FINDING THE BALANCE BETWEEN STRATEGY AND INTUITION

I can now clearly see how intuition and strategy support each other. Calculated thought is necessary to set up the framework for an upcoming match. That includes predetermined responses to scenarios that you expect to happen. This calculated strategy also helps identify which actions and responses will best leverage your strengths and exploit your opponent’s weaknesses. During the match, however, intuition then serves as the guiding force to respond to and/or create unforeseen opportunities during touch-by-touch decision making.

TRAINING INTUITION - LESS IS MORE

The prevailing attitude in sports is that more is better. More training. More footwork. More competitions, etc.

While, doing more may help you acquire a base of technical skills, it is easily misinterpreted and misapplied when it comes to improving intuition. Intuition can only become more accurate and useful through consistent exposure to high-quality learning moments and the reflection that comes afterward. So in that sense, developing your intuition is actually about doing less.

Fencers spend a lot of time bouting with each other in practice. However, only some portion of those matches will be intense enough and/or have sufficient quality to build your intuition. Consistent low intensity matches can actually impede building your intuition because they reinforce a different set of responses than those acquired in a competitive match (at full intensity). Slow matches also waste training time that a fencer could use to collect feedback from coaches and peers or to reflect on a match and visualize the key moments that reinforce positive intuitive responses under pressure. This is one of many reasons why focused, deliberate practice is essential to a comprehensive training plan.

The clarity and accuracy of your intuition comes from internalizing and understanding what went right (and what went wrong) in your matches, not from the exposure to the greatest number of scenarios.

Vladimir Nazlymov often told me about Pavel Kolobkov, Olympic Gold medal-winning epeeist from Russia, whose training regimen was managed to the exact number of touches he would fence every day (as a side note, Kolobkov was just named the new Russian Minister of Sport). In this extreme example, the athlete’s energy was meticulously maximized to ensure that he was exposed to the greatest number of high-quality training moments.

WHEN INTUITION BREAKS DOWN

There are, however, moments in a match when you must bring calculated decision making back into the game. Intuition is a sensitive mechanism which can break down when you are under stress. According to Gladwell, when our heart rate rises above 145 beats per minute, our ability to make complex decisions erodes significantly. This is the reason why high-intensity, high-quality training moments are exceptionally important. He tells the story of Gavin deBecker, who runs one of the country’s premier personal security agencies, who subjects his recruits to exercises with pit bulls and live bullets during training. Now don’t go and take off any of your equipment to up the ante, but I really want to drive home the point that simulating the stress of competition in training environments is essential to building intuition that you can rely on in future critical moments.

Only to complicate things, I must also point out that some circumstances actually require consciously overriding your intuition and pre-committing to an action. Whenever I suspected that my intuition might succumb to intense stress – for example, a match which concluded in a 14-14, ’sudden death,’ moment – I would deliberately choose my action based on my knowledge of my opponent and his fencing during the match. I recall one match-winning point during which I actually closed my eyes during an attack, so that I would not be tempted to change my mind once I initiated the plan.

Daryl Homer gave us a beautiful example of this type of strategic calculation in the Men’s Sabre semi-finals at the 2016 Olympics. At 14-14 with Mojtaba Abedini, his opponent from Iran, he went for a 5 parry, after having done so successfully several times earlier in the match. It was a bold gamble when the stakes were so high, but a far superior choice to having no plan when your intuition is likely to fail.

IMPROVE WHAT INTUITION PAYS ATTENTION TO

We mentioned before that in contrast to calculated thought, intuition relies on only a few key pieces of information to make quick decisions. You are rarely aware of what these specific inputs are, but you can try to make this process more conscious to improve it for the next time around. For example, when tracking an opponent on the en garde line, we often select a spot on their body that we spend more time looking at than others. Changes in the way this spot moves helps us anticipate what might happen next. For example, the nearly imperceptible lean forward that unconsciously suggests that your opponent is planning to attack fast off the line.

You can experiment and find what works best for you. For example, I found that when I watched my opponent’s midline (the spot right above their waist) I was much better at understanding changes to the distance between us. Compare this to the upper body or an opponent’s arm/weapon which can move much more without the actual distance between you and your opponent changing. Tim Morehouse and I used to talk about this frequently and for some time even experimented with watching our opponents’ feet! Although this never worked for me, you can see how an increased awareness of your opponent’s body can be very helpful to your fencing intuition.