INTEGRATING RANDOMNESS INTO YOUR FENCING LESSONS AND TRAINING

Again, it’s easy to see that if we knew exactly what would happen in competition, we could train in just one way over and over, like the group that only practiced serving to the spot that they were tested on. But fencing isn’t like that. It requires constant innovation and adaptation. If you can’t handle an opponent with unusual technique or someone who does something you’ve never seen in practice, you’re toast.



Unfortunately, most fencers still train in this more predictable structure. Just watch a group class or a private lesson. They’ll start with five lunges, then five advance-lunges, then five jump-lunges, or the coach will say, “I’m going to attack, and you should take parry 4 and riposte.”

BRIDGING THE GAP

It’s understandable why this happens—it’s the easiest way for coaches and fencers to plan a training session / fencing lesson, and it’s also a good way to help the student feel like they’re making progress. We feel good when we repeat a drill and finally do it correctly. Transferring those skills into our bouts, however, remains difficult because we may not have retained what we have learned or understood its practical applications. How often have you repeated a drill one day until you got it right, then, the next day, tried to do it again and felt as awkward as a cat with shoes on? As the study demonstrates, the more you drill skills in a varied and unpredictable order, the more likely it is that you will retain the core skill and be able to apply it under different circumstances—not just in your fencing lesson.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that training a particular technique in isolation is bad for you. If you’re learning a brand new skill, it’s important to practice it on its own at first just to get a feel for it and the basic technique down. But once you start feeling comfortable with it, you should try to progress to using it in increasingly more varied and unpredictable situations.

So how can you use this knowledge to make changes in your own fencing? If you’re just beginning and learning your parries, for example, it’s fairly straightforward. Rather than take parry 4 ten times, then parry 3 ten times, then parry 5 ten times (or 6, 7 or 8 for our foil and epee friends!), it would make sense to mix them up--take 4, then 3, then 5 twice, then 3 again, and so on.

If you’re more advanced, of course, this strategy still applies. Let me give a personal example. I would often make a plan for the day when doing my footwork that was divided into pieces: do attacks, then actions in the middle, then actions on defense. Within those, I would break it down more: for example, for my attacks, I would do ten long slow attacks, then ten fast attacks with a flunge, or for my actions in the middle I would practice simultaneous attacks, then distance parries, then attacks in preparation. I was still getting a lot of repetitions in, but after what we’ve learned today, it’s clear that this wasn’t the most efficient way for me to be learning. A better way would be to mix these all up--to do a long slow attack, then a distance parry, then a simultaneous attack, then two fast attacks with a flunge, then another simultaneous attack. You can even use your phone to record yourself saying which action to do next, to listen to while you practice.

The other important thing to take from these studies is the importance of varying even the way you do the same action. You aren’t always going to do the exact same advance-lunge every time in a bout--sometimes you will have to make it longer or shorter, or faster or slower. Again, you’ll get the most out of your training if you change this up as well. In the example above, every time I did a long slow attack, I could change up the overall length, the rhythm, what footwork I finished with, and what line I finished to.

You can ask your coach to help you with this or find a partner to do drills with, but even if you’re practicing on your own, as I often would with my footwork, just doing your actions in a variety of ways in an unpatterned sequence is a big step up over how a lot of fencers train (including me for a long time!). Having an opponent to make you react in real time is very valuable, of course, and we’ll get more into drills that focus on this soon when we revisit Soren Thompson and the idea of open and closed skills.

This will definitely make your practice more challenging than just doing one thing ten times, then the next thing ten times. You don’t have to come up with all new drills to do in order for this to work; you can just add a little variety and randomness to the ones you’re already doing. Don’t be concerned if you don’t do as well at practice with this randomness as you did before; it will be harder at first but will pay off in the long run. Just remember, fencing is challenging and unpredictable. Shouldn’t you be training the same way?