About circling in a fight. Personally, I think you should just go up to your opponent and strike at him/her (using good timing, distance, range, etc.). If you are not ready to make that strike, stay well back out of distance. When you are ready to strike, then enter into proper range and cut! If as you come into range and are about to make a cut your opponent cuts at you, countercut! Any questions?
I don't disagree with anything of what you said greg, except for the wording of a small but important chunk of this passage. "Staying well back out of distance" is a mistake, in practice, so I'm curious if there's a historical source that will tell you to do this.
You want to maintain a close distance to your opponent, ideally hovering at the very edge of the kill-range.
Fighting multiple opponents makes this imperative, especially if they are skilled at fighting together.
This comes from Liechtenaurs instructions to fight in the vor and get the vorschlag (sp?) when possible. If you are there to fight, then fight. Don't wait around for something to happen.
Equipment: mask, cup, gloves, in that order. Mask so you can include the head as a target. The head is the most important target by virtue of being the most decisive and most common target. Most of us have half a dozen different gloves because we experiment to find the gloves that are right for us in the protection-dexterity spectrum. Once you have learned proper control, you may not even use gloves. A few manuscripts depict fighters practicing in gloves (I.33 for example) but most do not. Having proper intent (one of our basic principles) does indeed make a huge difference and is one of the things that divides those who practice these arts as a Martial Art from those who don't.
Many of the secondary guards are just mutations on the primary four. By the time of, say Joachim Meyer, the four primary guards refer to very specific positions and are distinguished from other positions close by. But in the 14th and much of the 15th century, the four guards were understood more loosely, Alber is Alber whether the sword is held straight out or a bit too the side (which would be iron-door). John C's 14 guards (which I severely doubt he uses or would even recommend anymore) seem to be his own attempt at describing the range of positions in which one can hold the sword. This range is much better depicted in the historical guards, with the four primary guards (from the German tradition) being a broad articulation and the inclusion of the accumulated secondary guards plus the guards of other regions in Europe (such as the Italian guards) composing a detailed and systematic range.
Do you ever jump? Is there a historical precedent to jumping? Some people use quite low basic fighting stances, if the legs are already in a crouch then jumping may prove natural.
We don't jump upwards to void a low cut. We may raise our lead foot up off the ground. We leap forward sometimes, a lunge, with proper footwork.
...in general if you can't void counter-cut->bind is the only real option.
Sometime, many times, counter cutting in order to gain the bind is a much better option and not inferior in any way. Use to in ARMA we voided more than bind. Now it is the opposite based upon a better reading of the sources.
