High school fencing footwork

[fencingfrog]

hi

i am one of the co-captains at my high school fencing club. we pretty much run ourselves, and there is me (a sophmore) and my friend (a junior) that will be running the footwork section of our club. other people will run the endurance and bladework parts.

what i am wondering, is what exactly should we teach the fencers? most of them are novices or 2nd year fencers, but they only fence at the school during the winter. also, what is the best way to teach the en guarde position and advance/retreat steps to total novices?

any help would be awesome! thank you!

[Allen Evans]

Where is Mr. Epee when I need a pithy comment about our internet savy youth?

Try the training link in the green bar, right above this thread. There's a whole section on footwork.

Allen

[RITFencing]

Also, run a search on footwork.

[Phaeton]

I've been meaning to respond to this.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

A) An action is almost always comprised of aspects of both footwork and bladework. In the final execution these are inseparable, which is why people should learn an action as a whole during practice as opposed to chunks of different actions.

I don't know what your time and lesson plan looks like, but I'd do something like this:

You can work in the endurance aspect into the warm up, or separately and have endurance practices (probably the best idea)

Lesson: Parry Riposte

I: Warm up:

1. Running laps, when clap change direction (Should have a relation to the action being learned, Parry riposte often involves directional change, include that.)
2. Stretching: Try and make stretching applicable to the lesson....it's not something that can always be done.

II: Footwork:

1. Work on parts of the action you are working on, build upon it. You can only correct one thing at a time, so if someone makes a mistake, fix it, have them repeat it cleanly a few times, and move on. Make this more and more advanced.

Suzuki was right, whole->part->whole.

First someone should do the whole action, fix the broken part, and do the whole once again.

2. The best footwork set up should involve someone leading, and someone else checking other people and correcting errors.


III: Drills: Group lessons are far superior to individual lessons. Here is where you finally introduce the blade. Show a variety of scenarios and make sure responses are open eyes. Fix errors as mentioned above.

IV: Conclusion: Conclude your lesson, recap what you learned.

V: Cool Down: Have people stretch and such to improve over all flexibility.

This'll help things make more sense for your fencers, learning one action with all parts a whole.

Make sure core footwork is good, advancing, retreating, lunging, and step lunging (not so much for epee) are vital components of fencing. If a student knows these footwork wise and has no blade work he or she can still wins points.