Equipment
Depending on what your goal is, there are different types of protection that are good thing to have. Below you
can find some brief information about what may be needed.
Mask and mask overlay
Your most important protection as it protects the head, face and neck. The mask is one of the protections you should acquire first. Of course, we do have a number of masks that can be borrowed for the first few times, but to get the most out of your training you should buy your own as soon as you have the opportunity. It should have protection for the back of the head and be FIE-approved.
Gloves
It's very important to properly protect your hands during exercises at a higher tempo. When sparring with e.g. longsword, a pair of strong protective gloves that can withstand more if you get a blow to the hands or fingers are needed. To start out the club has a few pair of gloves available to borrow.
Fencing jacket
The most important protection for the rest of the upper body. Today there are many different models that work well to use, what you need to think about though is that the jacket has a fabric with a puncture resistance of at least 350N.This is, among other things, to provide sufficient protection in case the blade of the sword would break.
Extra protection
Protective pants
After you have acquired the most basic protective equipment, there are slightly different paths to take depending on your level of ambition. to buy some kind of padded pants can be good as they provide extra protection to the hips and thighs.
Gorget and plastron
To compete in tournaments, a gorget to protect the front of the neck is mandatory for everyone. This is to prevent thrusts etc to cause major damage, if you own one it's of course a good thing to use in training during sparring. There's usually some kind of protection in the jacket, but to use a plastron as a bit of extra protection in the chest area can be a good thing. This protects even more against impacts, thrusts or in case a sword would actually break.
Groin protection
Groin protection is important for men to use and mandatory for competition, but it's quite common for women to use these for extra protection as well.
Joint protection
In addition to the protection described above, extra protection to shoulders, elbows, forearms, knees and shins may be needed.