Circular parries in sabre?

[KD5MDK]

I wonder if someone could lure him into one.

[Rock]

Originally Posted by Rock

Is fencer 1 attacking with the point or with a chest cut?

Is fencer 1 attacking with the point or with a chest cut?

[sabreur]

Originally Posted by Rock

Is fencer 1 attacking with the point or with a chest cut?

Back-edge, obviously....

[randomsabreur]

Originally Posted by eac

The #2 in the world in Junior MF has never done a bladework drill with a partner in his entire life.

That would be foil...

Sabre, you're more likely to need to drill.

If you can't get the number of lessons you want (financial/availability of coaches), you have to. They can be very valuable if you can focus yourself on what you need to do, and correct yourself.

Fencers are often too reliant on their coaches - a good fencer should be able to cope without a coach, other than as a counterbalance against their opponent's coach causing hassle at the other end.

[eac]

Is there something fundamental about sabre that makes bladework drills somehow necessary, or are you just saying that there is a dearth of good sabre coaches, and so one must self-coach between the too-infrequent good lessons?

About self-reliance: Do you mean that a good fencer shouldn't require a coach on the strip in competition (I agree) or that a good fencer shouldn't require very many lessons to improve as fast as possible (I disagree)?

What you do in the presence of sufficiently many lessons (two per week, usually) is a somewhat different question from what you do in their absence.

In their presence, I think bladework drills in general are useless, not just scripted ones.
In their absence, I sometimes out of desperation give a clubmate some complicated sequential, randomized instructions to simulate the presence of a coach-- when I know the theory for how a set of actions is supposed to go, but I need to program the motions into my muscles. Even in their absence, though, I think the kind of scripted drills where a coach tells an entire class to do it with their partner, and they all do it slowly, incompetently, and destructively to their own potential technique, is useless.

[Rock]

Originally Posted by sabreur

Back-edge, obviously....

Wow! Thanks! (

[Adler]

Originally Posted by eac

In their presence, I think bladework drills in general are useless, not just scripted ones.

Just to be clear what are you defining as a blade work drill?

[Adler]

Originally Posted by oiuyt

Since my eventual goal is to have the defender be able to execute a parry in a bout -- where both the attacker and defender will be executing dynamic actions -- I want to create that setting as soon as I can after teaching the basic mechanics.

I'd agree that you can only say a stroke is fully acquired when a fencer is able to execute it under changeable situation of a bout.

[randomsabreur]

The thing about sabre is that bouts are quicker, you have less chance to practice stuff. You can also get a light on with a less than well executed action - with foil and epee, you need enough precision to get a light on.

As for a blade work drill, outside the situation where you can have daily lessons, some independent practice between lessons is key. A bladework drill will allow the fencers to practice an action they have been taught in a controlled, limited scenario, progressing to more realistic actions, without having to wait for their opponent to actually do the action which requires the move they've need.

A couple of examples:

Seconde parry. This is useful to have, but generally reliant on your opponent attacking you to a particular line (underneath hand). How do you practice it in a training bout if your training opponents prefer high line attacks.

Parrying remises. If your normal opponents don't remise that much (unless told to do so in a drill), how do you get used to dealing with them, unless in a scripted situation, where one fencer is briefed to go for an attack-remise.

Also, most fencers have one main coach. That coach, however good, will have his natural sense of timing. The coach's actions will be more predictable than the other students. Bladework drills mean you can have experience of getting stuff to work with less ideal conditions. If the worse comes to the worse, you can realise that a particular action is NOT sensible against certain styles of fencer.

[Snowbabe]

This is just one drill. No, this is not something that you would drill everyday, 24 hours a day. Just add it to your arsenal of things that you know. Quite honestly in a high school situation, they will probably do it anyway during a bout without knowing what they have just done.

[epeelion]

There may be some people that can be good without drills, but to say that bladework drills are completely useless is, in my opinion, a stupid statement to make. Ask Aladar Kogler, for instance, one of the most successful coaches in the country. Or my old coach, Bin Lu, who told me that the Chinese system involves hours and hours of drills. Drills, if done with a suitably competent partner (Obviously! Beginners can't do complicated drills together!), can be incredibly useful, and basically give the student time to work on something when the coach may only have an hour with them per week. This is especially true if the students are with the same coach and know certain drills very well. It's up to the coach to ensure that they have an appropriate skill level and know the drill well enough.

[tdwg83]

Drills done right are advantagous. Done correctly, they can help raise the ability of the club. Problem with drills: Many people approach the drill as taking what they need not giving what their teammate needs. These types of drills are detrimental. Fencers need to be responsible for helping their teammates grow.

[Rock]

Originally Posted by sabreur

Back-edge, obviously....

Wow! Thanks! (

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by KShan5[PrFC]

drills are still incredibly important.

So incredibly important that I somehow got a B without ever doing a single one...

Imagine, if I only did those crucial drills I'd be the next Podzniakov!

[KShan5[PrFC]]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

So incredibly important that I somehow got a B without ever doing a single one...

Imagine, if I only did those crucial drills I'd be the next Podzniakov!

No...but as you and I and everyone knows, ratings only mean so much. You probably would be a little better if you had done some drills. (Just personal opinion) On top of that, we were talking to someone who doesn't have a sabre coach to give him lessons. If he's not going to get lessons, and there's a suggestion out there to not do drills, how else is he going to make his hand smaller? If you can afford to take 3 lessons a week drills become less important, however, for a lot of people that's not an option, and drills are a good substitute.

[bigdawg2121]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

So incredibly important that I somehow got a B without ever doing a single one...

Imagine, if I only did those crucial drills I'd be the next Podzniakov!

Yep. I also got my B and national pts w/o ever having had a saber lesson or drill...and yet I'd definitely agree that good drills are a benefit and possibly even a necessity. It seems that a lot of the best programs and coaches both in the country and in the world focus on drilling; many drill more than they fence. Sure, there are a few programs/coaches/fencers that that dismiss the value of drills but they definitely seem to be in the minority (both in terms of numbers and of success stories).

[sheck]

Originally Posted by bigdawg2121

Yep. I also got my B and national pts w/o ever having had a saber lesson or drill...and yet I'd definitely agree that good drills are a benefit and possibly even a necessity. It seems that a lot of the best programs and coaches both in the country and in the world focus on drilling; many drill more than they fence. Sure, there are a few programs/coaches/fencers that that dismiss the value of drills but they definitely seem to be in the minority (both in terms of numbers and of success stories).

In the early 1990s I spent a week training in Korea and only fenced a couple of bouts. There were 2 training sessions a day filled with constant drilling and footwork. Not much fun.

[bigdawg2121]

But did they make you a better fencer?

[Sabresque]

Ask any top US saber coach; Yury Gelman, Ed Korfanty, Arkady Burdan, Vladimir Nazlymov... they all do drills. Sometimes the advice on these threads make me shake my head in wonder.

Effective practices mostly consist of these basic elements: Private lessons, footwork, drills, and competitive bouting.

[eac]

So, we have two sides on this thread. Side 1 consists mainly of me, saying that drills are crap, and here's some mild reasoning why, and also here's an example of some people in foil who do well without any drills. Side 2 consists of everybody else, saying WTF MAN!!!?!?!? YOU HAVE TO DO DRILLS!!! without any particular analysis of why, or any hypotheses for why one can be #2 in the world in foil without any bladework drills, if bladework drills are so wildly important.

One plausible explanation for why this is true is that sabre is somehow fundamentally different from foil in a way that causes it to require bladework drills, while foil clearly doesn't, assuming two lessons a week.

Another plausible explanation is that people have been doing bladework drills in sabre since the beginning of time, and no upstart coach has ever questioned the value of bladework drills enough to try skipping them. It sounds like in sabre, all the high-powered US coaches are Russian, whereas in foil the top US coaches are somewhat more heterogeneous. It seems likely that American coaches would be more likely to mess with the status quo than Russian coaches; maybe this is why no one has tried not doing bladework drills.

Edew produces top youth sabre fencers; maybe he can comment on the necessity of bladework drills at that level of sabre.

Here is some more reasoning for why bladework drills hinder good fencing:

They're static, and unrealistic. All real fencing actions exist in time, and the have a required associated timing for them to work. Bladework drills usually divorce actions from their timing, because there's no way to tell when you have the timing wrong. The guy in front of you is a) supposed to be a dummy, since it's a drill, so he's going to do the same thing anyway, and b) doesn't even know himself what the timing is supposed to be, so he's no help. So you end up going through what looks like the right motions, but the timing is completely wrong for use in real fencing, unbeknownst to you.
During the drill, the coach is presumably patrolling the class, paying not enough attention to any one student to really get their timing right.

Bladework drills frequently cause you to think of fencing (and especially parries and engagements) in terms of static positions, instead of dynamic actions. One thing I had to unlearn when I decided I wanted to be a serious competitor was that parries are positions-- parries are not positions. Parries are dynamic motions, and often as not your blade doesn't stop moving at all from the beginning of the parry motion to your riposte hitting. With the old system, with bladework drills, everybody could always point to a position that was parry 4.

Real fencing is dynamic, transient, and doesn't allow you time to think between actions-- you have to go straight to having an intuition and timing about everything, which is ruined by bladework drills.

Lessons, by contrast, do this well, because the coach knows the timing and knows the logic of the scenario, so he can a) yell at you when you get it wrong, and b) provide a good opponent that makes sense for the action, and c) can calibrate the speed and choice of the actions to your developing speed as a fencer, so you can do things that make sense without being too fast for you to execute correctly. Some things really should wait until you can move fast enough to do them; the extreme case, of course, is flicking, which relies on speed to even exist as an action.