Equipment Guidelines

Once you're in full swing with us and looking to purchase equipment, here are a few useful links:

Equipment Comparison Chart (Click Here) - one of our club members has put together this useful Google Sheet of equipment with linked reviews, details for item specifics and more. 

Purpleheart Armory - excellent customer service and our primary supplier of synthetic training swords.

HEMA Supplies - run by Scott Brown of Ochs America in Orlando FL, they are the US supplier of many steel-equpiment standard pieces inlcuding Regenyei swords and Sparring Gloves brand gloves.

Equipment for HEMA can be both confusing and expensive. We highly recommend attending a class and chatting about your goals, weapon preferences, and more before purchasing ANY equipment. We can talk you through common tournament standards, our minimum safety standards for drilling/free play/sparring, suppliers we recommend, and more. We also have loaner equipment available, so you can get started on your HEMA journey!

As a general rule, always plan on wearing athletic attire you can move comfortably in, and closed toed athletic shoes. Your first investment will be "personal gender-specific athletic protection" - an athletic cup most commonly, women may want to purchase a fencing protector for their chest. There is one piece of equipment we don't have loaners for - guess which piece it is?

For experienced fencers attending our club for free play or sparring, please be mindful we are primarily a synthetic club at this time for longsword and dussack, and a steel club for saber and rapier (with a few members having steel feders/jackets/etc, so don't leave them at home!).

As a HEMA Alliance Affiliate club, we adhere STRICTLY to the HEMA Alliance safety policy - the HEMAA Safety Policy can be found by clicking here.