OK, I had to split this into two posts; the first one is an overview and the second is the meat of the issue.

This is likely to be a very rambling post. As always, I welcome any and all questions, thoughts, commentary, compliments and criticism; one of the major reasons I post things like this is to get interesting discussion going and get fresh opinions on my own ideas.

I've been working for some time now on building up a framework of fencing based around distance and rhythm of motion and it's really starting to come together. I'm going to talk about where they're at now, what we did to get there and where I plan to go with it.

The major goal of this is creating fencers who can control when and how distance collapses and make real use of distance, motion and rhythm to connect with and control their opponent. The major underlying thoughts are:

1) That what matters is who scores the touch and that right of way and everything else are just tools which may or may not be used towards this end.

2) That the successful fencer is the one who is in control at the moment of collapse (when a touch is imminent.)

3) A fencer must always be ready to hit when they are close enough that a hit is possible. It doesn't have to be with an attack, but a fencer who is unready at this moment has basically lost if their opponent can capitalize. There are many conditions which can define unreadiness.

It follows that a fencer should only cause or allow the collapse to happen when they are likely to get the touch. What happens before the collapse is focused around denying the opponent any attempts to close that will prove dangerous to the fencer and creating a favorable moment to collapse the distance. For more on that last bit, I recommend Czajkowski's excellent book, Understanding Fencing. For those of you who have read this book, another way to put this is that I do not want my fencer to allow the distance to collapse without creating a moment of surprise. Note that I have not said "come forward into distance." Allowing/causing the distance to collapse can be done moving forwards or back, though I started with forward examples because they are easy to understand.

From a pedagogical standpoint, I worked to start with basic concepts and build them up, applying them to more and more realistic conditions as we went. I will hold off on describing drills until the later sections (it would take forever to type this otherwise) but I'm happy to talk about any individual step in more detail.

(As a caveat to anyone reading this: I am listing my focus at given stages, but that was not all that I did at that point. There was plenty of review of old material, some early introduction of new, some other important topics that will not be mentioned here because they are not directly related. This was not all of our training, just one very significant thread.)