Pensacola's Armored Combat Team
Pensacola's Armored Combat Team
Bayou Brutes is a Pensacola-based nonprofit armored combat team representing the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast in the full-contact sport of Historical Medieval Battles (HMB). We train and compete in steel armor, testing physical strength, mental resilience, and teamwork in one of the most demanding combat sports in the world.
Our athletes are committed to consistent training, skill development, and supporting one another on and off the field. As a nonprofit organization, we focus on building strong competitors while expanding access to the sport through structured practices, competition opportunities, and public-facing events. When numbers allow, we field multiple squads to give more fighters the chance to compete and grow.
Bayou Brutes exists to preserve and advance armored combat as a modern martial sport. We fight with pride, represent Pensacola with honor, and push ourselves—and each other—to be better athletes, teammates, and leaders.
In a Buhurt (a team vs team fight), there are two opposing teams of fighters. These teams are of a pre-determined size. The most common domestically are 3v3, 5v5 and sometimes 10v10 or 12v12.
This is how many fighters per team are on the field any given round, but like other team sports there is also a bench available to substitute fresher fighters in for fighters that are tired, hurt or that have had an armor failure. Therefore, a 3v3 team will have 5 people, 5v5 has 8, etc. Furthermore, there are dueling categories (1v1 duels for points) and many teams have dedicated duelists who do not participate in Buhurts. This means that a team can actually be quite large.
This is the world of Buhurt, modern medieval battle where men and women wearing up to 100 pounds of armor slash and hammer each other with blunted steel swords, axes and maces until someone goes down, gives up or loses on points.
It's called Buhurt, Historical Medieval Battles, or Armored Combat. It is not HEMA or SCA. If you're interested in the differences you can read about that here.
Like other martial arts studios, training matters. A mixture of grappling, striking, conditioning, and weaponry is what we focus on.
Once accepted onto the team, members attend training as they can or want. The more a student attends, the faster skills are acquired.
We focus all of our exercise and conditioning around being better at fighting in armor, so simply attending and putting in effort will get most people close to where they need to be physically, no matter what state they start from.


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