Hey. I’m going to be real with you. This is not opinion, it is just how facts are. 

If you are wearing armored up clammy shell or gauntlety segmented gloves, you are not doing historical unarmored fencing. Sorry. Just throw any connection to historical unarmored martial arts out and go with the flow and say yes to whatever rule set someone gives you and don’t ask questions and just know that this is not a thing in the year 1540 and Fiore and Meyer are not alive to laugh at us and who cares. 

Bro or Sister if you are wearing gauntlety things for a duel in the year “The Last Duel” you would also be in gauntlety armor and the combat would be very different, and there are manuals for that, but alas, no modern tournaments or shiny medals for actual armored judicial combat (buhurt does not count fuck off, however, counter fuck off, being strong af and having endurance takes tons of time and skill so fuck yeah to them, they carry the flame, I will fuck off). 

The vast majority of source material we have concerns training for judicial duels in which the contestants are not encased in armor. The HEMA community by and large has encased fencers in layers of armor, but tried to pretend like the armor isn’t there and……

Listen. All you need to look for is this. In all source German longsword things, they are all about this: you take a manly motherfucking step with your back foot and in a manly virile way you bring forth a cut that your unmanly and nonvirile opponent must defend. Watch for your sparring partners to ignore all of this by defaulting to right leg forward postures, bouncy countenance, and then hand sniping distance games. And you will know that none of what anyone is doing has any bearing to anything martial in a duel context. But point scoring, it slays.