Red Riding Hoods – Fleche and Other Footwork Training

This drill can be done by a fencer with their parent or friend. So it can be assigned as homework or it can be one parents can adopt to do with their fencer.

One of the big things with training the fleche is to be able to execute from any point in your movement without telegraphing that you're about to. The fleche should explosively take an opponent by surprise. They should not have the time to realize the fleche is happening or to respond.

If an athlete has to fully settle their feet before beginning a fleche, they lose the moment in which it would be effective. If an athlete has to load the body and set up the weight to be explosive, they lose the element of surprise.

This exercise is a fun one. My youth fencers love it – despite it being strenuous. I originally started using it for my college fencers to help teach them to fleche suddenly from light footwork movement. The team of beginner fencers who first adopted this drill went on to win their conference's foil title three years running. Obviously, this drill was not the only element of their success – but their ability to make sudden bursting attacks, counters, and attacks in prep, helped set them apart.

It is also adaptable. You can change the footwork involved, or even dispense with footwork altogether.

It's pretty simple. The leader tells a story. While the leader is telling the story the fencers “float” or maintain a dynamic guard (they bounce back and forth lightly or shuffle constantly between their feet, if they have trouble with this an advance-retreat in place pattern is fine).

Certain types of words trigger certain responses. Usually you only want two. You could work it as a recognition and choice drill by adding more than two – but this can be difficult and those are better as visual drills.

For example, we tell a faery tale and every time an animal word is used the fencer's fleche, every time a color word is used they do a burpee.

Number words can be an option also. Or the name of a character. Faery tales are the easiest to use, but we used The Death of Superman once. One of our youth athletes likes leading the drill and makes up stories. The important parts are

1. Keeping the story fun and interesting so athletes enjoy the exercise despite the work
2. Embellishing the story in the extreme – partially to keep it interesting; in order to add the trigger words as much as possible.

Your chosen responses can vary.

For footwork we commonly use fleche, flunge, double advance-lunge. You could use a distance pull-lunge. You could add an explosiveness exercise and do a scissor jump lunge, or a squat lunge.

For conditioning we typically use burpees or sit ups, but you could use jumping squats, or sprints, or even sit ups. It should just be a small number, or even only one, so that they can reset to their constant movement quickly. You'll also be making them do it several times throughout the story so they don't have to do a lot each time the word is said since you'll say your trigger words several times.

If you want to focus on creating a work out instead of focusing on footwork then you might try three or four cue words. You can increase the cue words in this instance because they don't have to worry about quick reaction on a precise or correct execution of a fencing movement, they are just doing a simpler exercise movement which should be more natural to them. Then set all trigger words for exercise movements. So colors trigger a burpee, numbers trigger a jumping squat, and animals trigger a sprint.

If they get the cue wrong, give them a jovial reminder of what the cues are. It's not a choice or decision drill so the error doesn't really need any firm correction – they just need to get on track so they get the most out of the drill.

Thanks

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Red riding hood image found on pintrest by Edli on Deviant Art, classic fleche image taken from Sydney Sabre

A Footwork Conditioning Exercise

Last summer I put together a sequence of footwork conditioning exercises for one of my students. He was really working at his fencing, but wasn't working out much. His footwork needed some help. It seemed like perfecting his footwork form would get easier if he had some more strength in his legs, specifically strength oriented towards the activity.

He used it through the summer and into the new season and saw a major improvement in his footwork. He then progressed from a D to a B during the course of the COVID shortened season. Another one of our fencers worked the routine and went from just starting fencing, to making it into the top 100 on the Cadet National Points List in that same shortened season.

In both their cases, they practiced multiple times a week for several hours. But footwork is your foundation and so improvements in footwork and better conditioning on the legs probably helped a lot. So this was potentially one of several factors to help them with their success.

We've been using it over our summer camps this summer, and into week two we're already seeing footwork improvements from the week one fencers.

The routine is really simple and can be done at home or at your club. You'll need a timer, a jump rope, a weight, and a length of space about as long as a fencing strip.

First step is advancing and retreating.

Advance the length of the strip, then retreat the length of the strip. First set do slowly, stay focused on your form.

Repeat at a medium pace. Focus on your form.

Repeat at a fast pace, focus on your form. This is a little harder at the fast pace but still necessary.

Now go at your maximum pace, stay attentive to form.

Now you'll work backwards. Do another fast set, then a medium set and finish with a slow set.

You're working your way up in speed and then bringing it back down. The first half works on maintaining form the second half on fixing form.

Second step is Sabre Runs

Sprint from one end of the strip to the other, then slowly walk back.

This simulates the explosive burst of going forward in a fencing action, and then the recovery from the action while you return to the line. It mimics the burst-rest interval experience of sabre.

When sprinting push to your limit. Try and push each sprint faster. This is how sprinting works to develop muscle speed. The muscles push to use more power so they adapt to normalize that power.

Third step is Jump Rope.

Set 2 or 3 minutes on the clock depending upon capability. Jump rope as consistently as possible during that time.

You're working on cardio, but also a little bit on hand eye and foot coordination.

The fourth step is Weighted Lunging

Grab a weight. Hold the weight to your chest. Lunge and recover forward the length of the strip and then back.

When you're done repeat on your non-dominant leg.

You can add a second or third set of these depending upon capability.

The fifth and final step are Standing Broad Jumps

Take your weight and hold it to your chest. From a stationary position, standing as if in guard, jump forward explosively using only your back leg.

Repeat this up and back the length of the strip.

Repeat the process with your non-dominant leg.

This is a power exercise, so time is a component.

The best way to do this is to run a stop watch and clock how much time it takes you to do one set on each leg.

Rest for about thirty seconds and then do both legs again. Run the stop watch to see if you improved your time.

Rest for about thirty seconds and repeat again. Run the stop watch to see if you beat both previous times.

If doing this for a group you can set partners to time each other, or you can have fencers count the number of jumps they take and try to beat the number each time.

You're only trying to beat the time or number done by that leg. So all your jumps on your right leg compare to each other but not to your jumps on the left leg, and visa versa.

Notes

There is a tendency when doing this to take huge breaks when one is left to their own devices. You have to fight this tendency. One student would stretch this to an hour or an hour and a half when he could. You can finish this in about 25 to 40 minutes.

My best friend is kind of into cross-fit. When he saw a student doing this set he was not a fan because it was all such specific exercises focused on such specific sort of uses of the legs. It is specifically a series of exercises to help develop footwork. It's important to do other conditioning and physical development that is more general as well.

Thanks

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Strangest Defensive Sabre Move

Among the questions my college students asked when I was fishing for topic inspiration was “what is the strangest defensive sabre move you know?” I guess the answer to the best defensive sabre move I know would be...attack more perfectly so you don't have to defend? I jest...sort of.

Over my time fencing I can think of a few amusing things I've encountered or used in sabre.

The coolest defensive sabre move is probably the jump parry-two. The Polish (or the sky-hook) is probably one of the cooler counter offensive movements, but the counter close out, or a resemblement pris-de-fer counter attack might be cooler.

For strange though...we have to dig deeper.

And honestly, even strange moves aren't super strange, they're just unusual, and usually impractical.

In college I was a fan of making a counter attack with a passata sotto followed by a parry five and riposte. Now you would make the same idea using what I like to call a “bunny hop” but what most people just call ducking...that crouching motion that you see in foil and epee sometimes. The passata sotto (ducking in a sort of reverse lunge with the off hand touching the floor for balance) was flashy and cool and esoteric in the minds of college kids I guess. You don't see it a lot now, it's probably one of those historical curiosities of fencing.

I once saw a coach, who claimed to be a former national coach, explaining to a group of kids that a passata sotto was the french term for an advance-lunge. The term is Italian, the Italian term for an advance-lunge is a patinando. It's been a few years, that coach seems to have since corrected his use of the terms.

I guess, again, this was a counter-offensive rather than a defensive action.

When I took my first lesson at Salle Palasz it was with Coach's best friend, Ramon Mathews. He was in his late seventies or early eighties and had an intense dramatic flair. He used to dress up as Zorro for the kids at Halloween. The lesson he gave me was on the use of the parry six in sabre.

Prior to this, I knew what a parry six was. Basically a backwards parry five with the hand brought to the other side of the face. When it was first shown to me by another fencer in college I thought he was making it up. By the time I received this lesson, I knew it was real but just something people didn't really do.

Ramon taught me that if I had made an attack in four, and was parried, if my opponent collapsed the distance with a riposte to the head, I could take the parry six more quickly than a five, and probably more effectively than a four at that distance, and then riposte by rotating the wrist and dropping my tip.

This is a pretty unlikely action in contemporary electric sabre, but it can work. It's definitely a hold over from non-electric sabre and is basically an infighting option. But there might be some scenarios where it could get used if you were against someone who managed to force fencing that close, or against a tactical distance-close on the parry to eliminate the parry-counter-riposte option.

Another weird moment was the use of a parry seven. The parry seven is a parry behind the back in sabre. Coaches talk about it as the parry you would use as someone was passing you on horseback. I don't know if that's real or not, but until the early nineties passing in sabre probably happened a lot because fleching happened a lot.

I was not fencing when the fleche was still allowed in sabre. But, a few years back I was doing a sabre bout with a student. The student was a left handed foilist, he has now switched over to being an epeeist and has moved away to be a professional fencing coach. I'm not sure why he was fencing sabre with me at the time. At one point his instincts kicked in and I guess he tried to attack when he saw me make a preparation, and he made a fleche. As he was going past tried to hit, so, I made a parry seven and extended behind myself to hit him as he ran past me.

Super unusual. I've seen one other fencer do this one time in a similar situation. But only that one other time.

My favorite though was probably this last one.

I was on a team with a foilist and an epeeist. We were in a three weapon team competition. So each team had one fencer from each weapon, and you fenced a relay to fifteen. I'm not sure how the bracketing worked, but we fenced a handful of teams and eventually won the competition. My high school students crushed a team from a local college, which I assumed would be the team to beat my team, and then my team crushed my high school students in the final.

Earlier in the day though we were against a team from another local club, and their head coach was doing sabre for their team. He was a lot of fun to fence and is a super nice guy. He made an attack with a very low line, or maybe he was going for a counter attack. He was left handed, and so he was closer than I expected and the distance was closing. So I switched from attacking to parrying but continued forward and took his blade in two and then bound the blade continuing from the second position in order to score the touch on his back while still holding his blade with mine.

It sounds a little ridiculous but can actually be done with some elegance. It's another example of sabre taking an action that is essentially in fighting.

So yeah, I don't know if any of those are the strangest...but they're the strange ones that come to mind. 

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Are All Ratings Created Equally?

         Several times over the last eight months a friend and I have ended up talking about perceptions of ratings. Most fencers and parents are aware that USA Fencing has a system of rating, A being the highest, E being the lowest, and U for anyone who has yet to earn a rating. For those unaware, our rating system is a purely USA Fencing thing. Internationally, and also domestically, there are multiple ranking lists whereon fencers achieve a numerical ranking through earning points based on placement in significant tournaments.

          For ratings, placement in a single tournament determines an earned rating. The tournament strength is decided by the number of people and the ratings of those people along with the number of rated people who place in the top eight. A rating lasts for four years. Any local event can give out a rating, even if its entirely attended by people of a single division, or even a single club, as long as the event is one of the appropriate age categories for giving the rating. Whether you earn it in a senior, a junior or a vet event, or if you earn it in a mixed, a men’s or a women’s event does not impact the rating. They’re all the same.

          Rankings are earned through points given based on placement in certain types of events. The number of points awarded may be determined by the nature of the event, or by the size of the event. Events which give out points are broken down between age groups, division, and gender. Your ranking only applies in the category where you earned points (Junior Men’s Foil, Division II [Senior] Women’s Epee, etc.). Your ranking will be the result of multiple performances, potentially, and points drop off after 12 months, or at the end of the season, depending upon the category.

          Because points reflect, potentially, multiple performances, are category specific, are earned in larger “more official” events, and exist for a shorter amount of time, many people feel rankings are a more meaningful system. It’s definitely the system which impacts more important stuff. But the rating system is more visible and is easier to comprehend, so it has an importance as well. Both systems can result in weird attainments. A fencer might have an unusually good day, or they might fence in an unusually easy tournament, or they might get a bizarrely lucky path through the DE table or an unfairly easy pool. In both systems random factors can impact performance so neither one is fool proof. The basic idea for both systems makes sense though, and both rankings and ratings can both be good determiners for an athlete’s ability to perform in a tournament setting.

          But are all ratings created equal? This is the question my friend has brought up after discussions with fellow competitors. Rankings get more specific, you’re given a particular place relative to everyone else. You earn that placement by performing in a regional or a national circuit event, which will often be pretty big, with – hopefully; national referees who know what they’re doing. You ranking is again for a specific category. So, when someone says “I’m in the top 50 Cadet Men’s Epeeists in the country,” it feels specific. You can guess how they qualified for that status. But when someone says “I’m a B,” are all Bs created equally?

          Some parents who don’t fence and some younger athletes take the view “Hey, if you earned it you are it, and it’s all the same.” They don’t consider whether you just had good luck, or opponents had bad luck, or if you got it in an easy event, or if the category of event makes it easier or harder. Those factors all exist though. So, yeah, sometimes a rating might get earned before a fencer is ready. Sometimes a fencer deserves a rating but keeps running into an unusually tough opponent in DEs, or the event strength drops mid-tournament due to upsets, or someone doesn’t show up or pulls out during pools and it just doesn’t hit the expected event rating. Again, it’s not fool proof.

          My friend, maybe questions his rating, he earned his B super-fast after earning his C, and that was pretty fast after his D. But, he spent two years training five to six days a week. In his case, he beat a B who was a former A and a former National Team member to earn his B. He did it in a large event with people from several divisions, and way more Div1 ratings than were needed for the event to have its strength. Half the referees had international referee ratings, including the one who refereed his pool, and the one who refereed most of his DEs. He was in a fairly strong pool as well. His rating was well earned. Conversely, I’ve seen people earn ratings in events where referees were throwing calls in their favor, or where it was all club mates, or events that were so mismanaged and so poorly refereed that many bouts finished in ways that defied logic. I’ve seen people earn ratings by being tall, skinny, and left-handed while fencing so awkwardly that they end up haphazardly getting past better opponents who just can’t adjust to hit them. It’s a mixed bag.

          In most cases though we can say a few things about ratings. Between an E and a D in foil and epee there usually won’t be a ton of difference. There is frequently a big jump between the D and the C in foil and sabre. In all three weapons there is, usually, a big jump from the C to the B, and from the B to the A.  

          Even with those trends…does that mean everyone with the same rating is comparably good? Obviously not. Some Cs routinely lose to some other Cs, some Bs routinely lose to some other Bs. The space for difference is real and unquestionable. Just because you’re on the weaker end of the Cs doesn’t mean you should be a D, or just being on the stronger end doesn’t mean you should be a B. There’s a fair shot your rating makes sense. Sometimes though, people are weaker or stronger than their rating suggests.

          The real thing you want to look for isn’t did you earn the rating, it’s what does your performance usually look like. After all, the rating is an exciting moment, it’s a great thing to celebrate, and it’s a great goal to motivate you – but your performance over time is the real thing you want to make good. So, you earn a C, are you routinely placing such that you would re-earn the C? If you’re in a larger event where re-earning is less likely – are you outplacing most of the Ds and below? Are you finishing amid the Cs? If you’re a C and you’re outplacing the bulk of the Bs routinely that can tell you something too. That’s what I look for. I’ll celebrate the win, but then I’ll look for the trend.

          If the trend isn’t immediate though don’t worry. You earned the rating, and if you did it in a meaningful context, it might just be a matter of getting your sea legs. The game changes a little. People will adjust the effort they put in because they expect you to be a harder opponent. Relative pool strength shifts, which should be an advantage but it can still weirdly adjust what your first DE bout is like. Adjust your training to your new context. Keep at it. Find the trend.

          For parents and team mates, when athletes get a rating they don’t expect and they doubt themselves, it might not be useful to just tell them that they earned it so it’s theirs. Point to the context, show them why it was deserved, and remind them they now have something to work towards fulfilling rather than to work towards earning. If they get too excited and their head swells up too much, remind them they need to be able to repeat it, and their access to tournaments is changing in a way to encourage that. All in all, celebrate the win, strive to prove the win through continued success and growth.

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Fencing At Home

So we’re in a pretty weird time. Around the world people are stuck at home, limiting their activities, keeping distance from one another. When I was running our Division’s National Qualifier we had to begin using the new rule of saluting with no handshake and minimizing fencer contact with paperwork. That didn’t last long because pretty quickly everything shut down. Quickly enough that no one had time to respond or plan for it. So many of us are still trying to find ways to keep up with fencing and keep athletes ready for the new season once things go back to normal.

          The first thing we can do is keep working out. Fencing provides a work out, but even when we’re in our clubs and on the strip we need to do a lot of additional work out activities if we want to be competitive and successful. So now that we aren’t in our clubs we need to make sure we’re working out even more. Most areas still allow people to go out for runs so keep that up. Otherwise at home work outs.

          With the at home work outs we should get some home drills in too. I’ve been doing Zoom classes for my students where we talk about the mental end of fencing stuff. One of my students warmed up for class today by running while we waited for his teammates, when the team did a social chat he had his golf ball and was working on point control while on the chat. This is a great commitment.

So lets go over some drill ideas.

Foil and Epee

Point Control

The easy obvious one is a golf ball. If you don’t want to set up a permanent hook from which to hang a golf ball you can get a command hook with removable double sided tape to temporarily attached to the ceiling. You’ll need an eye hook and rope. Drill a hole in the golf ball for the eye hook, and tie the rope between the eye hook and the hook from the ceiling.

Start off at lunge distance. For a lot of drills we begin close and move further out, but an extension distance doesn’t give you room to aim until you start to get your point control down.

Lunge, hit the ball, stay in the lunge, and manipulate the tip with your fingers so that you can hit the ball a second time as it swings back. The remise hit will allow you to focus on fine control a little more.

Once you have that down move to an advance lunge. Once you’ve got that will you can try from an extension distance, or an extension with an advance. Or try moving in and out and lunging.

If you can’t set up a golf ball you can set up a target. Some scrap leather framed with some padding will work, but to go a simpler route take a spare pillow and some tape. Make some cross marks on the pillow with the tape and set it against a wall and use the crosses as targets.

Epeeists if you have an old shoe tape it to the floor or put a weight in the shoe. Something to hold it down. You can work on point control hitting the toe of the shoe. Again, add movement back and forth,  then add making a feint to an imaginary wrist and drop to the toe.  

Disengages

When I learned to make disengages they told us to practice with door knobs. It’s still a decent option. Take your weapon extend and move the tip under the knob from one-side to the other. Make sure the movement is done by manipulating the grip with your fingers only so it stays a small motion. You can add the double, or the completed circle, by practicing rotating in a single direction fully around the door knob. Then try the other direction.

Sabre

Set a mask on the back of a chair from an extension distance make a cut to the left side of the mask and then recut from the fingers. Rotate the hand to the top of the head and cut from the fingers and then recut again. Rotate again to the right side cut from the fingers and then recut. Make the same rotation going back. The idea is from the extension to develop quick sharp small finger motions in a controlled fashion.

If you can situate the mask roughly the height of the head of someone standing en garde you can practice making head cuts. Begin at an extension distance, then advance with extension, then lunge, then advance lunge and double advance lunge. Then add back and forth movement. Then if there is room add a recovery with a distance pull.

You can also combine moving with the head cut and the double tap rotation. Move in and out and then lunge in and make the cut rotation sequence once then recover and retreat back to your movement and repeat.

Thanks for reading. Try these out, post in the comments about how it goes and about how you’re keeping your head in the game.

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Some Thoughts on Lunging

When you get to the end, there's a challenge for people stuck at home!

I asked my college students in their meme chat, which is not affiliated with the fencing program, to ask me some fencing questions. I wanted some thoughts for things to talk about that weren't just me thinking coachy things.

The first response I got was “how do I lunge” I thought this was kind of a smart alleck question, but it's really not bad. The lunge is something we think of as so basic that it's easy to overlook details. It's also something that we can get too caught up in the details of when introducing it and so we make it seem more difficult than it is. There are definitely things I'd explain when teaching a lunge that I don't hear frequently, and there is probably stuff I should be explaining that I miss.

If I was going to give a quick run down on lunging I would say

1.     Lift the front toes just enough to release the pressure of the front foot.

2.     Push forward from the back leg to propel the body forward

Pretty basic. If you followed those instructions, maybe you lunged.

Maybe not.

Some people might point out that I didn't talk about arms. The first part of lunging is extending your front arm, right?

Well maybe it isn't. Maybe you're making a body feint and you're going to flex your shoulder first to draw a parry, or maybe you're holding back the attack, or you're going to flick, or you're close enough to finish with a bent arm.

We don't have to explain that all those options are there for a beginner, but if we start with the feet and then add the extension then we can have more room to play with the extension more easily as we move forward.

So lets add the extension...

1.     Slowly begin extending the arm.

2.     Imagine a cord between the wrist and the leg so the as the arm pulls forward the legs launch forward

3.     As the legs launch forward sharply accelerate the extension of the arm

Well...why are we adding this bit about sharply extending the arm?

We don't have to...but, frequently that final bit of speed will add to the effectiveness of the attack. It's also an easier speed variance to introduce than slowing the arm. It plays well into how a lot of people read the right of way on the attack in foil and sabre.

Where's the back arm? We need that equal and opposite reaction if we want speed right?

No. That's not how physics works. That's just something fencing coaches say.

But we can add extending the back arm, because it will help us keep our balance, it draws the back upright and helps us keep that straight, and it allows us to rotate our shoulders, which simultaneously extends the reach of our front arm, and allows us to extend more from the muscles in our back and shoulders and less from the arm so that we have greater endurance on the extension.

So we've got some basics...but now maybe some details.

People will often point out that the front toe should be pointed forward. Sometimes we say it should be pointed at the opponent but we have a meter and a half of space the opponent might not be in line with us. We frequently explain that if the toe is pointed somewhere other than forward we won't lunge forward.

I don't know why we say such things, but you can, and people do, lunge straight with their foot turned.

It's important to line the foot up to avoid injury. But not just the foot, the knee and the hip too. The force when the leg comes down for the lunge can be pretty extreme, so if our knee is twisted or our ankle is twisted and the force is pulling things in different directions it can be detrimental. So keep the whole front leg lined up properly.

This brings up too other elements of feet and legs. The over lunge, and rolling the back foot.

Both of these issues tie into the question of how long should the lunge be.

For beginners I try to tell them to let the lunge end naturally. If you extend the back leg and just let the front leg glide forward then the back leg should stop when its done and the front leg will settle in that point. Trying to push further is where we run into the over lunge and the rolled back foot. If students have trouble with this idea, its simple enough to tell them not to let the front knee come past the front ankle and not to roll the back foot. Frankly explaining potential injuries there is usually enough to keep people mindful.

Once students can lunge comfortably without these mistakes adding in shorter, medium and longer lunges can be useful.

More than that I follow the instruction of my last coach, AK, who distinguished between attacking at reach and attacking at distance. In his approach your reach is where you can comfortably attack while being in control of the situation and being in balance enough to easily recover and escape. In your reach you can address a parry or distance pull, and you can recover and pull distance if needed. An attack at your distance is an attack from your maximum length, the point from which you can make an advance lunge using your full lunge capacity.

If we want to add to the idea of differing lengths of the lunge, I think this is a good approach.

What if students point out that high level athletes often lunge onto the side of their foot?

I think it's good to just own this right away. Lunging onto the side of the foot is dangerous because if you can't control the force of your lunge and you move incorrectly you can tear things in the ankle. Athletes with more awareness of their bodies and how they move and the extent of their ability to lunge can and do add length by rolling the foot without allowing a weight shift that would likely create damage.

While we're talking about the feet the height of the front foot is a good detail to address. When I was learning to fence, one of my coaches always called me out for rearing up and raising my front foot really high. I didn't think I was doing it. I probably was. I honestly don't know when I got really focused on not raising the foot, but its really important to me now.

I can get a group of 20 or so fencers to all lunge simultaneously with the softest little sound when it finishes because their feet just glide. 

If you raise your foot too much you're taking time away from your forward motion so you're slowing down your attack. This could lose you right of way or it could lead to you getting hit in prep or with a counter attack.

Additionally, your knee can only take so much damage over time. So raising your foot really high and slamming it down unnecessarily creates a lot of unnecessary impact for your knee, your feet, and your shins.

An exercise a coach once introduced me to was putting a quarter under your toe. When you lunge your heel should only come off the ground about the height of the quarter so when you lunge the quarter will slide forward. If placed right, it will slide in a straight line if your lunge is straight.

If we move up somewhat we can get to the hips. Once I was taking a lesson, and Coach just pushed on my waist a little to realign my hips. He didn't really say anything about it and he had this look on his face like I should have known to have them lined up that way. It made a huge difference in my movement. I was pretty shocked and it has always stuck with me how such a small detail could be so important.

It's a little hard to explain in text. Basically as you sit down into your lunge position, roll the hips forward slightly towards your front leg. This will pull in a little on the muscles of your back butt cheek. Some people find it also helps to tuck the butt in a bit. The result is kind of an almost shelf like hinge between the leg and the torso, so basically priming the hip joint for movement.

Later when working with AK he explained that this was setting the hip for the right type of movement in the hip flexor which allows for an effective lunge. You can lunge without doing this, but the lunge will be way better if you do this.

Once your hip is in place it lets us look at the back leg extension. Earlier I said to extend the back leg. At this point we can start saying EXPLODE the back leg. You want an explosive full extension of the back leg. Even on a short lunge, you'll adjust by angle rather than by reducing fullness. A pretty common mistake people make is to have a bent back leg. This reduces the length and power of the lunge and can also put strain on the leg.

If we have our hip lined up right the back leg explosion is pretty simple. Once you've loosened your front foot's grip on the ground, and the front leg is ready to go for a ride, then forcefully push the back foot into the ground. You would think you have to push at an angle, but if your hip is set right, then just pushing will launch you forward with the right motion.

Comparisons I like to make on the push are drawn from Dragonball Z. I thought we had hit a point where kids wouldn't know DBZ anymore, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In the Great Saiyaman story the characters explain that they fly by using their chi to push against the Earth. I like to think of exploding the back leg like you're pushing the Earth away with your back foot. So push with force intended to launch yourself, because that is literally what you are doing.

What part of the foot you push with might differ from coach to coach. Personally I focus on movement from the balls of the feet, so I think ultimately the ball of the foot is the best part to push with, but you can push effectively from the heel or with the whole foot as well.

Well, that's quite a bit on the lunge. There is probably more I could say on it, but those are my thoughts so far. Hopefully there are some ideas in there that might help improve your lunges, or improve how you explain lunges, or maybe you'll have some thoughts that'll help me in how I think about lunges.

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At home challenge: Since people around the world are stuck at home now...take the things you've learned in your fencing clubs and the ideas from this article and become the coach! Teach a family member to lunge. Post some photos or a video to your social media of your family working out and learning to lunge! Put your links in the comments. 

Sports Talk

Do you say “athlete” or do you say “fencer”? Do you say “I’m going to fence” or do you say “I play fencing”?

I’ve found when talking with people from college clubs, or fencing clubs in the US you get the fencing specific jargon. When talking to international fencers and NCAA fencers you get more sports style talk.

I was at a clinic once being taught by a really good French foil coach. The clinic was amazing. There were some pretty good coaches there learning stuff from some pretty awesome coaches. There were also a lot of rec coaches who didn’t know too much. A moment that stood out for me was when we were going through vocab, someone used a French fencing term. The coach running the clinic began to poke fun at him for being an American trying to use French.

Going to college events I’ve seen beginner referees trying to referee in French with bad pronunciation and incorrect words.

Sometimes people treat fencing like a weird niche activity instead of treating it like a sport. The romantic flair of Erol Flynn overtakes the high paced, physically and intellectually challenging athletics involved.

Fencing’s uniqueness has its benefits. It gives a backdrop for fencing culture that can build community and connections.

Knowing French fencing terms as sort of an international language of fencing can be useful. I had a student who trained and competed in South Korea for a year, and her temporary club mates thought she was a beginner because she didn’t know any of the French fencing terms. They realized she wasn’t once she started constantly medaling in competitions. It’s convenient that we have language that we can use to approach fencing when connecting with the world wide community of fencers.

On the flip side…what are athletes looking for when they look for sports and sports clubs? Are they looking for a place that will teach them to perform or are they looking for a place to be different? Clubs should be able to provide a space for both.

Fencing’s unique jargon, connection to history, and association with sword fighting and dueling provides a built in space for people looking for a unique recreational activity.

Those same elements can also be a barrier for drawing in competitive athletes.

I’ve had athletes ask how to get more competitive people and experienced athletes onto the team, or into the club or into the sport in general.

Treat it like a sport. From day one.

Focus on the opportunity to develop as a competitor from day one.

Encourage athletic training and work outs from day one.

Before people get to day one they have to be interested. Show them competitive success. Show them the physical complexity and intensity of training. Refer to it like a sport.

If athletes see it as something that can challenge them and develop them as athletes they will be interested. But that has to be up front. If it looks like playing Robin Hood they might be less inclined.

We keep Robin Hood and Zorro for the kids looking for that, but we need to remember we’re a sport, and keep that on the front line if we want kids to go in knowing that they have the opportunity to be successful athletes.

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