Starting a HEMA club, advice?

Im going to start a HEMA club and wondered if anyone could give me some advice about training methods and being an an instructor.

I am going to focus on dagger, boxing and wrestling as I'm interested in SD and these can be trained without investing in masks and swords. I have lots of historical manuals saved on my PC for reference.

I have trained in MMA, Judo and about less than six months Krav and Ninjutsu. I reckon I should have enough knowledge to teach boxing and wrestling. There is also an established instructor who can come down sometimes to give a dagger seminar, so I can learn from him.


My questions are about training, I would like to use Matt Thorntons I-method .It always seemed the best approach to alive training. I plan to train as alive as possible. And I wonder if anyone could give me any advice about using this method.

Also any tips about instructing or HEMA in general would be welcome.

Thanks

 

Are you a qualified Instructor in ANY of those disciplines?

If no, don't instruct

Are you qualified in Boxing or Wrestling?

If no you don't get to teach them either

Have you ever done any HEMA with an organised group?

If no, guess what?

Are you insured?

You know where this is going......

 

What Hannibal said.

And out of personal interest...what ninjutsu did you study, where, with who, what grade?

And what do you feel your prior experience brings to HEMA?

 

You want to teach an art you've never trained in?

 

I want to teach Aeronautical engineering. I've done car and bicycle repair, and I've done 6 months of submarine maintenance. I've got lots of manuals at home and some YouTube videos. Any advice?

 

In fairness, no living person can really be said to have trained those arts.

But of course some are more qualified to give their best guess.

 

However those more qualified people didn't just decide one day to teach HEMA, they got together with like minded people and trained together for years first.

 

Having a qualification doesn't make you a good instructor. In all essence it's just a piece of paper. A tick the boxes exercise. There are terrible instructors out there, who are somehow qualified to the eyeballs, that should not be peddling their crap.

Knowledge, & knowing how to teach what they are teaching, are the most important things a teacher should have. Something you generally don't get from an instructor qualification (in my experience anyway).

Insurance is important too, though the chance of successful claims isn't that high if you write out your PAR-Q well and cover all bases. It's all about risk assessment and ticking boxes in a cover your own **** world more than actually being able to teach. Lol.

 

To the op,
1) what experience in HEMA do you have?
2) what experience in teaching do you have?
3) what experience in MMA and Judo do you have?
4) HEMA isn't really about SD as a focus, so why HEMA?

 

As former captain of my school's fencing team, I'm the proud owner of an actual unbroken HEMA lineage. Hell, one of my old coaches actually carried a sword into battle.

 

That's bad-ass.

 

Oh by Thor's bollocks.


No

No

No.

Get thee to a dojo and get some substantial training done and stop trying to play silly buggers.

 

If you have to go on a fairly anonymous martial art board to ask these pretty fundamental questions then you have no business opening a club.
All of this should be answerable by talking to your instructors in the arts you wish to teach and drawing on your own experience in learning these arts.
If you don't have instructors in the arts and experience in learning them then you are YEARS away from being able to open a club.
Finding some instructors and actually learning some arts will answer many of the questions you've asked.

 

In this country, being qualified and being certified pretty much go hand in hand. In order to get insured you need that certification, or someone to vouch for you, for alot of companies to insure you.

I always said I would never teach Kickboxing until I had fought, regardless of my grade. I also know first hand that being a black belt or a qualified Instructor doesn't make you a good teacher. I've experienced that first hand too. I've seen shockingly bad black belts and instructors at clubs I've visited while being a much lower level on 'paper'.

For all the qualifications and paperwork nothing beats experience. If someone's been training for several years, had credible fights, etc, knows what they're talking about, and is dynamite, I'll take that over the one year instructor handouts any day.

 

Yeah there's no magic bullet that guarantees good teaching but IMHO some years of solid training with a reputable club/association and a basic level instructor qualification is the least you should have. It's not like such things are hard to get.
Getting some questions answered on a forum (no matter how good the answers) doesn't cut it.

Note this thread is not the same as a decently qualified beginning instructor with a new club asking for advice from people with more experience or asking for some different angles on what they are already doing.

 

One of the best indicators of martial arts is word of mouth. Like if you are recommended a place unanimously from different sources then it's a good place to be. If I was looking for judo I'd post up a few places and MAP would give me the best options/advice.

 

I have taken onboard everyones comments and am going to have a rethink about this.

 

No, they can't.

To say they can is entirely nonsensical, as you've now elevated HEMA to the status of a primary source, which becomes a logical ouroboros whereby HEMA need only study itself.

HEMA is, at its heart, an academic exercise, predominantly pursued by enthusiastic amateurs. Any historical investigation is only as good as its sources, and, as no source is perfect, by definition HEMA can never be said to have recreated past fighting disciplines in their entirety. This isn't meant to sound disparaging, as I personally think HEMA is great, but to bandy about statements like "I study the same art as Fiore dei Liberi" is to do a great disservice to genuine historical enquiry. For credibility's sake, as a society of experimental historians and archeologists, HEMA must remain honest and open as to its worth as a source.

This is just putting the part of my post you chose not to quote into different words:

Thinking of HEMA as a "broken lineage" of past arts sounds far too much like the thinking of a martial artist, rather than that of an experimental historian or archaeologist.

The context and intent of HEMA practitioners and historical fighters are entirely different. The moment anyone says "we are practising the same art as those we study", the death knell tolls for advancing our knowledge of the past.