My name is Chris. I am the co-founder of the GMU fencing team, for which I currently serve as the coach, and the captain, The crazy part is that im only 20, and I am not a very accomplished fencer. I referee (alot) because I need the money and I enjoy it. Im becoming a better referee than I am fencer, by far.
So I am going to try to use this blog to document and follow my development as a referee, from local schmo, into hopefully, an international level ref...
This is something I started really thinking about while I was at coaches college, and what are advantages and disadvantages of both of them.
There is 1 clear nice advantage of an inverse advance. That is that you can take that first half step with the back foot, and then decide if you want to finish it as an advance or a lunge. This is a very nice thing for foil or sabre.
After thinking about it more for a few days, I don't see much advantage of it at all in epee. So much of epee is short abrupt tempo changes, there really is no marching attack. If I start a lunge then decide I don't want to finish it, I can just make it a very short lunge, without harm to me. In foil or sabre, it could result in me losing RoW. I've still found uses for the invert advance in epee, but not in the lunge vs advanced choice thing that is its biggest asset in RoW weapons.
Someone told me the advantage of an inverse advance is to take that first half step effectively without your opponent noticing it, because your body doesn't move. I played around with that, but I realized the accuracy of that is solely based on how the 2 are taught.
From a mechanical standpoint, I can move my body on the front foot of an advance, the back foot of an advance, or somewhere in the middle. Also, I could move it on the first footfall, the 2nd footfall, or somewhere in the middle. (When talking about both advances, and inverse advances, 1st or 2nd footfall becomes an interesting way of looking at it.) Its solely a matter of how the action is taught. I was playing around with trying it both ways, and I don't really have an answer as to which is best. They're just different.
If I move my body on the footfall of my front foot, then yes, an inverse advance can steal a half step without my opponent realizing it. However, I could do the same thing with an advance, but holding my body back until the 2nd footfall. Similarly, if I only move my body on the movement of my BACK foot, then an inverse advance is just a tell that I'm starting an advance, and my opponent would notice it earlier.
So when I started out to look at advantages of advance vs. inverse advance, I find that I need to first look at advantages of moving the body on different footfalls. I think there, the best answer is probably somewhere in the middle, in the "both legs do work" territory.
I got up and moved around a bit trying it a number of different ways. Personally, when I do an advance, my body starts moving after my front foot leaves the ground, but before it hits the ground. My body continues moving forward until my back foot hits the ground to complete the step. You could do it different ways, but I think what I do is fairly conventional in terms of advances.*
If you are making an advance that way, then doing a half invert advance can steal a half step, but I have to be very careful about how I execute it. Its very easy to bring my back foot up and shift my body forward so much that I'm leaning out over my front foot. When I slow things down alot, I can feel just how wrong that is, and how much I'd need to lift my front foot to finish the step.
However, if I do the same thing without shifting my body on the first step, then I can still feel pretty well balanced when doing it. Its very uncondusive to finishing backwards, but thats one of the obvious detractors from it.
In a long attack, its easy to switch from making advances to invert advances and back. All it takes is bringing the back foot up more on the 2nd half of a normal advance, and that effectively leads you into an invert advance, or a string of them.
Over all, I still see the main benefit of them being allowing the decision of advance or lunge later into the action. Its interesting, though, how differently I see advances and retreats after thinking through all of this. I might think through some other actions like this from a strict mechanical standpoint and see what percolates through my head.
If you read this whole thing, mad props, because I know this was kind of random and stream of consciousness.
*I realized that I don't do the same for retreats. What I described is basically the way I always do an advance. It doesn't change much. The size / speed may change, but the body mechanics of it don't change very much.
I tend to use 2 different kinds of retreats though. The emergency retreat is very similar, where my body starts moving very early. But when its a more controlled environment, I find myself making retreats where my back foot goes back, without my body moving until my front foot follows it back. I suppose I do this, because it allows for a little bit more freedom to convert that first half step back into a half retreat lunge, or half retreat advance lunge if my body doesn't move early. I tend to fence alot off of counter offensive stuff, so I guess I do that to facilitate that. Odd, because I've never thought about the body mechanics of it before.
09-09-2009 06:14 PM