Training women, Pt 3: Recruitment and communication

If you want to diversify your fighter base, you may want to have a look at how you're advertising and marketing your practices, as well as how you communicate about them with interested people. It's easy to fall into thinking that all you need to do is to present the facts: when and where your practices take place. Maybe you will remember to add "Welcome!" in your sign-off if you're a people person.

For a moment, put yourself in the head of someone who may not have done any martial arts in their life, or may have done martial arts in a more typical male-heavy environment and perhaps had some unpleasant experiences through it. Let's assume that the notion of a rumble session, where a group of people turn up and muck around with bats/hockey sticks/branches/stones/swords is not something that they have ever engaged in. Imagine turning up for a craft lesson, where you're presented with a piece of wood or a lump of metal, and told to make something with it, with you not having a slightest idea of how to start or what tools you need for it. (That has happened to me, by the way.)

Most regular fitness classes that women tend to be familiar with are very highly structured weekly sessions, typically group classes where everyone is expected to do the same thing as demonstrated by an instructor, with possibly some variation in different movements according to individual ability level. There is typically very little physical contact between individuals (except of course in martial arts or team sports). Generally the participants need to provide little in the way of their own equipment; they might bring their own mats to yoga and pilates classes. In martial arts, participants will eventually acquire their own (usually fabric) suits or equipment necessary for sports like Kendo, which is fairly widely available. Typically, class advertisements will briefly describe what is involved and specify if participants need to bring anything.

Further, up until the past couple of years literally ALL of fitness oriented towards women has been focused on their looks, and that is still the situation to a very large extent. Just have a look at ads for gyms and fitness classes: get the beach body for the summer, get the body you've always dreamed of, with added pictures of beautiful young white ladies. Thankfully, lately women's fitness has become more orientated also towards strength and health - but still, particularly in terms of weightlifting, it is presented as a common concern among women that they might become "bulky". I have no idea whether this is a real thing that women worry about or not.

Unless women have done competitive sports in the past, they may feel uncomfortable with the notion of a situation where there is a "loser" and a "winner." Women are traditionally socialised towards working for a community, whether it be family, work community, social community, or society at large, and discouraged from striving for personal victories or things that they might do solely for themselves. (There is a twisted paradox relating to this that I call rivalry between women, but I will return to this in a subsequent post.)

Taking into account all of the above, why on earth would any woman want to take up heavy fighting?

Because despite all of it, there are women who dream about being able to be strong, to be able to fight, to be able to compete, to be able to win against others, to have crazy-ass rough fun, to feel the rush of battles, and to be a knight. Sometimes they don't know how to express it, and sometimes they don't realise that that's what they dream of until they try it out. The trick is to get them in to try it out, and doing it in a way that provides them with the least barrier possible.

I am going to use as example my shire's website, since we had had good success in recruiting women fighters.

1. Use pictures of female fighters. On our front page, the link to the "Armoured Fighting" section contains a photo of two women in armour grinning from ear to ear.

2. Explain what it's about. On our armoured fighting page, we include the following things:

• Description of the activity written for people who know nothing about it
• Emphasis on the safety: equipment, supervision, training, strict rules, safety test (=authorisation)
• Specifically mention "all genders and we welcome everyone" - this shows that we are aware of genders beyond the usual two and that we are prepared to make all of them welcome
• Mention that we train and compete together
• Offer an immediate encouragement for all those who might not be thinking that this is not for them by mentioning technique is more important than size or strength
• Different weapon forms and fighting formats available to whet their appetite
• What happens at practices 
• Practice times and details of a contact person
• Emphasise that training is suited to all levels and complete beginners are always welcome

3. Diverse contact persons. We have a female name listed as the contact person, which may have helped with recruitment.

4. Enthusiastic initial contact coded in female language.
Here is my more-or-less standard response to an initial query about fighting practices, with commentary for the current purposes added in:

You will be very very welcome. We are always delighted to get new people joining us. (emphasis on welcoming the newcomer) Armoured fighting is great fun, very safe due to our regulations, a good way to keep fit, and our group is very supportive. (these are the great reasons why you should come along!) Aside from weekly practices, we organise weekend events now and again, and those who wish to, can compete. (Here's what we offer. You don't have to compete if you don't want to) Men and women train together and compete together, and women are not seen as lesser or weaker than men in the sport. (We not only believe but also practice the notion of equality - reassurance)

The venue is xxxx, and the practice runs from 7 pm. If you're driving, there is a small carpark behind the school. Park in the fenced off area right behind the primary school building, as they don't like us using the bigger carpark. Come to the main door at the top of the stairs in the front of the building and ring the doorbell, and someone will come let you in. (Clear instructions how to find us)

My phone number is xxx if you have any problems. 

If you have any questions, just let me know. (Making myself available to show willing and enthusiasm to welcome a new person in.)

As a trainer, never forget that you are there for your students. Your students' job is to turn up, to listen to you, to do the exercises to the best of their ability, and to make your job worthwhile by striving to improve themselves. But you need to enable that by building an open, trusting, comfortable relationship from the beginning, and you will need to go the extra way at first. Whether you want it or not, as your students' first trainer, you will become Mr or Ms or Mx Heavy Fighting for them until they get exposure to other fighters and other trainers, and start forming their own concepts of what fighting means for them. What you do is what they will associate with heavy fighting. If you are grumpy, unsupportive, sarcastic or sexist, they will link those qualities with fighting and the fighting community. If you are open, welcoming, available, and take interest in their comfort and wellbeing, they will form a positive image of our beloved art and are that bit more willing to keep turning up for practices. 

5. Ongoing communication. Your preferred form of communication will depend on the individuals in your group. You may want to use FB, Whatsapp, email, or something else. If you know practice will not happen at the usual time, communicate this as early as you can - this is particularly important for those women who may have childcare issues. If one of the group announces that they can't make it a particular week, never ever respond with snark, sarcasm, annoyance or anything similar. They are under no obligation to turn up. They may have work or family stuff going on, or a physical or mental issue may have raised its head. You will acknowledge their message and welcome them again the following week.      

Training women, Pt 2: The body

Physiology

You may be familiar with alleged differences between the male and female skeletal structures, finger length, centre of gravity, and so on. My understanding is that a lot of that is exaggerated in terms of significance, but I have little knowledge of anatomy beyond the basics, so I'm going to reserve judgement of such claims.

I know tall and short, fat and slim, male and female fighters, with a mix of all of these characteristics. Duke Drachenwald is not much taller than I am, and I am 164 cm/5'4. As we all know, good technique is superior to physical strength.

There are four features in terms of female physiology that make a difference in terms of training:

1. Females generally have a larger chest circumference in relation to the rest of the body than males, and the tissue is distributed in such a way, that unless the breasts are flattened through binding, the woman may have difficulty with certain movements involving bringing the arm across the upper body. Some women may have difficulty fighting with their head held up and their chest out, rather than curling their head and shoulders over their chest, because they have been told they shouldn't be having "their tits out". 

2. Females have wider hips than men. In the fighting system I use/am learning and developing, this makes little difference in terms of power generation. However, both the presence of more mass here, as well as the wider chest, may affect the woman's spatial perception regarding their position in an engagement. The shape of the female hip also means that the length of the female upper torso from the nape of the neck to the navel is considerably shorter than that male equivalent length. These kind of features have much more relevance in terms of armour construction (I will come back to this at a later stage) but they may have a relevance to the particular style you teach. 

3. As a rule, women have smaller hands than men. Again, an immediate relevance is armour, of which more later. However, another immediate significance is the grip of the sword and of the shield. If a woman is not quite able to close her fingers around a sword hilt, her sword mobility will be affected and she will be clumsier than a man with larger hands grasping the same sword - through no fault of her own but because of her physiology. Similarly, if she has difficulty grasping a shield, some of the energy she should be using to control the fight will be re-directed to managing the equipment.

4. Most women between the ages of 13 and 50 have monthly periods. An egg is released from the woman's ovaries around halfway through the menstrual cycle, which is called the ovulation. Her uterus will have been developing a thick lining, in case the egg gets successfully fertilised and needs to attach itself to the lining. If a fertilisation doesn't happen, this uterine lining is released from the body as menstrual blood (and yes, it can be lumpy). Women experience their periods and the lead-up to their periods in different ways. Some women barely notice it. Others suffer a great deal of pain. Symptoms include: low/aggressive mood, headaches, abdominal pain, nausea, sometimes a feeling of weakness. Most women have their heaviest flow in the first two days of their cycle, during which they may feel the worst.

Women athletes have only started to talk about their periods in the last year or so. Here is another link. And Here is a link to a recent study in Sweden concerning female athletic performance and the menstrual cycle. Some women can perform better in particular points of their cycle. Others can feel ill and are able to perform less well. It is possible that an important tourney co-incides with a bad day of the cycle. Or it may be that your female student is suddenly performing far less well in practice than she normally would.

Ideally, try to create your practice into a space where your female student can say, "Dude, I got my period, I feel shit," without anyone feeling embarrassed. They may choose not to. You may choose to not bring it up. That's fine. But if they feel they can, you're winning. How can you achieve this? Do not joke about annoying people being on the rag. Never challenge female fighters accusing them of being on their period. Talk about the experiences your female fighter friends have had, or other sporty female friends, in a neutral, informative way. If you want, you can put together a care bag for the practice, which includes pain killers, plasters, stomach medicine, tissues, nose spray - and pads and tampons, so that they are present there with the rest of the equipment as perfectly normal items. They will also thank you for the pain killers.

Conduct

Yes, yes, not all men, and yes, you are not one of those men. But the number of those men is so great in the world that literally every single women has grown up in an environment, where they consider it normal to have to moderate their behaviour and movements under a constant threat of predators. Even the strongest, the most confident take-no-shit women are subject to this. If you truly want to make your practice and other fighting environments comfortable for women, so that they can feel themselves safe no matter what, you need to respect this. Some women may have had bad experiences with men and they may be particularly sensitive to male behaviour, presence and ways of speaking. If you follow the below advice, you are not doing so because you are personally suspect or because you're kowtowing to the PC-brigade: you are, in fact, demonstrating to the female fighter that you embody the virtues for which we strive: chivalry, courtesy, and respect - and you are in every way a sound chap.

1. When inspecting the armour for safety, inform the fighter what you are doing at all times, and ask them for permission before you touch them. "I am going to put my hand on your back to check for kidney protection, is that ok?" and RESPECT the answer. Get into the habit of asking even when you're inspecting your friends, who you know will not mind, in order to avoid forgetting the ask when you inspect someone you don't know.

2. If you have legged your female opponent and are fighting them from upright position, please don't shove your crotch in their face. That would be poor behaviour at the best of times, but it is particularly pronounced in a situation where a relatively new female fighter has to smell her opponent's box in a situation that mimics an intimate contact. And in any case if you know what you're doing you don't need to do that.

3. Do not make any comments about her body or her looks, no matter how positive. That is not relevant to the situation in which you are training together.

4. NEVER, EVER employ any kind of innuendo until you are 120% certain that the female fighter in the situation will not mind it. Yes, there are women who enjoy dirty jokes. But you need to identify them first.

5. As with #1, in case of drills and demonstrations, always ask the other person first, if you need to touch them. You can get a blanket permission in the beginning of the class, if it makes things easier, as long as you remind the attendees that they can refuse at any point. If you need to figure out another way to demonstrate your point, well - you are the trainer, that is your job, to think of a way to teach your student in a way that makes sense to them (and that includes keeping them comfortable).

6. If anyone else in the practice makes any of the mistakes listed above, you need to step in without hesitation and say, "Dude, that is not cool." If you as the trainer, the authority, don't call out bad behaviour straight away, you have effectively given it your blessing.

The above, of course, don't just apply to women - they are pretty decent guidelines for interaction with any gender.

Training women, Pt 1: Introduction

I feel very conflicted about addressing this topic that I'm occasionally asked to talk about, but recently I gave a class about this at a weekend practice and the reception was positive enough for me to expand on it here.

Disclaimers:

1. I strongly dislike the idea that "women", "men", "gays", "whatevers" are a homogenous blob who can justifiably be generalised under any topic. There is a vast amount of individual variation under any grouping, and what applies to example A does not necessarily apply to example H even if both examples are taken from the same group.

2. I have a female body, and I have largely no problem with that, but mentally I identify as what can best described as agender. I pay very little attention to gender in the day to day life, and I have little interest in typically "feminine" activities or aesthetics. I was brought up in a country with a strong tradition of equality, and I often have difficulty relating to the experience of women brought up elsewhere.

3. Rather than just focusing on training women and women's experience of fighting, I think we should consider the experience of anyone who is not what I call a standard fighter: a young to middle age white heterosexual cis man. However, that is a lot all in one go, and, the only aspect of this I am qualified to talk about is the experience of fighting and training as a woman. So that is what I'm going to do, based on my own experiences, those of my friends, those I have read about, and what I know and have experienced of female culture and socialisation outside the fighting area, in the mundane society. 

There is enough material in this topic that I am going to write it up under several posts, as a series. 

Why is this important? Whatever about other kingdoms, in Drachenwald the numbers of fighters have decreased, and much of fighting activities is focused on a few particular tourneys over the year, rather than the kingdom sustaining a balanced and active fighting community across the board. In Insulae Draconis, our participant numbers in the Coronet tourney have doubled over the past few years largely due to more and more women getting involved in fighting on a serious basis. If we want to keep armoured fighting as an important and inspiring element of the Society, we cannot afford to turn potential fighters away or neglect nurturing them just because they differ from the standard.

In my experience, Drachenwald is a very good kingdom in which to be a female fighter. I have experienced no (evident) prejudice due to my gender from other fighters, and I have heard of little such happening, at least in the recent years. I have no doubt that there are also other perspectives.

What I have encountered is, on the one hand, a strong willingness to include non-standard fighters in practices and tourneys but a certain degree of a lack of knowledge of how to best do so, and, on the other hand, practices developing into spaces that, inavoidably, follow the "masculine" paradigm in terms of social interaction and training practices. Such practices can be hard to break into, even with the best will in the world. It is particularly difficult to be more inclusive, if you're not doing anything wrong, but you have no concept that your particular practice mode doesn't necessarily suit everyone, and you cannot even imagine other possibilities.

The purpose of this post series is to ask you to consider how you run your practices and tourneys, how you treat your students and fellow fighters, and whether there are things you could be doing differently.   

Training with Depression: 10 things to do

I know many fighters who have issues with their mental health: I am one of them. I started taking a low dose of antidepressants in August, and while they have had an absolutely fantastic effect in allowing me to feel calmer, mentally stronger, generally more positive, able to set boundaries, and slow down to analyse how my mind works, they have also meant that I need far more sleep and rest, and consequently have not been training at my usual intensity since then. I have, however, been training, and I have been thinking about how hard it can be to get yourself out to your pell, to practice, to the gym, or out to run, when your own mind and the associated processes can weigh heavier on you than any iron. So today I want to talk a little bit about how to keep up training in such circumstances.

First and foremost: I'm not a professional. Please, talk to your doctor and try to formulate a plan. If you are prescribed medicine, please keep taking them. If you think you would find therapy useful, please seek out a therapist and work with them. Reach out to your friends and family: hopefully you have a supportive partner who is prepared to walk this journey with you. If you are friends and family, don't wait to be reached out to: ask how your fighter is doing, take time with them, don't shy away if they open up - and keep their confidence.

That out of the way, you, as a fighter, be confident that this experience will, in fact, enable you to emerge as a better fighter. On the one hand, yes, you are bearing an injury, which will slow you down, as any physical issue would. But at the same time, like a physical issue, your mental health issue will force you to step back, slow down, analyse yourself and how you do things, including how you can best adjust to working with your issue and improve from it. You will need to figure out what works for you, and what doesn't, rather than just barging onwards through sheer stubborness, and exhausting yourself along the way. Sound familiar?

1. Prioritise sleep and recovery. Things are tiring. Work is tiring. Social life is tiring. Training is tired. Struggling with your own mind is tiring. Allow yourself to be tired. Sleep will help you in all number of ways, so make sure you get as much sleep as you can. Downtime will also help. I have had to learn to take naps, but they are now an essential part of my self care.

2. A few minutes is better than none at all. If you're not able to do a full set or a full run, how much can you do? Often it's easy to fall into the false thinking that there is only two modes of doing things: (1) exactly "right"; and (2) not at all. But there are stages in between, and often our thinking can be overfocused on our perception of what right is. Every step you take, and every raise of a weight you do, is more than nothing at all. Everything counts.

3. Actions influence emotions. Just as you don't do a thing because you feel crap, doing things can also influence how you feel. Sometimes you are too drained to do anything at all, but if you have a bit more energy and can nudge yourself, you are likely to find that even a short period of activity will rejig things in your head and make you feel better.

4. Set small, manageable targets. Get a notebook, or an app, or a whiteboard on the wall. Write targets for yourself where you can easily see them, but keep them deliberately small and easily doable. When you're carrying a mental injury, you are not able to push yourself to the max. Do what works for you: a daily target, or a weekly one. Shorter target periods give you experiences of success more often than longer ones, which will contribute to your mental health. Try 10 minutes on the pell. If that's too much, do 5. Maybe 50 shots is the maximum you can manage? Set a target of 20. Run for 2 km. Run for 15 minutes.

5. Track your targets. When you're done with your targets, tick them off, again where you can see them, or give yourself a sticker, and this way you have a constant reminder that you're still getting things done. And, crucially, if you don't achieve the target, don't blame yourself. Think about it like each fight in an important tourney. When you face a new opponent, it doesn't matter if you won or lost against the previous one. Each fight is its own thing. Each training target is its own thing.

6. Why do you really want to train? Actually sit down with yourself, and analyse why you're training. Because I want to win Crown/Coronet/become a Knight. Okay, why do I want to do that? Because I like winning. Why do I like winning? Because I enjoy being good at something. Why is that? Because it makes me feel powerful. Why? Because my body feels strong and agile. Why? Because my body is doing things smoothly and the movements feel good. Ok, so I'm training in order to feel good about my body. Boring down to your actual motivations can help you get up and keep training even when you feel that your goals remain forever out of reach - or when you have already reached your goals and you may feel there's no longer anything to gain.

7. Try out new things. Try out new combos or techniques on the pell. Try out a new weapon form at practice. Choose a new running route, or try out a whole different form of cardio or a different sport.

8. Go back to basics. Maybe trying out a new thing feels completely beyond your reach. Work on the very basics that will always prove useful. Throw basic shots on the pell. Do footwork up and down the house or the garden. Practice shifting your weight.

9. Moderate your resources. You only have a certain amount of resources available during a day. It is likely that this amount has decreased since your mental injury kicked in. Accept and allow this. You will need to do a certain degree of prioritising. If you want to go for a run, you may not have the energy to work on that A&S project. Explain to your family that training will help you with your mental health and ask for support in enabling this. This may mean someone else cooking dinner, someone else dealing with school runs, or walking the dog, or many other similar chores. 

10. Be flexible. Consider a pool of different training activities that you can vary based on your energy levels. If you're not able to go for a run in the rain, can you practice footwork at home? If you're too tired to go to the gym, can you do yoga, pilates, or generic core exercises at home?     

Bonus

11. Talk. As worn as this advice is, it does work for a reason. Talk to your Knight, your squires, your consort, your friends and family, anyone you know well and whom you trust. You may feel that you're a burden and that nobody wants to listen, but this is your depression lying to you. If people don't want to listen, or are not in a position to do so, they will make their excuses and remove themselves. If people stay, or check in with you, don't be afraid to talk about what you're going through.

If you feel like you have nobody else around who understands what you're going through, you can always reach out to me, and I will try to listen the best I can, or arrange a time to do so.

What you are going through is normal and common, and your awareness of it makes you better and stronger.