You might be wondering why this way of thinking matters. If you’re doing the same drills either way, who cares what you’re thinking about? That’s where what psychologists call the “four stages of learning” come in. These stages are a model they use to describe how we learn and develop new skills.

The first stage is being unconsciously unskilled. This means that something is wrong, but we don’t really know what, or even if anything is wrong at all! If you’re having some problems with your advance lunge, for example, you might have a vague sense that it’s “not good enough,” or just that you’re losing touches but you’re not sure why.

The second stage is being consciously unskilled. This stage is the key to improvement—this is the point where we realize exactly what is going wrong so we can fix it! This is where you might have the realization that your advance lunge isn’t powerful enough because you aren’t pushing from your back foot, or that your opponent can see it coming because you tense your upper body before you start to move. It can be easy to get stuck in the previous phase, but breaking out of it just takes a little self-reflection or advice from an experienced coach or fencer. By knowing exactly what the issue is, you can design drills to specifically target that problem.

The third stage is being consciously skilled. This means you’ve put in enough practice that when you’re really focused, you can do it right, but under pressure or if you’re not thinking about it you might slip into your old habits. This can be frustrating for a lot of people, but it’s actually a good sign—it means you’re making progress!

Pretty soon, you’ll enter the fourth stage—being unconsciously skilled. When you watch elite fencers, this is the phase they’re in for just about everything. They can do an advance lunge or take a parry correctly and automatically. This leaves them free to focus on the more abstract, mentally challenging pieces of the game—controlling their opponent, making the right choices, or even persuading the referee that a touch was theirs.

IT'S GOOD TO MAKE MISTAKES

Being in the unconsciously skilled phase doesn’t mean you never make a mistake, of course—I spend plenty of time walking around, but I still trip from time to time. And it’s good to fail sometimes! That’s where we find out where we still need to get better. If you’re doing a drill and you’re 100% successful, make the drill more difficult! That’s when you’ll discover the next thing you need to work on—now that you can do a perfect advance lunge without thinking about it, you might realize you still don’t know when to do it, for example. That’s how the learning process works, and it means you get to start all over again with your new challenge!

Remember, the third and fourth stages might seem to be the ones where you see the biggest changes in your fencing. But in actuality the most important piece of that whole cycle is the transition between the first two stages—making the conscious discovery that a particular area of your fencing needs to be improved. Once you get the ball rolling and start doing the proper drills (with intensity and focus!), you’ll get better naturally. But you can’t start that process until you’re aware of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.