Who doesn`t know Bryce Lightbody from Australia? Everybody knows him well. His golden head and hard strikes are famous between members of the HMB-movement. HMBIA News decided to tell you his own HMB-history. He told us it from the very beginning. He started his story from the graduation from the high school. The young man always had an interest in history – mostly the martial aspects and traditional martial arts. So, when Bryce finished high school and moved interstate, he found a reenactment club and started doing the Dark Ages reenactment.

Bryce Lightbody:
“I moved around a bit and joined several clubs around the Eastern States of Australia. I had a really good time and learned a lot. At the same time, I was training in Ju Jitsu and MMA. In 2011 I stumbled upon some videos of the Battle of the Nations on Youtube and found the mini-series they made. I immediately began searching for mates through Facebook, and I found Kit Houston in the reenactment community, who was putting a team together”.

Bryce understood he needed to get a set of armour to practice HMB sport, so he started to search and order the armour immediately. For that time, no one in Australia had any knowledge of the buhurt, so there were a plenty of trials and challenges on his way. In the lead up to the HMB World Championship “Battle of the Nations-2012″ in France, Lightbody and the team travelled to New Zealand a couple of times and ran a selection tourney in Melbourne.

Bryce Lightbody:
“We went to France with 5 fighters to compete in the “5vs5″ category, where we were knocked out of the competition by the USA after making it through the group stage. We have learned a lot from those fights and gained new knowledge, thus we returned to Australia and began a massive recruiting push”.

Five years later in Australia there are teams in an almost every major city with new members joining every week. 2017 was an amazing year for Australian HMB as they won their first medal at HMB World Championship “Battle of the Nations-2017″ in Barcelona. The women “3vs3″ team, led by Skye Burnie, have taken the third place in a tense struggle.

Bryce Lightbody:
“I’m extremely excited to see how HMB is developing in Australia and across the world. It’s gaining traction in the main stream of the martial arts community and become widely known in general. A few years ago, when I told people, what I am going in for, they thought I was talking about LARP, “live action role-playing game”. Now, when I told them, the majority start talking excitedly about the brutality of the buhurt and pro-fights, even if they don’t know how it is actually called”.

As we know, Bryce has got 2 big dogs – Freya and Moose. These two giants love Bryce and his girlfriend Skye Burnie so much. It`s a happy and funny family that use to fight in armour time after time because Bryce is a trainer for Skye and his teammates from “Havoc” HMB-club.

It’s always a pleasure to talk with somebody, who adores HMB so much and can speak about it for hours. As we can see, Bryce is that kind of a person. An HMBIA News reporter had a great time in conversation with him. So, we wish Bryce Lightbody success in the sport and more great victories.

HMBIA News