. We were careful and trained hard to have control.
And injuries seemed to be less serious and less frequent than what I have seen in the last 3 years.
The problem most HEMA practitioners face is this: in competition, you can expect your opponent who you have never met to care less about controlling his contact on you. He just wants that point. He is willing to swing as hard and fast as it takes to get the judges to see that he made the hit. If you are training for that, you are going to need to get used to all that padding and gear.
There is another way, but it is less glamorous. You could train in a smaller group with guys that you know and trust. People you actually care about. And you can practice control and develop an understanding of freeplay that makes hard contact unnecessary. Freeplay can be less about ego and more about simulating combat and testing out skills and interpretations of the sources.
I’m just saying that things could be that way. I have seen it that way.