Continuing from the appetizer:

Step one, starting quite some time ago, before even worrying about technique, was to build up physical and mental abilities. My fencers needed a lot of strength work in the legs and core. They lacked aerobic and anaerobic endurance. We needed to work on foot discipline, agility and speed. But before all of these, we needed to work on basic balance and body control. We still return to these things quite often to keep building and maintaining physical abilities, peak for competitions and to get the bodies ready for whatever specific aspect we might be working on in that class.

Mentally, some of the fencers needed to be convinced that they had something to fix. This was fortunately a very small percentage as I was blessed with an open minded group, something I have tried to continue to cultivate. They still had to embrace new ideas of some of the basics of fencing and realities of right of way, however. They needed work on their mental focus and emotional control. One of the biggest things I had to change was a mentality of rushing on the attack and an inability to perform open eyes actions, which was largely due to the fact that no one had really made them think of such things. The open eyes actions in particular were to later form the basis of the framework.

Once basic capabilities were improved, our next task was to focus on fixing major technical problems. This had already begun with the balance work we were doing, but there were still large problems of shifting the weight involuntarily as they move. Their ability the change directions and rhythms were atrocious. They had a very small repertoire of different steps, and there were many issues with bladework, centering mainly around improper muscle use (too much reliance on gross motor actions) poor hand/foot coordination (extending at the wrong moment and on searching for the blade while attempting to attack, causing many one light hits against them) and one of my biggest pet peeves: poor extensions. They're all major aspects of technique, but that last one is just a killer. If you can't extend right, you can't do much with the blade at all. Hand in hand with this was work on their sense of distance and timing for simple actions; things would often be executed at an odd time or with footwork that would be more suited on step further or closer and we had many talks and examples about exactly what was a good option for many situations.

The next stage was to create a fencer who can make decisions while moving. Sabre is the easiest one to model this off of: I needed fencers who could enter distance correctly on an attack and choose to finish that attack there, abort to a defense or realize that they had gained control of that center ground and press their advantage (this does not necessarily mean attack.) This works going back, too; fencers on defense needed to be able to see what was happening, choose the correct defensive action and execute it well. A great deal of work went into this, but nothing else would have been possible without it. The goal at the end of this step was to have fencers who, in other words, know what to do entering distance coming forward. In other words, they had to learn to use their eyes while fencing instead of guessing and hoping (this plays a bigger and bigger theme as we move on.)

From simple offense and defense options, we started to work on multi layered defenses. Long distance actions were constructed in such a way that if they did not directly score or break the opponent's attack, they worked to guide that attack into one of the defender's preferred short distance actions or slowed down the attacker enough that another long distance defense could be used. See Jason's blog for an excellent post on this.

Multi layered defenses segued nicely into the next topic, where we took a step back and looked at what happened before the hit. We first talked about and practiced different ways of stealing distance and time from opponents. These ranged from check steps and tempo changes and there are far too many to list. We went on to do many drills based around one fencer attacking and one drawing the attack and attempting to cause it to fail. Blade actions were sometimes allowed, but we generally started with distance as the only defense. It was, however, always with the caveat that such a situation favors the attacker and we would usually add in more blade options as we went, which evened things out. I always reminded both fencers that foot tempo alone was not all that goes into a good touch and that defenders should be looking to draw the attack at a moment that is good for them as much as attackers are looking to set up their moment. One of the major issues with these drills was a tendency to rush forward while attacking (especially when there was no threat of a stop hit) but there are several ways to deal with that (which I can list later if anyone wants.) This was done with both on directional drills (attacker is always moving forward) bi directional, sometimes with a leader and a follower and sometimes with both fencers moving however they wished.

At this point, they had most of the tools they needed to construct a good game:

• Physical and mental capabilities needed for fencing
• Well executed basic actions with the ability to chain and coordinate them together
• A sense of when and where to do what
• The ability to make and execute decisions as distance collapsed
• The knowledge of good moments to cause a collapse
• The ability to fight over allowing, denying and forcing a collapse to happen

We are now in the stage of tying all of this together. Here is an example of today's work: Once the fencers were warmed up, I had them get on guard just out of distance from me. I moved them back and forth, trying different traps and making sure that they could keep out of the critical distance (when one fencer can hit.) It's important to note that this was NOT random; I had a purpose behind what I was doing. This did not take long, and was just an intro. After that, I gave them three different options to hit me. If I attacked, they were to get away and go, if I stopped moving, they were to advance and lunge and if I stepped forward while pulling my arm back, they were to lunge and "hit" before I finished my step. After a few minutes of this and some corrections, I had them work in pairs on this, one leader and one follower. We then asked about who would have been getting hit more if we were using weapons, with the obvious answer of the leader. I asked them what all three moments had in common, and was pleasantly surprised when one of my newer fencers immediately piped up with "They're all in response to what the leader is doing!" as I really thought I would have to spoon feed them that one. They also picked up on the fact that every hit was made when the leader was momentarily "stuck" (right after an attack or hesitating) or making a mistake as they entered distance. We went back to a group leader-follower drill and added another level of complexity: When they initiated an attack after a hesitation or making my attack fall short, instead of starting a premeditated advance lunge, they had to take a strong step into distance and finish if I remained in place or got away too late, but if I had managed to escape before they were ready to lunge, they had to go right back to movement. This may seem odd to a RoW fencer, but we are not looking at right of way, we are looking at entering distance. If I've managed to get away in time, they will need another moment to get close. This tripped them up a bit but some reminders about how easy it is to defend against an a committed action from a long distance away fixed things. We also talked about how in foil and sabre they could definitely keep moving forward and hold onto the right of way but that it was just another form of that motion. Anyway, we then split into pairs again and had them work the new drill. After that, we made things more adversarial: Now, the leader could draw out the follower's attack using any of the three conditions mentioned above and try to make the attacker fall short, then take over and hit. Basically, they could try to trap the follower . The follower, however, was now allowed more freedom in their movements, and was told that if a trap was obvious, they didn't have to spring it. Both fencers were attempting to trap the other. This forced a lot of realism on both parts, and several of the sabre fencers present broke out into bladeless fencing on a few occasions. Our last conversation after that talked about how even if the distance allowed one person to hit, when blade actions were thrown back in that more complexity would arise and that any fencer capable of making a composed defense should by all means allow their opponent to initiate an attack and that what mattered more than hitting on a specific attack was being able to control the moment the opponent attacked or get create a moment to initiate a successful one of their own.

We'll be working on more ways to tie all of these things together, probably followed by review of various component subjects. Once they've really got this down (and they get better with it every day) we're going to take this basic framework and add in more complex blade and foot actions and do a lot more with speed, endurance and psychology to ensure that they have whatever options they need and are ready and able to execute them against strong opponents. From there, each fencer will be taking much more individualized paths, as this is a very open ended framework and is definitely producing some diverse fencers. I've said this before, but I am very excited as to how this will turn out. I'm already seeing the fruits in practice and competition, but this is just the beginning; there is still so much work to be done.