The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sir Gusztáv Arlow’s Sabre Fencing: Austro-Hungarian Sabre Series, vol. 3 (Austro-Hungarian Military Sabre Series) by Russ Mitchell

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Sir Gusztáv Arlow's Sabre Fencing: Austro-Hungarian Sabre Series, vol. 3 (Austro-Hungarian Military Sabre Series) by Russ Mitchell https://www.amazon.com/Guszt%C3%A1v-Arlows-Sabre-Fencing-Austro-Hung...arian/dp/B09X3NZ2P5 The Birth of Italo-Hungarian Fencing! Gusztáv Arlow’s work represents perhaps the point where the Hungarian public sees a well-known, well-established, and well-respected fencer come forward to discuss the merits of the “Italian,” that is to say, Radaellian, fencing method, while simultaneously discussing its integration with elements of Hungarian sabre fencing. Arlow, previously an adherent to the so-called "High Tierce" system, lays out the case for "Italian" fencing in this translated manual, which contains extensive commentary on the art of fencing. A must-have for historical fencers and those interested in the birth of the modern Italo-Hungarian school.About the author Russ Mitchell is an author, historian, and fencing instructor who helps people with stress, strain, and balance issues. He also writes fantasy stories for fun and to read to his daughter. Russ' work is heavily influenced by Moshe Feldenkrais, Barbara Hambly, Robert Heinlein, and Glen Cook. He is a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson's famous dictum "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." He was voted "least in need of LSD" while in college, which might explain a lot. When not travelling to smack people with swords and axes, he lives in Irving, TX, with his wife, daughter, and cats.

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Starting point is 00:01:17 Today's featured author comes to us from Books to Lifemarketing.co. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Today we're going to be talking about some interesting new programs that you can do to maybe lose weight and exercise. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up at this point. We have a young man on the show.
Starting point is 00:01:40 We're going to be talking about his new book. Sir Gustavs, Arlo's, Sabre Fencing, Austro-Hungarian, Sabre Series, Volume 3 out April 7, 2022 by Russ Mitchell. We're going to be talking about some of the intricate details of saber fencing. And maybe how you can enjoy it too as well. So we're going to get into it with him. We're going to talk to him about some of those insights and his latest book that you can find on Amazon there as well.
Starting point is 00:02:10 Gustav Arlo's work represents perhaps the point where Hungarian public sees a well-known, well-established, and well-respected fencer. Come forward to discuss the merits of the Italian, that is to say, redelion fencing method, simultaneously discussing with the integration with elements of Hungarian saber fencing. Arlo previously an adherent to the so-called high, what is it, the high-tier system lays out the case for Italian fencing, and it's translated manual, which contains extensive commentary on the art of fencing. Welcome the show. How are you, sir? Russ.
Starting point is 00:02:46 Great, glad to be here. Glad to have you as well. Give us dot-coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? So the easiest ways to find me are on YouTube and on Patreon. So there is patreon.com. I've got a profile. I can shoot you the link on that directly. I'm assuming you don't want me to read out the letters and numbers on the podcast. Yeah, and then we'll put the link also on the Chris Fosh show so people can find it on there on the dot coms.
Starting point is 00:03:13 Give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside this book? All right. So here's a guy who's at the top of his game in terms of fencing. He is an aristocrat, which is important before World War I. He is well respected. He is teaching fencing publicly, and people take what he says very, very seriously. And along come these Italian guys with their newfangled thing,
Starting point is 00:03:36 and they go into the place where saber fencing is a religion like Friday night football here is in Texas. And Gustav Arlo goes, hey, what we're doing, it's not good enough. We need to do what they're doing and add what we do. due to the mix and change it up and to play that's an earthquake is putting it really mildly it's like saying hey we should stop you should put some rugby rules into our Friday night football and I guess fencing is the way people you know engage entertain exercise back in the day maybe you know get ready for battle war that sort of thing I guess battle war duels and just for sports in fact some people considered it a performing art as well as a fine art so you had an audience
Starting point is 00:04:21 of thousands of people who knew all about fencing and they expected to see good shit when two different people fought each other on a piece or they followed it the same way our sports fans do. So it was the thing. It was like maybe boxing back in the day or NFL
Starting point is 00:04:37 football back in the day, huh? Yep. Yeah. I don't think they televised football yet back then, so I think that was the issue that had quite caught on. Now, you basically, I don't have the pronunciation of this right, I'm sure. But you practice a method of fencing starts with an F. Can you pronounce that
Starting point is 00:04:58 right for me and tell us about what that is? So I practice what's called historical fencing. So Olympics in general is basically a sports league. And it is a kind of fencing that lets you work with a very specific set of sports so people can compete on even terms. Just as, for example, different MMA leagues have different rules for how they engage. So what I do is historical saber fencing, and I do a system of Hussar fencing, and pre-Olympic historical saber fencing. I usually do chain league fencing. That's usually what I focus on a lot, but maybe that's a different thing than what you're talking about.
Starting point is 00:05:41 You can hold the most fence at once you win. That's how that game works. I just put up a fence between the guy with the sword, and I, you know, then I can avoid getting stabbed. That's my trick. As long as the laser small. As long as the legs are. Yeah, because that's right.
Starting point is 00:05:56 You know, I've seen fencing done, and it's really an interesting art. I don't know if art's the right way to describe sport. I've got a friend who is wheelchair back. She does fencing, and they have wheelchairs, and I guess they lock down the wheelchair, so they can't move too much.
Starting point is 00:06:14 And she fences. And I was like, that's an interesting choice, but hey man it's a wide world with lots of cool stuff to do and and i think it's great that you know stuff like that's available to everybody um and so she does fencing and she's in a wheelchair and i'm just like i wouldn't do fencing standing up because i might get stabbed so you're a part-time professor uh you're a fencing coach and you're a veteran of the historic european martial arts movement that has been actively involved in finding and publishing historical fencing manuscripts since 1996. What drew you to that? So I was a nerd a very long time ago. I'm still one now, just to be
Starting point is 00:06:58 very clear. And my dad noticed that when we had various games lying around, that I tended to pay a lot of attention to the various weapons described in the games. And I sort of nerded out on the geometry of all the different tools involved. And I got into, you want to hear a phrase that will kill any cocktail party instantly? Sure. I got into medieval 14th century Central European Warfare. Ah, that's on my Tinder profile. I was working in history and looking through medieval history and medieval warfare
Starting point is 00:07:34 and trying to solve problems like that. And that was about the time that a bunch of people were going, hey, we have European martial arts manuscripts. Wouldn't it be cool if somebody could read them? And so I started helping to dig them out of archives and transcribed them and translate them and put them in front of people so they could do more than just look at the
Starting point is 00:07:52 pictures and guess a lot. Oh, wow. And that's been a hobby and an application for 30 years now. Now, you've written a lot of different books or I guess help translate or record a lot of, or redo a lot of books and bring them into the forefront. Is that how many books do you have? I got about 26 books in print.
Starting point is 00:08:11 The majority of them are different translated fencing manuals. So all these manuals were from back in the day. They'd teach people how to do the sports. They'd probably like modern day NFL training manuals or something. Now, I believe your wife helps you do some of this translation. Tell us how that works. Okay, so it works very carefully, and I buy her a lot of cappuccino afterwards. Some of the languages involved in German and,
Starting point is 00:08:38 Hungarian are among the worst offenders like this, went through a lot of language shifts at the end of the 19th century. Although I'm not a slacker when it comes to languages, there are a lot of times where a native speaker is really, really helpful. So I call myself an editor, but my job is basically to work with the original person and get it into something resembling English. And then because I cut my teeth editing historical documents by scholars who are European, my job is to take that very raw nothing and turn it into actual English. So anybody who translates in school, you translate word for word for word. But real world translation isn't like that. You're translating an idea and you're putting it in the words that people can actually read so they don't fall asleep trying to read your
Starting point is 00:09:24 stuff. So back half of the translation work and then all of the apparatus and the lots of commentary and stuff is what I do, especially because I know the technical terms of fencing and some of the folks I work with aren't actually fencers. Now is your wife Hungarian or is she European? She knows these languages. She's an American citizen now, but yeah, she's Hungarian. I stole Buddha. Did you do that on purpose so you could write these books? I'm just joking. I did it so I could get the Hungarian cooking. Oh, hey, good food, man. You can't be a good cook and good food. So what inspired you to write this? I guess this is a series. Is that correct? this is that's right three so this series this here this series is about understanding the history
Starting point is 00:10:12 of saber fencing so when we get into olympic fencing everybody pays attention to the saber and looks at hungarian stuff because they're hungarian coaches and for 20 or 30 years the hungarians just wipe the walls with everybody except the italians who they sometimes wipe the walls with and sometimes they play even with and so in hungarian's saber fencing, the Italians were really influential for a while. So we have what's called Italo-Hungarian saber fencing. But we have almost no documentation, just a lot of oral history about how this process came to pass. So imagine you're looking at your sport of choice, and you've got lots of documentation from, say, 1970, and you don't know why the old-time
Starting point is 00:10:58 boxers stance the way they boxed, and you're trying to understand what was different in the rules or what was different in the technique. This series is bringing those primary sources out to people so they can understand it. And so for those who are interested, so they can practice it and put it into play. What draws people to fencing these days? Is it the exercise, the art of it, the challenge, the skill that's involved? So it's a combination of all of that. I tend to call fencing exercise with benefits because you're picking up a technical skill.
Starting point is 00:11:33 and when you're doing that and ask anybody who has a really technical sport in their background, you tend to actually work out harder than when you're just busting reps or distance. You're intellectually extremely engaged. Have you ever seen
Starting point is 00:11:49 a little kid with a stick? Sort fighting is a really big part of our general society. As soon as any kid gets a stick, they start swinging at some other kid with a stick, right? That romance has never gone away. And it's an arrow
Starting point is 00:12:03 tends to pull people into fencing. Wasn't that Errol Flynn back in the day that inspired a lot of people? Was there Earl Flynn? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he was a great fencer, wasn't he? Or maybe he was just on movies?
Starting point is 00:12:18 He was a good fencer. Now, stage combat and fencing are a little bit different. Sure. Things that will get you ganked in regular fencing look perfect on screen. Things that look perfect on screen don't go the other way because stage combat's point is to tell a story using the swords, right?
Starting point is 00:12:33 So they want to show the audience where we want to do is deceive them and then poke them and giggle. I remember there was a bond. James Bond did a fencing scene, I think, somewhere. I don't remember which bond it was, but maybe there might have been multiple bonds. I don't have a hot minute. I would have to look that
Starting point is 00:12:49 one up. You've got me, boss. Yeah. I believe it was I don't think it was Pierce Brousin. I think it was Dalton. Well, Google it. So in the meantime, you discuss in this book, a particular portion of the art based upon this gentleman named Arlo. And what makes him interesting and what's important about this method that he utilizes? Okay. So Arlo came from
Starting point is 00:13:16 very traditional Hungarian fencing of the day, which mostly moved from the wrist. And it was really beating out most of the other methods of its era because it was really simple and intuitive. So if I'm defending myself, and I'll hold my hand up for those who are actually catching this on video, the people who are just listening will have to imagine it. I've got my hand up in the air, and my point is sticking out towards someone's face, so I've got a threat. But the geometry of the stance means all I've literally got to do is turn my wrist one way or another, and I immediately have any parry I need, and I can teach someone how to parry in this system to defend themselves in the space of about 10 minutes flat, which means it's simple, it's intuitive,
Starting point is 00:14:00 it's easy to learn. It's ridiculously effective. Arlo's good at it. He's got lots of cachet. He's teaching. He's one of the first sports fencing instructors who teaches women, which makes him near and dear to my heart. And he goes up against a bunch of guys who are Italian because he comes with a new teacher named Barbissetti. And being at the absolute top of his game and super respected, he goes, huh, these guys are doing something different and we need to learn from it. And what the Italians did different was they moved from the elbow, but most importantly from a sports perspective, they thought of it the way we think of modern sports. So if I can steal a metaphor from the general martial arts community, one of the reasons MMA is popular and effective is people get lots of pressure testing in. You go to any MMA gym, and it doesn't matter what your background style is, you have common rules, you can go, you can mix it up, you can play. Well, under that pressure testing that the Italians were doing, they were getting better and better and better, whereas people from smaller schools tended to be the big fish
Starting point is 00:15:09 in their little school, but not get so much pressure testing. So Arlo learned a lot of stuff from the Italians, and he said, hey, let's make something that's better than both of them. And he took the best features of Italian and Hungarian fencing at the time, and he blended them together. now I pulled the Google pull on this it was die another day with Pierce Brosnan as Bond and there was a duel I believe it was a sword fight duel so I don't know if that qualifies in the same sort of fencing sort of thing it looks like it starts out as fencing and then they go to swords or something I don't know but yeah great scene there and I remember seeing it going that's a really cool our form and then we tend to think of fencing as the Olympic thing but that doesn't define all sword play I mean Kendo for example is fencing it's just a very
Starting point is 00:16:02 different kind of fencing is that with the wood sticks yeah that's what the bamboo shinai wood sticks come at each other wearing the armor so there's lots of different kinds of fencing and what Brosnan is doing in the movie absolutely qualifies as a limping excuse me as fencing just
Starting point is 00:16:18 not the Olympic Sport League version of fencing yeah it's you know acting So acting, as this S&L gentleman would say, and I forget his name. Now, you, so how early did the Olympics adopt fencing? Was it one of the first sports when they launched Olympics? Yes, it was. Fencing is one of the original sports to it.
Starting point is 00:16:44 They almost had horseback saber, but after World War I, they were shy on horses, so that went away. Oh, wow. I think we would have a lot more spectators about it. it was still horseback saber fencing. Yeah, that would be wild to watch. It's a, because you got to negotiate the horses and get close enough to bang swords, right? Absolutely. But imagine that's what happened.
Starting point is 00:17:08 Mad teenagers on bicycles and that's fun too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, or skateboarding. Maybe skateboarding might be cool. Maybe that could be a new Olympic sport there, skateboarding fencing. I don't know. Sounds like somebody's getting injured for sure. Get your insurance now, folks. So it really changed the game, it sounds like, for the sport of fencing and maybe for, you said, I think it was the Italians or the Hungarians that adopted this?
Starting point is 00:17:34 It really did, because when you bring a modern sports perspective to your practice, you train differently. You can get harder, you pay more attention to some details that you otherwise wouldn't worry about, because if you're winning in your local school, hey, you must be good. but then you get in front of 50 people from a bunch of other schools and then you discover, oh, maybe I'm just kicking superficial ass and I need to train the places where I've got holes a little bit harder. Yeah, yeah. I'm a big Raiders fan. Did I, Al Davis ever own a fencing thing?
Starting point is 00:18:08 And he'd just be like, just win, baby. I am not going to get myself in front of all those Raider fans by a pining there. I know what's good for me. We're used to losing anyway. So, I mean, we need all the help we can get. But we got Tom Brady now, which is kind of ironically weird, considering he stole our last chance at a Super Bowl. Now you advertise yourself as a fencing instructor and a movement instructor.
Starting point is 00:18:34 How do those two things fit together? Okay. So on the one hand, I'll hit the movement instructor part first because it will make the other back end more obvious. So I do what's called the Felden Christ method. It basically is a way of teaching yourself how to use yourself more effectively. So, for example, if somebody comes to me because they want off their cane or because they're elderly and having trouble getting around, I can get it to where they can walk around
Starting point is 00:19:00 their grandkids and not wear out. But it's based on efficiency. It's based on elegant movement, not just torturing your muscles until they screen. So while, for example, I can take a stroke off of almost anybody's golf score. What I focus on is fencing because it's really, really technical. If I have good basic technique in fencing, it counts a lot. I'm in my mid-50s, and I can play against somebody who's 30 years younger than me with absolute advantage if my technique is better than their technique. So understanding how movement works at a very deep level helps with that. Yeah, that might help get 10-Z off my lawn. Maybe I should take off fencing.
Starting point is 00:19:47 Old man jokes. but no that's awesome you can compete in that way it sounds like it's a it's not only a physical sort of aspect of a game but very cerebral where you know it's it's kind of like physical chess maybe i don't know that is literally the metaphor that chess people really absolutely because i have a game and you have a game and i roughly know what your plays are and you roughly know what mine is and which one of us can deceive each other to get a moment of time which is we call stealing a tempo where I can whack you and you can't whack me back. If we just flail at each other like morons, that's ugly fencing that nobody wants to watch and nobody's re-winning. So figuring out how to deceive another completely competent person, sword in hand, is what makes sword play interesting and what keeps it interesting.
Starting point is 00:20:39 See, what I do is I just usually do that Indiana Jones scene when they come at me with a sword. I just say, I'm too tired for the shit and I pull out a gun and just put them down. then that's why the chain link's not going to work the cops have to scale the fence first that gives me time to run so there's a method to the madness uh it's the play don't shoot people people that's a joke don't create any cults off what chris fuss says please we have enough cults so you put out a number of these books besides translations do you want to give us me an over you about some of the other ones is there ways you know like if i'm a beginner out there listening and I'm like, you know, it sounds really interesting. Maybe I, maybe I should
Starting point is 00:21:20 see if this is maybe my kind of sport. Is there ways to get into it? Absolutely. In fact, I coach a number of people online, a couple of whom don't have local coaches. Arlo, his pedagogy is amazing. He's one of the very few fencing guys that you can pick up a lot of the manuals and just literally go to town step by step by step by step and you've got it. Some of the older Hungarian manuals are the same way. They're really, really clear. And if you take these manual step by step you can actually turn yourself into a very respectable fencer very quickly yeah wow and then i i can impress the chicks put this on my tinder man this suit get me so you get me your grandkids and chase them around the house yeah well i don't have any kids so uh i they already
Starting point is 00:22:07 met the sword they already met the vasectomy sword ah okay well if your neighbors have kids you can be You can be the hero granddad of your block, but chasing a camera around with swords. I'm just still trying to get them off my lawn, so I just might chase them off the lawn with the sword. Now, you also have a YouTube channel. We should get a promotion for that if you want to plug that as well. Absolutely. So I originally started with what we call a living lineage of saber. That is, it wasn't just from a book, but my coach is still alive.
Starting point is 00:22:37 And on that channel, we have a playlist for the Arlo stuff, and I go into how to fence, how to learn how to fend, and a lot of the mindset issues that make someone successful or unsuccessful fencing. Can you give yourself permission to win? Can you get out of your own way? All of the soft-skill things that approach how you learn to fence. And on the YouTube channel, we talk about those kinds of things. And speaking of dating and maybe a way for me to get chicks on Tinder, you're known to be very vocal about encouraging people, or I'm sorry, encouraging women
Starting point is 00:23:14 defense why is that i am and that's because fencing is technical enough that the conditioning plays a slightly lesser role so olympic fencing you have the sport is set up in such a way that conditioning really counts either you get in the best shape you've ever been in your life or you'll enjoy yourself but you're not going to win the historical fencing rule sets are a little bit easier that way and you can be a middle-aged mother of three and not only can you have fun fencing but you can win the tournament. You can go out there and absolutely kick ass because your technical ability matters. When you form an attack correctly, when you form a parry correctly, you're not wasting time. And the cleaner your technique is, the more you begin to get a tempo advantage on your
Starting point is 00:24:02 opponent, what the fighter nerds would call the Udo loop. You're able to act inside their decision making and you can get ahead of them. And from the outside, you look like you're blazingly fast. But what you actually are is more efficient and anybody can be more efficient so it's the only sport i know of that's both intensely physical and where men and women can compete with 100 percent equivalency because fencing's an art of timing and technique anybody can learn that yeah so it's an equal opportunity sport do do when when when i imagine there's official games or official like uh tiers or where people get it together and compete, do men and women use to compete against each other?
Starting point is 00:24:47 Is it segmented by sex like a lot of sports these days? So some historical fencing is segmented by sex, but often everybody's competing together. Oh, okay. Well, that makes it nice. You don't have to have, like, separate, you know, you don't have to have the NBA and the WMBA. And, you know, you're like, which one am I watching now?
Starting point is 00:25:06 And, you know. But, yeah, it's kind of a beautiful art sport. I mean, when you see it, you're just like, Wow, that's really cool. And I think there's kind of a hearkening of Renaissance and historical nature that, I don't know, we kind of possessing ourselves. You know, there's something kind of romantic about it, I think, you know. Those movies that play with swords make a lot of money for good reason. People like the sword play.
Starting point is 00:25:34 You know, I mean, we probably spent most of our human history or at least a large part of it. you know, that was the main weapon of choice or defense was a sword, right? You know, you know, we hadn't invented Uzi's yet. And so, yeah, and, you know, you'd see people, you know, I think there's a romanticism of that. And we have a lot of novels on the show and, you know, they write back in those eras and, you know, the guys who are the knights and stuff and sword play of knights. And so, yeah, there's a real thing to it. You know, I've often looked at chain mail and swords. And I'm like, yeah, I wouldn't want to be on the back end of that thing in a war, you know, kind of glad I can just kind of stand back and shoot people far away.
Starting point is 00:26:21 Yeah, we stab our friends for fun, so no bleeding. No bleeding. We're against the bleeding. Yeah, and do you have to wear the whole regalia, the helmet hat protection, and then the thick padding and all that stuff? So some schools of fencing just make do with safety glasses, but yes, we wear the whole rattle battle. if there's enough pressure, you don't want to bruise too badly, especially, for example, if you work with your hands, you don't want those two banged up, and you always wear a fencing mask for safety, because it's only one mistake in a thousand that causes an incredible
Starting point is 00:26:55 oops, but nobody wants to be on scene when that record scratch hits. Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to, I'm against taking swords to chest. It's kind of a belief system I adopted a long time ago. So that's why I don't date women with daddy issues. Now, can you learn fencing from a book if someone read your type, your book? In fact, in fact, Arlo and several of the others I've translated are actually clear enough that yes, you can. I have a couple of people who I've mentored here and there to help them with spots that
Starting point is 00:27:29 aren't quite as clear, but simply working through the books they've gone from losing on the regular to becoming absolute monsters, their opponents have a hard time to hit. Wow. And then people can engage with their Patreon. And what do they get over there? What do you offer them? So some of its body mechanics videos, but the rest of it is lots of one-on-one coaching. I coach four or five people a week on different forms of technique online and to improve how you're using your body. Most of the time when people are having trouble with the technique in the sport, it's because they're being asked to do something physically that they don't know how to do. If you're close to your existing habit, you pick up the technique really clearly. If you're far away from that habit, then it's harder to pick it up. So, for example, if you're a keyboard monkey who slouches all the time and your shoulders are
Starting point is 00:28:18 in this giant crunch all the time, moving your shoulders around freely may be a problem. But if I show you how to move your shoulders more effectively, you have an easier time performing the sport. So I help people where the movement and the techniques come together so they can do the things they want with more ease. And, yeah, all about probably technique. Mindset's probably a big thing as it is pretty much in every sport, right? Oh, yeah, you're not getting away from mindset.
Starting point is 00:28:46 Yeah, yeah. It's all about, you know, your mind and practice. And, you know, I mean, they don't put just any sport in the Olympics, man. It's usually got to be something good. Except didn't they put stripping in. Part of wrestling didn't make it. Oh, that's too bad. That's just unfortunate.
Starting point is 00:29:04 be i i just uh watch the two guys uh grapple each other like a prison uh action uh doesn't really appeal to me but uh it's just fun oh i know what else haven't we talked about that i do a lot of mhma jokes about that uh it just looks just looks odd uh let's just put that way i don't really want to see guys uh grappling each other much but you know some people love that thing i different strokes for different folks everybody's everybody's welcome to live their own life, I suppose, as long as there's consent. So, I didn't know for a while, but long-term fencing is a lot more fun for me.
Starting point is 00:29:45 You're not in some guy's butt looking in his tight tights, you know. He takes your head and tries to screw it around like it. Exactly, with his legs. That's, I only like women that do that. So what else haven't we discussed about sport of fencing? What can someone gain reading your books if they aren't in the fencing. Okay. So Arlo's fencing manual is a fencing manual. You'll get some cultural history out of that. It'll work. The books that are not related to fencing are primarily related to movement and how to make your life easier. For example, I was
Starting point is 00:30:20 working with a gal. She's 82 years old and she was having trouble with just some basic life stuff because she wanted to chase her grandkids around. So I got a book called Clutz Therapy. And it's just 10 habits that you can play with that will teach you how to use yourself better without having to make it into a turgid lesson so you can deep dive lessons and get very serious about it or you can take one habit and go hey what does this habit do for me so for example give your readers an example if i'm trying to check my blind spots in the mirror and we're coming of an age where you're worried about losing your driver's license because you can't crank your head far enough and the beat beep on the mirror isn't cutting it for you, I can turn my head and go, oh, I only turn my head so far. But if I take my
Starting point is 00:31:06 left shoulder and pull it backwards, all of a sudden I can look so far behind me that it could actually be a bad idea because I could take my eyes right off the road. Really? Simply, yeah, try it. You'll see, oh, my range of motion is actually huge. Finds more. If I try to turn my head and use my shoulder. So when you start seeing that there's lots of little things like that that make your life easier, then you can keep doing the things you want to do. And fencing is just my application of that principle because I am a nerd who's been interested in all these old weapons since I was eight or nine years old. But like when I said,
Starting point is 00:31:44 I could take a stroke off somebody's golf game. That's real. I've taken minutes off people's miles the same way. When you figure out how to use yourself more effectively, you get more gain less stream, which runs against what a lot of our society teaches us right now. Ah. And I mean, range of movement is one of those things they talk about and, you know, just making sure that you're a spry.
Starting point is 00:32:08 And, you know, I mean, I'm one of those people I can sneeze and throw out my back, you know, or you can sneeze and pull an arm. Oh, that's the first back injury. What happened to do? Oh, I sneezed. Oh, I sneezed. I never thought as I got older that I can injure myself. I broke an arm once sneezing. No, I'm just kidding.
Starting point is 00:32:24 But sometimes I wonder. man. And then I tend to sneeze in a series, like I'll have like six or ten of them. I don't know what it is. I just don't sneeze anymore. I like, I don't know. I think I'm trying to lubricate something in my body to get it out of my system or something. Usually it's after some coffee, a lot of coffee. Maybe I'm drinking too much espresso. So as we go out, tell people how they can onboard with your different offerings that you do. Can they reach out to your website and get one-on-one consulting, things like that? Absolutely. Yes. So anybody can reach you check out the YouTube see if you like it anybody can go to the Patreon get the coaching if you are
Starting point is 00:33:02 and I see this on a very regular basis interesting in fencing and sword play but you don't have somebody local to teach you I can coach you and if it turns out we're not a great fit I can point you at somebody else who can coach you because sometimes personality matters but if you reach out to the Patreon you can sign up on the unpaid version and just send a note saying hey I'm interested in this help me out I will be more than glad to do so And so you can basically tell a teach fencing. Yes, you can't. And I've done so very successfully.
Starting point is 00:33:32 That's awesome, man. I know, Hermony, who I mentored right now, and he is podiuming left and right, and his students are doing the same. Wow. And, you know, good exercise, folks. Gives movement. Get out from behind those stupid screens and move your butt and, you know, get some healthy exercise. And, you know, one of the reasons I like playing video games that shoot is because, you know, it helps me take out some of my aggression. after driving in traffic for a while.
Starting point is 00:33:58 You know, in a healthy way. This sounds like better because I can stab people and swing swords at them in real life. Yeah, I can fool your friends and snicker at them. Can I invite my enemies to come? Enemy fencing is different. You need a chain link for that. Well, thank you very much for coming to the show.
Starting point is 00:34:18 We really appreciate it. Give us your dot-coms as we go out so people can check them out, Russ. Okay, so YouTube.com, Wingsaber, historical fensling. and Russ Mitchell, patreon.com, movement and fencing books and videos. But I'm going to let you give the punch out on the book title as we go out. Go ahead and hit that. Okay, so the book title we've been talking about is Sir Gustav Arlo's Sabre Fencing. Austro-Hungarian Saber Series Volume 3.
Starting point is 00:34:43 Meloratory Saber Series Volume 3. Make sure you pick up the other two volumes so you can keep track what's going on there. April 7, 2022. Thank you very much for us for being in the show. We really appreciate it. All right. Thanks. Nice to be here. Thank you. And thanks so honest for tuning in. I'm kind of interested in this. I'm going to go watch the James Bond thing.
Starting point is 00:35:04 I realize it's probably not real fencing, but boy, boy, what a great entrance attraction thing. I mean, I always want to be James Bond. Maybe I'll learn some fencing to pick some chicks. That or I can defend myself for when I piss off my girlfriend. It goes through the knife, which is, you know, on Fridays. Anyway, thanks for tuning in, everyone. check out his book and his interest wherever fine books are sold and, you know, expand your mind. There's all sorts of different things. There's a romanticism to this sort of deal.
Starting point is 00:35:33 And, you know, you never know. You might end up on the other side of a sword fight and the next time you're riding the bus. And you'll be able to defend yourself or defend your woman chivalry or however that works and all that good stuff. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Ford says Chris Foss, and all this crazy place to the internet. Be good at each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys. next time. And that's you have us out.

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