JustBeginning
← Back to the hema guide

Your first six weeks of HEMA

HEMA has a longer on-ramp than most martial arts — you need a club, borrowed gear, and some patience before the sword work makes sense. Here's what actually happens in the first six weeks.

By The JustBeginning Editors · Published June 3, 2026

HEMA has a longer runway than most hobbies. You don’t show up, pick up a sword, and start fighting on day one — there’s a club to find, gear to understand, footwork to absorb, and a set of concepts from 15th-century German fighting manuals to wrap your head around. Six weeks is about how long it takes to get to the point where all of it starts connecting. This is what those six weeks actually look like.

Week 1: Find a club, then show up empty-handed

The biggest mistake people make with HEMA is buying gear before setting foot in a club. Most clubs have loaner equipment — mask, jacket, gloves, training sword — specifically so newcomers can try the art before committing $700 to protective equipment. Walk in wearing athletic clothes. Ask if they have loaner gear. Almost every club will say yes.

When you arrive, don’t perform expertise you don’t have. The HEMA community is small and honest — practitioners will notice if you’re overselling your background, and they won’t mind at all if you’re genuinely new. What they notice and appreciate is someone who listens, asks good questions, and doesn’t get frustrated when something is hard.

Your first session will probably involve:

  • Footwork patterns: how to advance and retreat without crossing your feet, how to move obliquely, how to keep your weight centered while in motion.
  • Basic guard positions: the Liechtenauer tradition (what most clubs teach) has four primary guards — vom Tag, Pflug, Ochs, Alber. You won’t retain them in session one, but you’ll hear the names and see the shapes.
  • Paired slow-work: with a synthetic training sword, doing the movements at quarter-speed with a partner, working on contact and blade control rather than speed.

You will feel clumsy. That’s the correct starting state.

Weeks 2–3: Footwork becomes automatic, cuts start to develop

By week two, footwork starts to click — not perfectly, but reliably. The advance and retreat feel less like conscious decisions and more like reactions. This is when instructors typically introduce the offensive material: the basic cuts (Oberhau, Unterhau, Mittelhau — high, low, and horizontal cuts), thrusts, and simple combinations.

This period tends to have a predictable frustration point: the gap between what you understand and what you can do. You understand the Oberhau — strike from the shoulder, edge-aligned, driving through the target. You’ve seen it demonstrated clearly. Then you try it, and it’s a mess of twisting elbows and uncertain footwork. This is normal. This is what the first 20 sessions are for.

The thing to hold onto here is that HEMA technique is built from principles, not memorized sequences. The Liechtenauer tradition is organized around concepts like Vor (initiative, acting before your opponent) and Nach (response, acting after), Indes (in the instant of contact), and the principle that every position should be simultaneously an attack and a defense. Understanding these concepts won’t make your cuts clean immediately, but it changes how you interpret everything you’re learning — you’re not memorizing a choreography, you’re learning a logic.

Spend five minutes at the end of each session looking at one primary source text. The Wiktenauer has English translations of Liechtenauer, Ringeck, and other masters. You don’t need to understand everything — just reading the structure of how a technique is described changes how you think about training it.

instructor demonstrating sword guard position to students
Photo by Yuanpei Hua on Unsplash

Weeks 4–5: Drilling with resistance, taste of sparring

Around week four, something shifts: slow-work with a cooperative partner starts feeling too easy. Your cuts are landing where you intend them, your footwork is holding up, and you’re starting to notice openings in your partner’s position. This is when clubs typically introduce resistance drilling — the same techniques, but with a partner who isn’t fully cooperative, who moves and defends and forces you to adapt.

Resistance drilling is where HEMA gets uncomfortable and interesting at the same time. The techniques that worked in slow cooperative work start breaking down — you discover your Zornhau (wrath cut) has a timing problem, your bind responses are a half-second late. This is valuable information. You’re learning something real about where your technique actually stands versus where you thought it stood.

At this stage, many clubs also introduce light sparring: not full free-play, but a constrained version — one person attacks from a set starting position, the other responds, then they switch. It’s sparring with training wheels, and it’s the right tool for this point in the learning curve.

What you’ll notice in light sparring is that the initiative problems are much harder than the technique problems. Knowing which cut to throw is easy when it’s telegraphed in a drill. Knowing when to throw it — and committing without hesitation — is a different skill entirely. The Vor/Nach concepts you read about start making physical sense.

Week 6: First real sparring

By week six, most clubs have you in some form of supervised free sparring — two practitioners in full gear, no predetermined roles, playing the game as it’s actually meant to be played. It will feel chaotic. You’ll notice yourself abandoning technique under pressure: swinging instead of cutting, pulling back when you should be entering, freezing when you’re surprised.

This is exactly right. Sparring pressure doesn’t destroy your technique — it reveals what you’ve actually learned versus what you’ve only understood intellectually. Your footwork may be cleaner than you expected (footwork tends to hold up under pressure because it’s learned earlier and practiced more). Your offensive timing will be worse than you expected.

After your first sparring session, you’ll have a very specific list of things to fix. That list is worth more than six months of drilling without sparring ever could be. HEMA is a partner art — the feedback only comes from a live opponent, and the six-week on-ramp exists to make sure you can receive that feedback safely and productively.

Things you’ll fail at — and that’s fine

  • Winding: entering the bind and adjusting to a different line of attack. Conceptually simple. Physically, most people feel like they’re wrestling a fire hose for the first two months.
  • Committing to an attack: the impulse is to hedge, to do a half-committed strike that can be pulled back. HEMA technique depends on commitment — a half-committed Zornhau is just a bad miss.
  • Remembering guard names under pressure: your brain is busy. The guards will come eventually. Don’t let the terminology slow you down in the first month.
  • Tracking the bind: what your blade and your opponent’s blade are doing in contact is a sixth sense that takes time to develop. You’ll lose the thread constantly early on. So does everyone.

What changes at week seven

Once you’ve had your first real sparring sessions, your learning accelerates sharply. You know which problems are real because you’ve felt them. You have questions for your instructor that are specific rather than general. You understand which drills to prioritize.

A few things will make the months after this inflection point more productive:

Record your sparring occasionally. Video is brutal and invaluable. The thing you think you’re doing and the thing you’re actually doing are often completely different, and video shows you the gap instantly.

Find a regular training partner at your level. A committed pair who trains together outside of club hours will improve faster than either would training with the broader group alone. You’ll develop patterns, correct each other, and build the specific rhythm that makes a sparring pair.

Read one more historical manual. After six weeks in the Liechtenauer tradition, pick up Joachim Meyer’s Gründtliche Beschreibung der Kunst des Fechtens, or George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence if you’re interested in the English tradition. The historical masters are not just historical curiosity — they’re still the most concentrated technical writing on these weapons in existence.

You’re not a beginner at week seven. You’re someone with six weeks of genuine training and a clear sense of what needs work. That’s a much more interesting thing to be.

Ready to buy your own gear? See our HEMA gear guide for the mask, jacket, gloves, and training sword worth buying first.