Medieval Knight Training: The Real Conditioning Behind the Armor

Medieval knight training was a decade-long apprenticeship organised around one unusual demand: fighting competently while wearing 30 to 50 kg of steel spread across every limb. Published treadmill research on men in replica fifteenth-century armour found that walking in a full harness costs roughly 2.1 to 2.3 times the energy of walking unloaded, and running about 1.9 times — noticeably more than carrying the same mass on the trunk. That single measurement explains most of what the historical record shows: training began in childhood, leaned on repetitive weapon drills against fixed targets, and built grip, trunk and hip strength as a by-product rather than as a stated goal.

What Is Documented, and What Is Modern Inference

This series has covered cultures where almost no training material survives, and the honest answer there is usually a shrug. Medieval Europe is different. Three separate strands of hard evidence exist, and it is worth naming them before anything else, because everything else in this article is built on them.

1. Surviving armour. Museum harnesses can be weighed, and replicas can be built and worn, so the load a knight carried is a measured quantity rather than a guess.
2. Surviving fight manuals. The Fechtbücher tradition left us actual instructional texts, with named authors and dated manuscripts, showing what techniques were taught.
3. Modern laboratory measurement. The physiological cost of moving in plate armour has been measured under controlled conditions and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

What does not survive is anything resembling a strength and conditioning programme. No medieval master left sets, reps, progressions or rest intervals. Where this article describes physical qualities a knight must have had, that is inference drawn from the load and the task — clearly signposted as such.

The Armour Was the Training Load

The best number available comes from the study itself. Askew, Formenti and Minetti open their paper by stating that by the fifteenth century a typical suit of field armour weighed between 30 and 50 kg and was distributed over the entire body. That distribution is the detail that matters most, and it is easy to skim past.

Their three replica harnesses — an English suit of about 1470 to 1480, a mid-to-late fifteenth-century Milanese suit, and a late fifteenth-century Germanic gothic style — averaged 35 kg. For the four experienced armour wearers who took part, that came to roughly 44 per cent of body mass.

Note that this is heavier than the 15 to 25 kg figure often repeated online. Weights genuinely varied by period, region, purpose and wearer, and tournament armour was heavier again, but the figures cited here are the ones stated in the published study.

What the Treadmill Study Actually Found

The experiment was straightforward. Four men experienced in wearing replica armour walked at 0.5 to 2.0 metres per second and ran at 1.7 to 2.0 metres per second on a treadmill while their oxygen consumption was measured, with readings taken once breathing had stabilised at each speed.

The net metabolic cost of locomotion in armour came out 2.1 to 2.3 times higher than unloaded walking at the same speed, and 1.9 times higher for running. Some of that is simply the extra force needed to support additional mass, which is unsurprising.

The interesting part is the residual. The authors report that the cost in armour was also much higher than equivalent trunk loading, meaning a knight paid more for 35 kg of harness than a modern hiker pays for 35 kg in a rucksack. They attribute that gap chiefly to the increased energy required to swing the limbs and to impaired breathing.

Why Distributed Load Changes the Training Problem

Mass on the limbs behaves differently from mass on the back because the limbs accelerate and decelerate with every stride. A greave and sabaton on each leg must be swung thousands of times per hour of movement, and each swing has to be paid for.

Restricted breathing compounds it. A cuirass and its associated plates constrain chest expansion at exactly the moment when oxygen demand is highest, which is a poor combination for anyone who has to keep working in it.

The training implication is inference, but a reasonable one: adaptation to a harness like this is highly specific. Time spent moving and fighting in the actual armour is the only thing that closely resembles the task, which fits the picture of boys being put into progressively heavier equipment from early adolescence.

A Career That Started at Seven

The apprenticeship structure is well documented. Boys from noble households typically entered service as pages somewhere between the ages of seven and ten, becoming familiar with horses, hunting and mock weapons while serving a knight, baron or royal court.

At around fourteen a page became a squire, and the martial content sharpened: practice with lance and sword, sometimes using deliberately heavier weapons for conditioning, alongside cleaning weapons, maintaining armour and attending a knight in the field. Knighting generally followed between eighteen and twenty-one.

That is roughly eleven to fourteen years of near-daily exposure, beginning before puberty. Whatever else can be said about it, the timeline resembles a modern elite athletic pathway far more than it resembles adult recreational training.

The Two Drills We Can Name: Pell and Quintain

Most cultures in this series left no named training apparatus. Medieval Europe left two, both repeatedly described in the historical literature.

• The pell. A stout wooden post, struck repeatedly with sword or other weapons. It permits very high volumes of full-force striking with no partner and no injury risk, which makes it a technique and endurance tool in equal measure.
• The quintain. A rotating arm carrying a shield at one end and a weight at the other. Ridden at, it demands an accurate strike and then immediate forward movement, because the counterweight swings round to punish a rider who slows down.
• Suspended rings. Also recorded as a squire’s target, rewarding lance precision at speed rather than power.

Both main devices share a feature modern coaches would recognise instantly: they let a trainee accumulate an enormous number of repetitions of the exact skill, at close to real intensity, without needing an opponent. That is an efficient way to build a motor pattern and the local endurance to keep expressing it.

Mounted Combat and the Demands Nobody Wrote Down

Fighting from horseback is where the physical demands become most distinctive, and also where the record is thinnest. The documented requirement is that a knight controlled his horse largely with knees, legs and seat, because his hands were occupied with shield and lance.

From that, some inference is unavoidable. Steering and staying seated by leg pressure alone implies substantial adductor and hip strength, and sustained trunk stiffness to transmit lance impact without being unseated. Holding a shield and controlling reins over long periods implies serious grip endurance.

None of that appears as a stated training target in any surviving source. It is a reconstruction from the task, and it should be read that way — the demand profile is inferred from what the job required, not quoted from a manual.

The Fight Manuals: Real Instructional Material

The Fechtbücher are the reason medieval Europe can be discussed more precisely than most warrior cultures. These are illustrated technical manuals by identifiable authors, and modern practitioners reconstruct from them directly.

Fiore dei Liberi

Fiore dei Liberi, born around 1350 in Premariacco, had established a reputation as a martial instructor by 1383 and wrote Il Fior di Battaglia after roughly fifty years of practice. It survives in four manuscript versions and covers armed and unarmed fighting, on foot and mounted, in armour and without, with sword, spear, pollaxe, dagger and bare hands.

Fiore frames the qualities a fighter needs through four animals: the lynx for caution, the tiger for speed, the lion for courage and the elephant for strength. It is not a periodised plan, but it is an explicit statement that speed and strength were understood as trainable attributes and not afterthoughts.

Hans Talhoffer

Hans Talhoffer, active between 1433 and 1467, was a German fencing master connected to the Liechtenauer tradition. He authored at least five fencing manuals and appears to have made his living teaching, including preparing people for judicial duels and trial by combat.

The significance for our purposes is occupational. Talhoffer was a paid professional coach in the fifteenth century, which tells us organised instruction existed as a trade — a level of detail simply unavailable for gladiators, Mongol horse archers or Aztec warriors.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the film version and what remains is genuinely impressive without embellishment: an eleven-to-fourteen-year apprenticeship starting before puberty, a distributed steel load of around 44 per cent of body mass, a measured energy penalty of roughly double for ordinary walking, and a documented drill culture built on high-repetition striking against fixed targets.

The transferable lessons are unglamorous. Specificity beats generality when the task is unusual; distributed load is harder than the same weight carried centrally; and volume of correct repetition, accumulated over years, is what builds a skill you can still perform when tired. This article is educational and is not medical or personal training advice.

Sources

• Askew GN, Formenti F, Minetti AE. Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers’ locomotor performance. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2012; 279(1729): 640–644.
• Cartwright M. How to Become a Medieval Knight. World History Encyclopedia, 2018.
• Cartwright M. The Weapons of an English Medieval Knight. World History Encyclopedia, 2018.
• How Medieval Sword Fighting Really Worked: Lessons from Fiore dei Liberi. Medievalists.net, 2025.
• Wiktenauer. Hans Talhoffer.