[Axel Pettersson]

thanks erik, you are welcome over to train with us any time.

as for tournament equipment, the only competitions we have organized or participated in have been for unarmoured fighting, so that's what I'll comment on:

we favour the minimalistic approach, for this years synthetic waster competitions minimum gear is a fencing mask, a cup for gents and breast protector for ladies, and gloves. Additional gear might be used but we exclude any gear made of hard materials like metal or hard plastic, as we allow more or less unrestricted grappling, punching, kicking etc (not agains the natural bending direction of joints though, or the neck, spine or back of the head). Same thing with the shinai competitions, with steel the injury risk goes up I suppose, and requires more protective gear or protective rulesets.

Scott Brown and Matt Galas are developing the rules for the synthetic waster sword & buckler competition for this year (which has a frikkin sweet lineup of fighters btw) so it might vary a bit from the other competitions.

the risk for injuries is always present, in competition and in sparring, and we probably won't away from it. For those who want to train hard and fight on a high level, more and harder training is the answer, you wouldn't send an untrained boxer or MMA fighter up in the ring and get suprised or upset if he or she gets injured, and the same should apply for us. For more recreational competition (which is also something we encourage) you might spend more time on lessening the risks. One thing though, in HEMA the fight is usually halted and reset after a successfull hit, which drastically reduces the risk of injuries compared to say full contact stick fighting with rattan sticks where the fighting doesn't stop after a hit. one of our guys (Anders Linnard) participaded in one such competition last year and those people use equal or less protective gear than us and still fight using a more dangerous ruleset (the continious fighting). note the above is written with synthetic waster in mind, and perhaps hanwei feders, not rebated steel.

Pentti Kangasmaa of our club makes our wasters, he has also made alot of aluminum messer wasters and sold abroad, and his synthetics are real cool with a good flex that allows us to reduce protective gear. however he does not have the means to produce very many, and most are swallowed up by our members pretty quickly. Scott Brown will bring back a pair of longsword and single handers to the US after Swordfish, so if you train with him sometime you can try them out. There is a British guy who will start to produce similar wasters to a lesser cost and on a larger scale pretty soon, too.