My newest hobby is getting beat up. Well, that's not really the intent, but I do it quite well. It's the study of European swordsmanship with ARMA, the Association for Rennaisance Martial Arts. We have a nice sized group here in South Jersey, consisting of 6 or so adults and about 4 kids. We meet every Wednesday.

Here's the most recent picture of our group.

Here's the pictures from a recent ARMA outing! Check it out, a good time was had by all in this six hour workout.

Here's a shot of some of our people from 13 May 2006. (click on it to download the full resolution picture)

We are working on writing up our drills and exercises in the hopes of getting feedback from other ARMA members. So here's the first draft of what we hope will become the South Jersey ARMA curriculum.

There used to be a North Jersey group, but they have since disbanded. We went up to support them at the 2005 Family Medieval and Fantasy Faire at Waterloo Village.

Instructions for building practice swords for full-contact free sparring are available. This is not the only method for building practice weapons but it's what we use in our group.
Swordbuilding 101 - shortsword project
Swordbuilding 102 - greatsword project

Finally, we have the "Wall of Pain", a page dedicated to the perils of free-sparring.

some links...
Zornhau and associated techniques with longsword from Lichtenauers Kunst des Fechtens
first 40 pages of Meyer
another Meyer