Read most fencing books written in the last few hundred years or so or hit Google and ask it how to practice fencing footwork. The first thing most sources will tell you is that footwork is a large percentage of a complete fencer’s skill and the next thing you will get is a recommendation to do lots and lots of deconstructed and identical repetition work on a specific set of steps to increase familiarity and build skill.
Shuffle. Pass without a facing change. Pass with a facing change. Lunge. On command. Out of context of their use in a match. The list of potential movements is pretty long when you actually lay it all out and especially when you add factors like amplitude and angle/direction. You might also get a recommendation to do things like agility ladders. Agility ladders train you to lift your leg quickly and place it precisely whilst watching your feet. Fencing is about putting force into the ground in order to create motion or change direction whilst watching your opponent. Agility ladders are not a good tool for learning to move better in HEMA.
Rehearsing steps used to feel logical to me. My first lesson of every term used to be “Death by Footwork”. I suspect I was contributing to the death of my student retention. It was boring and it didn’t feel like learning fencing. It felt like work.
In my estimation at the time, surely I needed to construct the building blocks before I could use them to assemble a fencer? Surely?
In reality, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. Have you ever had that feeling where you’ve “learned” something in choreographed drilling, but couldn’t really get it to work until you’d taught yourself to use it in freeplay? Yeah. That’s the rest of the skill. The perception part. The infinitely variable part. The part where you have to fit the very square peg you’ve learned into a variety of round holes. Without variability, and without realistic and game-faithful perception practice, you’ve learned to dance. Not to fence.
Isolating the physical part can be useful for pure action-capacity (physical ability to perform a task), but even then, just building the necessary hip mobility and strength outside of fencing is in my experience a more effective way to go, if only so that class time can be used for things that require a partner. I’ve watched dozens of people add small amounts of hip strength and mobility and get vastly better at fencing in a short period of time over and over. Their bodies reorganise themselves into a more recognisable and historically-faithful shape really quickly whilst improving at the game. Win win.
It’s important to point out that all training works to a degree eventually, provided you spend enough time in freeplay. It’s the simplest thing in the world, but I think spending enough time actually fencing is something a lot of HEMAists and HEMA clubs don’t seem to manage. The game itself is a teacher. A good one. Add a little bit of prompting and/or the odd constraint into that freeplay and you have something really powerful. Definitely something more powerful than choreography.
Restricted freeplay is far more powerful than stepping through a play like it’s a dance as restricted freeplay is representative of the game that we are playing, and stepping through a play just isn’t. If we aren’t perceiving and acting at the same time, we aren’t practicing fencing. As coaches, we need to ensure that our activities are at least as valuable as just spending more time in freeplay if we are trying to create the best fencers we can. This of course needs to be balanced with fun, fatigue management, and historical source engagement, but is still generally true.
So what do good movement skills for fencing look like? Are they big step lunges and passes or are they minimal stepping to afford a tight blade actions? The answer is yes to both. There is so much variability in the fencing itself, opponents, the space, the weapons, the rules and more, that it’s impossible to generalise.
A taller fencer may not need to move much at all to stay safe and land touches. A shorter fencer will probably need to. If the space is small, more bladework will be required. If the space is larger, then more movement-based tactics can come to the fore. Now think about that in relation to stepping through the plays. Can some fencers even use some of what is in the plays effectively? Should they?
So if it’s not specific steps and body positions, then is it the form of those specific steps and body positions? Yes…and no.
There are biomechanical considerations here. Knees flexing significantly outside the line of the toes are in danger. A packed shoulder is generally more stable than a protracted one. That type of thing.
There are tactical considerations too. A simple comparison would be in following something like Meyer’s sidesword vs Neapolitan rapier. The sidesword wants a forward weighted posture to enable the back foot to move without a preparatory action. Neapolitan rapier wants that back foot more loaded to afford quicker forward step with the front foot.
With sources in mind, there will still need to be space for individual and situational variance. The gold standard for a lunge in a given system might be a relatively upright torso. This makes recovery easy and keeps the squishy bits further away than one where a fencer leans forward. Imagine a shorter and/or less plyometrically gifted fencer is fencing a taller and/or bouncier one. The fencer with less reach needs to make up their deficit somehow or the game will consist of them walking into a distance where they can be attacked without the other fencer having to move their feet over and over and over. One way to do that if they are strong enough to recover well or skilled enough in aborting to a parry whilst attacking is to employ a bit more of a lean to make up the distance. Is this wrong? I don’t believe it is for them. The fencing systems have to adapt to the user even in historical fencing. They would have historically. A good fencing master surely would have helped their students to be the best they could be given their inherent strengths and weaknesses?
The most useful question in relation to someone’s movement is whether it helps them effectively and efficiently solve the problem in front of them in a way that is broadly recognisable within their historical system of practice. All of the biomechanical, tactical, and historical accuracy aspects of a training approach are tied up in this question.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this article talking about what not to do. It’s time to talk about more representative training design. Here’s something I’m pretty sure about. Marching up and down the training space practicing steps out of the context in which they will be used in a bout is not a good use of training time.
Instead of deconstructing and isolating actions by removing their context, or running through an example of actions from a play in the book like a dance, I believe the best way to train is to take slices of the game and isolate one or more problems within that slice. This keeps the representativeness intact but enables focus.
An example of designing to solve a problem might be: “People are retreating too far on defence and are unable to land a riposte as a result even on a very committed attack from their opponent”.
So in this case, we need to first focus on the amplitude of that retreat as primary and then on the direction change as secondary as an improvement in either of these could address the problem. A good way to do that is to remove the parry first and allow only the retreat as a defensive option. You’ll want to bring back the parry eventually, but right now, we want people retreating just enough, so we are focusing on that skill in a way it is often used in a bout. People retreat without a parry all the time.
This game, and any other that maintains representativeness, has things to teach both players, but what it teaches the offensive player is outside the scope of this article. You may note though that taking a slice of the game rather than having one player act as the coach keeps the actions of both players inherently more representative.
People can of course try and win the game through exploiting the rules, and every now and then, this will create an exploit that can upset the task goal. You can change the rules of the game, or ask a player not to use a particular solution and then move on with the lesson. In my club, I most often stop the activity for everyone, get the reporting player to show the exploit, congratulate them by saying “VERY GOOD…STOP IT…NEW RULE!”, and then announce the rule change.
Doing this reinforces the club culture of play coupled with a focus on personal improvement, and gets everyone analysing the new solution for them as they continue the game. Regardless of any potential exploits, I would much rather deal with players finding and spamming exploits than rely on a designated feeder who might unknowingly perform actions that aren’t representative enough to build skill in the first place.
Detailed game design is beyond the scope of this article. The above is a good start for the thought process. You will have some failures when designing games. I’m four years into ditching drills completely and I still have the odd misfire. It’s ok. You stop the game and move on. When you train in a more representative way so that variability is built into your training activities, it’s easy to accidentally build unwanted incentives into those activities. Finding exploits is a strong sign that students are engaging thoughtfully with the game which is what we want.
If you are new to this method of training, it’s important to remember that you didn’t learn to train people the way you already do in a few sessions, and it’s going to take more than a few sessions to get even remotely good at it. If your students are like mine, some will be skeptical but most will be willing to give the new method a go. Give them a timeframe. A month or months is better than weeks. You’ll probably lose a few. I did. Now I am having trouble fitting all of the new ones attracted by this method and our club culture in my training spaces.
You’ve realised you’ve been using choreographed drills for too long. VERY GOOD…STOP IT…NEW RULES For training design are here.
Good luck!
