My problem is that it can turn into eating desert first. Fighting slowly allows you to process all the information easily and respond stress free at an easy rate; and so of course fighting becomes more technical. This is in itself good. The problem comes when monkey brains get involved. For many fencers their goal is to fight “technically” - a term I’m actually now coming to hate despite often being described as a technical fencer. Since this objective can be fulfilled in slow fencing with less work than in full speed sparring, they never see a reason to put the work into the second, as the first better fulfills their personal goals and always will.

Fighting with full speed, contact (no this does not mean striking as hard as you possibly can because this will get you hit… a lot!) and resistance requires both your mental and physical conditioning to be at a level to handle the pressure. You have to have enough experience to be able to extrapolate what’s going on from tiny pieces of information you glimpse at speed, to understand what’s going, and to react accordingly. Your muscles have to be able to respond with sufficient speed, power, and precision to execute your intentions and keep up with the fight. Not to mention the sheer mental composure it takes to not breakdown mentally from the stress. Those things come from lots of hard boring work, so if you don’t have any reason to do it you won’t. It’s less work to create a social construct that doesn’t prioritize full over limited sparring then to do the work.