Circular parries in sabre?

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by Sabresque

Ask any top US saber coach; Yury Gelman, Ed Korfanty, Arkady Burdan, Vladimir Nazlymov... they all do drills.

Sorry, specious reasoning. That drills are universally done by coaches who get results does not demonstrate that it is the drills which produce the results, as opposed to the other things they do. Causality is not proven by correlation, or even by the belief of top performers in a causal link. And the existence of counterexamples calls the "rule" into stark question.

Once upon a time, the top people in any given field no doubt believed some things which later turned out to be wrong.

[eac]

It isn't that specious. If you don't know which things are important, one reasonable strategy for doing well is to imitate everything the high-powered coaches and fencers do, in the hopes that you'll get the important stuff along with the crap. I've used that strategy sometimes myself, and sometimes the stuff turned out to be important, and sometimes not.

If you're bad, and you want to be good, you frequently don't know exactly why you're bad, and so it is risky to throw out anything that high-powered people do; that might be the difference between you and them, and by extension between you being how you currently are and you being as good as they are.

What I'm saying is that there are reasonable high-powered drill-free examples, and also there is a line of reasoning that says why drills are bad.

(edit: of course, in the above, I mean bladework drills done with a partner, not footwork drills. Footwork drills are good, because they don't require precise timing and distance and so on; they're mainly a) imitating good people's technique, and b) muscle-growing. Footwork transfers from drill to bout.)

[Adler]

Originally Posted by eac

Footwork transfers from drill to bout.)

So should blade work drills if done properly.

[sheck]

Originally Posted by bigdawg2121

But did they make you a better fencer?

No I didn't learn anything new and wasn't there long enough to benefit from the conditioning.

[epeelion]

You're right, the Chinese and Korean fencers are pretty crap-oh wait, no they're not. And they hardly free fence, as sheck says. This is confirmed by my old coach, who was on the Chinese National Team.

Just because some people can succeed without drills, or there are coaches that have good students that coach without drills, does not in any way imply that drills are useless. At all. Saying that bladework drills are useless just because one person has attained incredible results without them is IDIOTIC. Graham Wicas did tons of drills. He was second at Junior world championships. The Hungarians, from what Aladar tells me, do lots of drills. How good are they? Drills may not be the only way to get good, but they are not useless, and to say they are is ignorant. Perhaps they are of less use in foil, but I'm pretty sure the coaches in Hungary, China, and Korea probably use similar methods of training in foil and sabre. Bladwork drills are not necessarily static. They can be tactical, they can improve decision making. Or, if done with movement, they can increase speed and precision of movements. This was absolutely true for me.

And to say that people doing bladework drills are bad people that want to be good by imitating better fencers is laughable. I'm sure there are examples of this, but I'm also pretty sure there are high level coaches that came up with it all on their lonesome. There are high powered examples of people who don;t do drills, that's true, and there may be a line of reasoning that says they are bad, though this line of reasoning is quite suspect.

What you said, eac, is that bladework drills are crap and useless. You have no authority to make such a ridiculous blanket statement, and I have provided some high powered counterexamples.

[Peach]

2001, the year I earned my one-time "A" I was doing considerable amounts of bladework and footwork drills with my clubmates. After that, the guy who was leading us, a former National Champion, stopped coming to the club because family and career obligations intervened, and since then I haven't been able to get people to drill as much. And I never renewed my "A." Hardly a scientific study, and merely anecdotal, but I experienced the direct effects and can attest to the benefits of drill.

[tdwg83]

Originally Posted by eac

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.

What I understand from you is people don't understand how to use drill work. Drill work by itself is not inheritly ineffective. Individual experiences of drill work affects your perspective.

As a student under Vladimir Nazlymov school of thought (my coach was a student of his when he first came from Russia), Nazlymov uses very effective drills. Instead of repetitive static motion, you always incorporate footwork. In addition, you define a set of specific actions as possibilities:

Teach students what these look like and how to prompt for them
Teacher /Student
1. Invite /Attack
2. Attack /Parry-Riposte
3. Invite /Attack
Parry-Riposte /Evade parry or parry-riposte
4. Move to take blade / Evade-attack
Etc.

We never do #1 continuously. All that teaches you is reacting to a expected action. By varying the action you are teaching the student how to REACT TO WHATS HAPPENING. As the skill of the student increases, you increase the difficult by adding combinations and increasing tempo. Further more the students need to be able to do both sides of a drill. It will further their understanding of tempo in these attacks. The only way a team can develop is for each member of the team to be responsible to helping their teammates perform.

[erooMynohtnA]

Originally Posted by 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.

I think you're stating that a certain type of drill is useless and people are ignoring that and talking at length of the use of all drills.

I think drills are useful (when done properly and both fencers know what's going on, otherwise it usually turns into a lesson with the better fencer teaching or just random poking). At the level of drilling I'm talking about, it's closer to situational bouting than choreography.

I agree, though, that static bladework drills are stupid. I think any choreographed drill is pretty much retarded. There's only so much "getting the motion down" will do for you. My first coach would always give the class a drill "Attack four, counter four, seven with an advance lunge, then defenders riposte with a lunge to eight" and we would just do that for half an hour. Not surprisingly, we had technically proficient (clean, crisp, small, whatever you want to call them) parries and pretty lunges, and everyone beat us anyway.

[sheck]

Originally Posted by epeelion

You're right, the Chinese and Korean fencers are pretty crap-oh wait, no they're not. And they hardly free fence, as sheck says. This is confirmed by my old coach, who was on the Chinese National Team.

In my case I trained at the sport center near the Seoul Olympic park. Everyday was the same. Up at dawn. All students from different sports meet at playing field for conditioning. This was the end of November and it was absolutely freezing out. After that everyone broke up by sport for more outdoor conditioning. Move inside to a pretty much unheated fencing room. Started with warm up, followed by footwork and drilling. No bouting at all. Back for second training session in the late afternoon. Start with weight training. Back to fencing room for more footwork and drilling. Short individual lessons. Fence a couple bouts at the end. BTW the coach didn't like that I was fencing from the low line causing his fencers problems. Repeat 5 days in a row. At that time Korea only had junior results. They didn't have much of a senior program.

[Shi no Tenshi]

Unfortunately, the case tends to be that some people work well with drills, and some don't. Drills are the accepted norm of teaching people. That is pretty much a fact. However, as Inq has pointed out, that doesn't make it the be-all end-all. Some people learn quicker with matches, and can transfer what they learn better that way than in a drill. How do you learn that parry 2 when you never drill it? Image training, forcing the opponent to go for that shot, etc. can go a long way for myself. And that also helps you with tactical thought, which seems to be rather important as well.

I personally have very little use for drills, but understand as well that some people need that sort of structure to succeed. When I'm helping the instructors, I tend to use drills on certain students, where with others I will forego them as they just learn better the other way, where their creativity can come in to play.

[eac]

Why does everybody have to argue against a different misinterpretation of what I said?

epeelion: We've established that there are good people who drill. Talking more about new and different good people who drill does not add to the conversation.
Also, I didn't say that people who did drills were bad and were trying to imitate good people. Clearly, as established near the beginning of the thread, there are also good people who do drills. I said that if one is bad, then it is a reasonable strategy to imitate good people. I do this myself some of the time.
So I was defending the line of reasoning "Good people do drills, so we should do drills too" against Inq, who said that it was specious.

I just think that in this case, it doesn't hold, for the previously mentioned reasons.

[oso97]

As a coach, I find this course of discussion absolutely fascinating *dry cough*

If you're a fencer at my club, you're going to do general conditioning, footwork, paired drills, directed bouting, training and sharp bouting, and lessons. All appropritely gauged and designed for the particular level of fencer.

Being a "recreational fencer" is not an excuse for being lazy with regards to drills. Neither is being a "competitive fencer." Different drills for different fencers.

[epeelion]

I simply took issue with the statement that bladework drills were "completely useless" as a blanket statement. Other than that, everyone improves differently, obviously, and different things may work for different people. So it's perfectly possible for some people to do well without them (though I would argue that they never hurt).

[bigdawg2121]

One of the aspects of Elliot's argument that I find interesting is that it's ok...wait, it's necessary and good, to drill as long as it's with your coach who knows what you should be doing and what the timing, etc should be. It does not, however, help to do similar drills with other fencers as they do not have the same sense of correct timing and execution, even if ultimately the goal is to be effective against all of the different types of people one may fence.

[jfarmer]

Originally Posted by eac

Why does everybody have to argue against a different misinterpretation of what I said?

epeelion: We've established that there are good people who drill. Talking more about new and different good people who drill does not add to the conversation.
Also, I didn't say that people who did drills were bad and were trying to imitate good people. Clearly, as established near the beginning of the thread, there are also good people who do drills. I said that if one is bad, then it is a reasonable strategy to imitate good people. I do this myself some of the time.
So I was defending the line of reasoning "Good people do drills, so we should do drills too" against Inq, who said that it was specious.

I just think that in this case, it doesn't hold, for the previously mentioned reasons.

The point is that you said:

Bladework drills (scripted ones with two partners, anyway) are completely useless. I expect they're even less useful in sabre than they are in foil, since bladework in sabre is comparatively less complicated, and footwork is more important. You don't get better doing bladework drills. I did them for five years; I only started to get much better when I stopped doing them and focused on real fencing instead. I've made *much* more total progress in the two years I haven't been doing them than in the five that I did do them. Do footwork drills, take lessons and fence instead.

That looks pretty much to me that you are flat out stating that one should not do bladework drills....

Look you are arguing the same as many of my math (high school age) and programming (college age) students said about doing homework, "I don't need to do the sample problems, I know how to do it, I will do just fine on tests, and besides, homework problems are nothing like the real world..." And in maybe 1 or 2 out of 100 students, that was true, they could work through the problem once or twice, and ace the test. (And on the other end, 1 or 2 could work pages of sample problems and never get it...) But the fact of the matter is, for most people (I'm guessing at >90%) they need the repetition of sample problems, or drills, to get it down.

Your claim is equivalent to stating that the only way to learn how to solve differential equations is to keep taking different tests (club bout), or attempt to solve real world systems problems (tournament bouts) until you get it right... Finding one fencer who is successful without practicing bladework drills does not invalidate their use for improvement for the other 99%..

[bobb121]

I would see this attack as being a preperation for a straight forward attack. The drill needs to be down with footwork. That is my two cents worth. You might try and get the coach to demonstrate it using footowork.

[Don Badowski]

Setting aside anything new they might teach you, when you take a lesson with a coach, aren't you in effect drilling with a high level partner?

And consider the strong fencer who hits the weaker fencer with a very simple action, such as simple direct or simple indirect attack. The weaker fencer wonders how he got hit with such a simple thing. The answer is usually that the stronger fencer was able to make the weaker do the wrong thing, or the right thing but at the wrong time. How was he able to do that? Drills carried out at a very high level. Drills that train the fencer to match the speed of the opponents' actions and force them to do the action they want.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by eac

It isn't that specious. If you don't know which things are important, one reasonable strategy for doing well is to imitate everything the high-powered coaches and fencers do, in the hopes that you'll get the important stuff along with the crap.

Except that one size does not fit all. At the extreme, a very short fencer probably would not get much out of trying to imitate Brad---or Ben Igoe, for that matter. A very tall fencer would probably not be well advised to adopt all aspects of, say, Mike Momtselidze's style. Heck, some top fencer's are fairly idiosyncratic. ( Can anyone do what Ivan Lee does with the springing flunge? I sure can't. )

But maybe this is the way things like screaming spread.

Originally Posted by epeelion

Just because some people can succeed without drills, or there are coaches that have good students that coach without drills, does not in any way imply that drills are useless.

Very true. That's just as unproven as the universal statement that drills always help and are indispensable...

NB There's also the possibility that it's not the drills per se which improve some people's fencing, but rather the exertion of the discipline and patience needed to do the dratted things. Heck, there may even be a placebo effect at work..

[epeelion]

Fair enough, Inq, my only point to make in this thread was that drills were not useless. Another thought I had to whoever said that they did lots of drills and fenced clean but lost, is that perhaps that's the fault of the coach forgetting to teach you tactics, not the fault of the drills. Drills only hurt when they're assigned by a coach that has no idea what he/she is doing...