what are the keys to an explosive lunge?? my lunges tend to be long, deep and "floating" instead of fast and almost always land short or i end up getting stuck.
is the lunge more of a kicking action with the front foot or a pushing from the rear leg...or both??
extend arm
lift front foot
extend rear leg as quickly as possible.
hopefully your point landed before your foot did.
"I live my life a bout at a time. Nothing else matters. Not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bulls***. For those 15 touches or less, I am free."
You don't want to lift your foot as much as kick it (i.e. your heal stays close to the ground).
A good exercise for working on explosive lunges is stand en-guard and put a penny under the heel of your front foot. As you lunge, the penny should fly forward across the floor. If the penny stays were you put it, you are not kicking with your front foot.
Alternatively, hold your weapon so its over your front foot (eg: like in a parry 8 position), and make the first foot motion to kick the blade forward. The knee straightens to move the foot forward, not raising the entire leg. This way you don't have to lunge, pick up the penny, lunge, pick up the penny, etc. for each repetition!
"In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different."
You don't want to lift your foot as much as kick it (i.e. your heal stays close to the ground).
A good exercise for working on explosive lunges is stand en-guard and put a penny under the heel of your front foot. As you lunge, the penny should fly forward across the floor. If the penny stays were you put it, you are not kicking with your front foot.
Boo
Yes, but your forget that a penny doesn't travel as far as it use to! I'll definitely try this though!
Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics are German, the lovers are French, and its all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it's all organized by the Italians.
"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered" George Best
You don't want to lift your foot as much as kick it (i.e. your heal stays close to the ground).
A good exercise for working on explosive lunges is stand en-guard and put a penny under the heel of your front foot. As you lunge, the penny should fly forward across the floor. If the penny stays were you put it, you are not kicking with your front foot.
Boo
This is a good exercise - we incorporate it into all our footwork classes.
My 2 cents on the penny thing. First off, I wouldn't recommend lifting your front foot. I would lift your toe within your shoe. I had a lesson the other week where I was lifting the whole front of my foot and my instructor told me that I was telegraphing every lunge.
I'd also recommend thinking about the direction in which your hips are moving. Are they moving straight out and down as you lunge, or are you raising your hips up at the beginning of the lunge? Lots of fencers do a loopy kind of lunge where they start by going up and then out. You want to go straight out (and down) with your hips. Any upwards motion is going to slow you down considerably.
The power of your lunge is coming from you back leg, so think about crouching down in on guard a bit more so that you can really propel yourself forward.
Finally, most people don't do this any more, but the classic back arm: limp wrist, forearm perpendicular, and top of your arm parallel to the ground will give you the best balance, point you straight out, and will also give you a bit more momentum as your back arm goes back during the lunge.
My 2 cents on the penny thing. First off, I wouldn't recommend lifting your front foot. I would lift your toe within your shoe. I had a lesson the other week where I was lifting the whole front of my foot and my instructor told me that I was telegraphing every lunge.
If you lift your foot whilst doing the penny thing, it wont work (i.e. the penny wont fly).
You have to kick your foot - i.e. toes up, heel skims across the floor - for it to work.
You are right: lifting your foot telegraphs your intentions and is ineffecient (you are expending energy and time going up when you can just go forward...)
Two things to look for in a mirror (over and above the extremely useful advice above):
1. Are you weighting your rear leg too much before you lunge? Are you shifting your weight back, lifting up your front foot and then pushing off? This will result in a lunge that arches up and then down; lots of wasted power.
2. Feet width. Are your feet in en guarde position too wide? You have a max lunge range. A too wide en guarde position leaves less room for forward movement relative to the back leg. You don't want to be standing up, of course, because then your center will be unstable and your movement will be impeded.
"Since when does being a patriot in America mean shutting your mouth?"
---
Ditto on kicking your foot (I was just told this was the problem with my lunge). Also, this may seem to be an odd thing to say, but especially when encorperating other footwork into you lunge, lead the lunge with your knee. This has the twofold purpose of concealing your lunge as an advance and enabling you to cut the lunge into an advance. Also, it more or less forces you to kick your front foot.
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathetice et cinaede Furi
... This way you don't have to lunge, pick up the penny, lunge, pick up the penny, etc. for each repetition!
We play the game in pairs. That way you kick the penny between the fencers. If your lunge is going straight, you will send the penny directly to your partner.
what are the keys to an explosive lunge?? my lunges tend to be long, deep and "floating" instead of fast and almost always land short or i end up getting stuck.
Check the path your hips are traveling. You want your hips to sort of drop out from under you during the lunge. If your hips are going forward horizontally, then falling into the lunge at the last instant you are exerting muscle power in the up direction to keep your self in the air. You want all the force going forward.
Also, make sure your knees are bent. For the lunge, make sure your back knee is bent so it can propel you forward. A good exercise to show the importance of bent knees is to start standing normally and do a vertical hop. Start with the knees only slightly bent. Not much hop. Bend the knees and you get a lot of hop.
I think the explosiveness comes from the rear leg. One exercise I've heard in this forum which seems very helpful to develop that explosive power is to tie one of those stretch exercise bands around your waist and then to a pole or something else stationary and lunge against it. Also, plyometric exercises might be helpful.
There are two things to work on for improving lunges:
Strength/Power and Technique.
Most of the answers here speak to technique.
Technique speaks to balance, recovery, using the least amount of energy to achieve a lunge and disguising the fact that you are lunging. Work with a coach to develop the proper technique and then practice that technique in front of mirror everyday. Watch for tells in your technique that would give your lunge away. Your point should pull you into your lunge. Your feint and extension should appear identical from lots of lines. When you finish your lunge, you should be stable and able to easily recover, parry, repost, continue to another advance lunge, etc...
Strength/Power speaks to your physical strength generated by your legs and torso. There are a number of exercises that you can do to gain Strenght/Power in your legs. If you want power, hit the weight room. Personally, I do a number of leg workouts every other day in the weight room. I use a cybex machine for leg extensions and leg curls--three sets of ten each. Also, I take an Olympic bar with some weight on it, put it on my shoulders in a standing position, lift up with my toes to full extension and then back down--I'll do this for a hundred reps. Afterwards, I'll run, not jog, a mile--around a five minute mile. I play soccer which helps alot with cross-training. Finally, don't forget your mid-section and hips. Tremendous power is generated here. There are a wide range of exercises that you can do to strengthen your midsection but start with crunches.
I hate working my ab's, but these are an absolute must if you do nothing else.
Finally, the better your technique, the faster your lunge will appear. If you have power but bad technique your lunge will always be average; but if you can combine power and technique, your lunge will be explosive.
Another thing that people don't think about often is your rear foot. Don't try to plant it hard on the ground. Let it slide a little bit. If you plant your back foot solid then you won't get quite the distance/speed out of your lunge as you can. I'm not saying to just make like a jumping advance and end up en garde again, but letting your back foot slide 6 inches or so can both help to increase the speed/distance of your lunge, and also make it easy to recover because you don't end up in the splits trying to reach your opponent.
One of the biggest barriers to an explosive lunge is located in front foot.
A fencer simply won't push off explosively if they feel like they're going to flop over on their face. Watch a beginner's class -- when they lunge, they don't reach with their front heels. Instead, they lift their front foot, keeping the front knee bent, and then put the foot down flat, as if they're taking a big step. Consequently, the thrust from the back leg is "reigned in" and limited.
Not only does this put undue stress on the knee, as the knee is stopping the forward momentum, but the fencers miss out on all the other cool mechanics. If you land on your heel and roll into the lunge, you use your thigh muscles as shock absorbers and never spend any energy landing.
I got worried about the bent-leg landings, and foreshortened lunges, during our latest club semester. Everybody was letting gravity do the work of the lunge (too slow!), and if they were pushing, they were pushing up and getting hangtime.
So, we did slow hanging lunges from the en garde where the front leg sticks out parallel to the hips. Way up in the air. Then they pushed off and landed. Not only were the lunges longer, and the landings more realistic, they started feeling the role of the back leg in the lunge (to push). You can't do these lunges versus a partner, so they were only in technical footwork sessions. But I noticed that the fencers' real lunges were getting better -- longer, faster, more snappy.
So, we did slow hanging lunges from the en garde where the front leg sticks out parallel to the hips. Way up in the air. Then they pushed off and landed. Not only were the lunges longer, and the landings more realistic, they started feeling the role of the back leg in the lunge (to push). You can't do these lunges versus a partner, so they were only in technical footwork sessions. But I noticed that the fencers' real lunges were getting better -- longer, faster, more snappy.
Walter,
Could you describe this in a bit more detail? So you're in on guard except your front foot is sticking straight out in front of you and then you lunge?
Could you describe this in a bit more detail? So you're in on guard except your front foot is sticking straight out in front of you and then you lunge?
Sure! Step by step:
1. The fencer is en garde, sitting a little lower than usual
2. The hand extends
3. The front foot goes up, it's in a straight line from the hips
4. (Optional, if you're demonstrating) Leave the foot up while you talk about the next step. People will start falling over or groaning. It's fun! When I demonstrate, I make darn sure I can balance and keep the foot up long enough.
5. Push forward from the back foot
6. Near the end of the lunge, as the fencer is sinking/falling to the ground, the front foot will lower and the heel will land. The fencer will roll forward onto the flat of the foot, the front knee will bend to 90º. The fencer's body will come to a stop.
For fencers with weak or short lunges, they will now be in a deeper lunge (and closer to the splits) than ever before. The distance between feet, the whole reachy/stretchy feeling, and the rolling onto the front foot -- this is what fencers should try to reproduce with the real lunge.
7. For added torture, have them boing 3 times in the lunge and recover back.
Instead of #1..7, the short version is: "Lunge as normal, except start with your foot at hip level."
With three months of 20 per practice, and fencing shoes, there's no reason a new fencer couldn't build a Young Ho Kim lunge. (Hasn't happened yet tho.)
I've found that when coaches say, "Keep your front foot close to the ground as you lunge" (which is utterly correct), fencers will take this as permission to land the front foot whenever they want... and they usually think 18-24 inches is a fair distance. This premature foot-dropping "finishes" the lunge and makes it very short. And, since they're doing this, they will never build the explosiveness they need.
In fact, the front foot should only land when most forward momentum is exhausted. So in the end analysis, the back foot (thrust) is controlling when the front foot lands.
I photoshopped a picture! My avatar icon shows a fat coach making a lazy lunge -- the thing I like best is that my front foot is straight. I have several pictures from the same practice of me and a co-instructor lunging while giving lessons, and we both have straight front legs with our heels skimming the floor. Meanwhile, our students were coming at us knee-first... ugh. Out of desperation I finally told a student, "Lunge at me, but lift your leg high." He did it, but the sole faced the floor. I told him, "No, show me the sole." And I got this incredible long lunge out of him.
Attached is a jpeg of the avatar icon, showing how high the foot goes with the "goose step" exercise. It looks odd, but it seems useful.
Another thing that helps with the "pop" for the lunge:
Put your glove on your front foot and lunge. As your front foot goes forward, it kicks the glove into the air. Catch the glove as you finish your lunge.
Haven't tried this in class yet. For some reason, I never remember it.
That's great. I thought that's what you meant, but the pic confirmed it. I'll have to practice that one before trying it in front of a group! Thanks Walter.
it sounds like you need to build up some strength. If you have problems getting stuck in your lunge, you need to build leg and core strength like crazy. Crunches every night is a good way to start, front, side, and back. For my legs, I do wall-sits at my house, but that's mainly because I don't have access to weights right now, but when I do, leg-press all the way!
I would work on your strength mainly, I thikn that's you main problem, but more technique can never hurt!
Originally Posted by ls14evar 
