So, I'm in utah, for a wedding. Thought I'd stay over another week so that I could go to saltwars.
I'm getting my brother, who also expresses interest in fighting, and who fights with his housemates, with swords I've provided, to go with me. He's of age, but he's untrained- the fighting with his housemates is a terrible affair. He's still at the stage where they run away. It's kinda awful.

So I'm trying to get him into fighting shape. His instincts and reaction times are good, which I'll blame on genes(we come from a line of killers, all the way back to charlemagne), though as a youngest sibling, he's kinda timid, and definitely runs away too much. So to help him with the urge to run, I'm having him work on block strike with me- while it's good for other things as well, mostly it's about him getting used to standing his ground.

Second, I sat him down, and went over the strategy(but not tactics) involved in ditching and flanking. Not sure how much of it sank in- he was attentive, and trying to get it all down, but it's all theory atm. I'll probably have to repeat it to him again later, once he's seen the reality of things, to firm it up.

Third- I've got him practicing denial guard, and practicing parrying back and forth with it, so he'll have at least some (stationary) defense. Yeah, it'll be little more than a speed bump against the better fighters, but it's something against the weaker ones.

Fourth- I did muscle isolations with him- going over the joints, I identified in this post and having him move each one separately. This actually seemed really helpful- it's helping eliminate the sloppy movement that most new fighters have, and got him to be able to understand how to curve shots around a defense.

Fifth, I've shown him a couple of the best youtube videos- BrennonEH's channel, and a little bit of Peter the quick, though I'm not sure how much of the second will be useful to him atm. He's better than me at understanding what's about to happen(even though he's unable to stop it) so maybe it'll help. Certainly it'll give him what he needs to study later, in order to become awesome.

Finally, I'm showing him a little sword and board- he's been fighting single blue, since that's all he had.

We've got about a week or so, till saltwars happens, so we'll see how it goes, and I'll post more as I teach him more.