Welcome to Historical Fencing

 

Welcome to Historical Fencing

A couple of months ago I had my first chance to fence a bunch of people I didn’t know since moving to New York State at Fecht Yeah. It went well, and in the time since I’ve been thinking about some of the perspective shifts I’ve had since I started fencing in 2016. A large part of my training history has involved book and source study with the goal of helping others, and only in the last few years have I gotten the chance to focus purely on developing my own fencing. 

I’m not currently coaching, but it feels like the easiest way to express some of my perspective changes over the last six years is to write as though I were explaining fencing to a brand-new fencer, or someone getting ready for their first training session - sort of like a “pre-class orientation.” It might sound something like this:

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Welcome to historical fencing. 

Whenever we start something new, the amount of information to take in is overwhelming. This is true for fencing, too - there’s a lot to learn about all kinds of things: equipment; physical fitness; the history of fencing; what competition involves; what the historical sources we work from say. I was certainly overwhelmed when I started, and there are many things I wish someone had taken me aside to tell me at the time. 

In the hope that it might save you the confusion I had to go through, here are some of those things. All of these are my opinions, but they are informed by experience.

First and most importantly:

Fencing Should Be Understood as a Skill, Not As Intellectual Knowledge 

The idea that fencing is a “skill” as opposed to something else might seem obvious, but it is worth emphasizing because historical fencing is in many ways defined by its reference to historical source material, and many people in the historical fencing community place a premium on knowing what those historical sources say. Despite how much focus there can sometimes be on the historical books we reference to structure our training, when we are actually fencing - at speed, against an uncooperative opponent trying to win - what we are doing is a lot more like riding a skateboard than reciting facts and ideas we learned from a book. When we ride a skateboard we don’t think to ourselves “steer the board by leaning, but not too much” - we just steer, hopefully without thinking about it. The actual skill of steering a skateboard cannot be fully conveyed with words.

Nobody told me anything about this in 2016 when I started, and after a few years’ worth of broken expectations, I wish someone had. Thinking of fencing as a skill, rather than as intellectual knowledge, draws parallels with other skill-knowledge that is difficult to convey through words, which helps set our expectations on what “growth” in fencing looks like. 

When we think of examples, everyone knows what skill-knowledge is and how it differs from intellectual or theoretical knowledge. Skateboarding is one example. Another is how a master potter has accumulated great skill at producing pottery - and while that person can give demonstrations of what they do, and provide descriptions of their process using their words, they cannot actually convey everything they know with a demonstration or description.

This is because a major portion of their knowledge is know-how, or skill-knowledge, not something that can be conveyed with words or demonstrations. There is no shortcut to competence at pottery - we have to practice if we want to gain tactile skill with the clay. That practice helps us build skill-knowledge that contributes to our competence: how hard we can press a particular kind of clay before it stops doing what we want it to, or how long a pot needs to dry before it can be fired given walls of a certain thickness.

Similarly, a very skilled fencer has also mastered their own kind of competence - cultivating their own athleticism; reading the psychology of their opponent through their body language; recognizing when a good moment to attack is and how to best defend themselves; and so on. 

When I realized that fencing is a skill, and not intellectual knowledge, other things fell into place in my understanding:

• Techniques Matter, But Not How Most Beginners Think They Do

• Athleticism is a Critically Important Fundamental

• Thinking Of Skills As “Fundamental” And “Compound” Is Usually More Helpful Than “Beginner” or “Advanced”

• There’s a Place for Intellectual Knowledge in Fencing, Too

These points are all basically my opinions, and not all fencers may agree with them. That is fine! But these are some things I wish someone had told me as a beginner, because it would have helped me understand what it means to make progress in fencing - and maybe even progress faster. 

Techniques Matter, But Not How Most Beginners Think They Do

One way of understanding fencing is in terms of how one technique counters another. There is a grain of truth to this - after an exchange is over, we can look back and see how one technique countered another. The cause-and-effect relationship appears tidy and linear.

Thinking this way about historical fencing seems particularly accessible because we work from historical sources. We can look right at the book and see the instructions that a technique is supposed to work a certain way. For example, in some historical longsword sources, the technique Zwerhau is advised as a technique that should defeat a cut from the opponent that comes down from above. 

This understanding of fencing typically manifests in at least a couple of distinct ways:

• Some fencers want to accumulate as large a library of techniques as possible, as quickly as possible, from as many different sources as possible. The idea is straightforward: Since one technique counters another, we want to master as many techniques as possible so that we are as prepared for as many situations as possible. Why limit ourselves?

• Some fencers, when they are working through a series of motions from the book that are supposed to lead to a hit, wonder, “But what if I do this counter?” before showing a hypothetical action they might take. (Sometimes disrupting other people’s learning during training to have this discussion, sometimes not.) 

I had elements of this mindset for at least a good few years when I began, but I no longer think this is a helpful or productive way to think. 

Many situations in fencing might have multiple acceptable options. Mixing and matching tactical paradigms from different fencing sources might theoretically give us more tools for the toolbox, but picking which one to use becomes harder in the actual moment of a bout if we are trying to follow the advice of more than one source. Any time spent trying to make up our minds is time we give the opponent to work. For this reason, it is more useful for skill growth to just pick one and try to internalize its style of doing things so that we get practice doing it that way quickly and under stress, and thereby provide the opponent with less time to work when fencing us. 

And, even if we commit to following only one source’s guidance, smaller-scale tactical considerations might complicate our decision-making anyway. What if an opponent is just faster than us - we can choose the right technique, but they always act quicker than us? Or, if we achieve a position of advantage on the opponent, is it better to try for a riskier deep target, or a lower-risk shallow target? How well are we doing overall, and how tolerant can we be of the risk of getting hit? The answer might vary from day to day, exchange to exchange, or what our overall goals for the bout are.

When we are fencing, we cannot look backwards to see clean, tidy, cause-and-effect relationships for how one technique counters another - we have to look forward and predict what is about to happen on the basis of limited information. We have cognitive lag-time as we process that, and we tend to fail when we don’t recognize what’s happening fast enough. We either don’t understand the situation in time to capitalize on it (as the attacker), or don’t have time to solve the problem (as the defender). This means the answer to “What if I do this counter?”-style questions is usually some variation on, "You're either talking about a different setup, or you won't actually have the time you need to do that." 

When all this is put into practice, it is often less important to pick the “correct” option from our technical repertoire than it is to just do something at the right moment that will put us in a bit better position than we are now, instead of spending time processing what is happening. High-level fencing centers less around deployment of a large technical library than it does on execution of fundamentals at a high level - doing an acceptable thing at the right moment. 

Understanding the setups for techniques does matter in the cultivation of the physical, embodied skill of fencing, because it shows us how big the space of possibilities is. But eventually, we climb up that ladder and find we don't need to think in terms of exact setups or techniques anymore. We internalize skill-knowledge that allows us to just act - we balance on the skateboard through the turn, without thinking about it.

As I re-read the above paragraph, I recognize how vaguely worded it is - truly the kind of thing I absolutely hated hearing as a beginner, when I craved specific advice about what to do and when. But this is the reality of trying to use words to capture what is fundamentally a skill, and not fully transmissible using demonstrations and words. Knowing when to do something can only come with practice.

Athleticism is a Critically Important Fundamental

Most (or at least many) historical fencers join the sport without ever having done any other sports. It's more common to find historical fencers with greater background in Dungeons and Dragons and sword-oriented video games than with other sports. (I was and still basically am this kind of nerd - so I know.) There is no need to justify or rationalize this - but forming our expectations around how fencing works based on popular media has a tendency to result in those expectations being broken. 

So, in case it helps to hear someone with experience say so, real-world athleticism does not work like a tabletop or computer game. There are no "dex builds" and "strength builds" in the real world - someone can be both strong and dextrous at the same time, and good fencers are usually both. Similarly, the idea that bodily strength, dexterity, flexibility, endurance, and the ability to endure stress are separate attributes of a person might make for fun game design, but in the real world, all of these things are closely related and difficult to disentangle. 

It is more helpful to think about athleticism and bodily coordination in more general terms. Gross motor skills, fine motor skills, muscular strength, and general body awareness can all cooperate and support our fencing. Developing these competencies matters for at least three big reasons:

1. Being athletic helps us perform well in the actual action of a fencing bout;

2. Being athletic helps us get more and better practice in; and 

3. If two fencers are otherwise equal, the more athletic fencer has an advantage over the less athletic fencer. 

One of the things my very first fencing club did well was stress the importance of building athletic ability. While I don't think the specific ways they went about trying to build it in their students was optimal, my first coach was absolutely correct that if we want to fence at a high level, we need to pursue both strength training and high-intensity cardiovascular fitness - usually outside of and in addition to our usual fencing training sessions.

I resisted this idea for years because I wanted to believe that "technique is what really matters." I do think developing technique has a place in any fencing training program, but I was wrong to resist embracing athleticism. 

It is 100% anecdotal evidence, but I would say that the thing that has had the biggest impact on my personal fencing ability in the last few years has nothing to do directly with swords - it was to start running regularly, including doing sprint training. Doing high-intensity interval training to build my anaerobic cardiovascular ability has absolutely changed how I feel when fencing. Where I used to feel like I was unable to breathe through the fencing mask and “couldn’t see clearly,” I now feel merely a bit warm and mildly uncomfortable, while being more able to observe my fencing partner with a clear head. 

In short, doing interval training gave me the endurance needed to be patient…in addition to making my legs, core, and heart stronger. Running a mile or two every few days has also conditioned my body to recover more quickly from stress and exertion. 

Relatedly, when someone who has the same level of technical ability as me does better than me by relying on their athleticism instead of what I regard as “technique,” they are not cheating or inauthentic as a fencer somehow. They are actually more effective as a fencer than I am, at least in this specific way. That's fine, and we are not “secretly better” because of our technical skills when we lose a bout against someone with superior athleticism. Technique is an important component of what we do, but it is not the only one - and it's possible to have technique and be highly athletic. Such a person is a more complete and well-rounded fencer than someone who only has one of the two. 

All this being said, it is worth remembering that there is an aesthetic aspect of fencing - basically, what people see as being cool or interesting about it - and this is related to how one thinks about the relationship between technique and athleticism. Specifically, the fencing of someone who is very athletic but has a low level of technique may not be as interesting or fun to watch as someone who shows very high technical ability. Most people tend to find highly technical fencing interesting and graceful. 

At the end of the day, the reason anyone does fencing at all is “for fun,” and it’s important to recognize that people can have different opinions about what is interesting and fun. If someone places a premium on demonstration of technique, then they might feel frustrated or bored with fencing that they think shows low technical skill. Conversely, if we want to see and perform fencing that demonstrates technical repertoire, that is an aesthetic goal. 

Judgments about aesthetics like this are real judgments, and they are an important aspect of the hobby. However, it is important to understand what they do and don’t cover when setting expectations for what “growth” in fencing skill looks like. Athletic ability complements and supports technical development, and extra physical training outside of fencing to develop strength and endurance will yield benefits to our fencing.

Thinking Of Skills As “Fundamental” And “Compound” Is Usually More Helpful Than “Beginner” or “Advanced”

I used to think that the growth of fencing ability had a relatively linear progression starting with "beginner" material, mastering it, and then building on that mastery to tackle "advanced" material (usually advanced “techniques” - about which, see above). Beginner material for many fencing clubs varies, but usually seems to consist of things like the rudiments of footwork and bladework, usually combined with some discussions of body mechanics.

This understanding of growth and progression certainly seems intuitive - and sometimes, a historical fencing source may even explain its guidance in a similar manner. However, after a good few years of fencing and trying my best to teach others how to fence, I no longer think this is a useful way to think about developing fencing skill. 

Rather than thinking about “beginner” and “advanced” material, I think it is more useful to understand certain capabilities and skill-knowledge as being fundamental or compound. That is, some ideas, techniques, and competencies in fencing are compound because they build on the fencer having already internalized other, more fundamental ideas, techniques and competencies. 

One application of this way of thinking might be technical - for example, one set of techniques might be founded on the fencer being able to reliably achieve a certain kind of simple setup, from which an array of other follow-on techniques can be used. Here, the simpler setup is the fundamental; the follow-on techniques are a compound application.

This idea goes deeper than just techniques though, and similar interrelationships exist between the fundamentals of fencing. Making a list of the most fundamental building blocks for fencing skill development is deceptively difficult. There are so many different possible ways to describe fencing that the very act of making a list at all is a kind of motivated act. Any list will be at least partially informed by how the list-maker understands fencing to work.

So, while other people’s lists might be different than mine, my start at a list might include:

• Threat recognition - the ability to recognize when we can hit the opponent, and be hit by the opponent. 

• Athletic ability - the strength, speed, flexibility, and endurance necessary to perform fencing actions.

• Somatic / body awareness - the ability to intuitively know where one’s body is in space, and move fluidly within that space. 

• Fundamental technical repertoire - what this is specifically will vary based on whatever style of fencing one is studying, but might include (for example) advances; retreats; lunges; passing steps; basic cuts; basic thrusts; and so on.

All of these aspects of fencing are related to each other, and high-level fencing involves bringing all of one’s fundamentals to a high level so that they can compound upon each other and help us perform everything better. 

Some specific examples of this might include how the fundamental technical repertoire of an approach to fencing informs our understanding of what a threat is when using that approach to fencing; the relationship also works the other direction as well, because we might evaluate how well we have mastered a piece of technical repertoire by how well it threatens, or responds to a threat. Similarly, better athleticism affects how well and how quickly we can threaten the opponent, or respond to their threats; conversely, understanding how to threaten and respond to threats informs us on the level of athleticism we need to cultivate. 

These examples show that the path to overall competency is non-linear. It involves re-visiting things we used to do and applying a fresh perspective; it involves gradual iteration on our understanding and our execution, and continually making small improvements. That is why I now think it is not very helpful to understand progress and skill development in fencing in terms of “beginner” and “advanced” material. We do not master something and then have it down cold, with nothing more to work on.

Instead, it is probably more realistic to say that everyone has something to work on, because our capability at one aspect of fencing “decays” without practice to keep sharp. Some fencers have deep knowledge of how to perform techniques, but have such weak fundamentals of managing distance, footwork, blade handling, and knowing when to attack or defend that no amount of technical repertoire saves them from fencing poorly. Simultaneously, this same fencer might be able to develop better fundamentals if they just spend more time practicing to build them. 

Other fencers have such incredible fundamentals that they virtually never have to do any kind of fancy blade work at all, and their understanding of when to attack is so good that it seems like they just mind-control their opponents into doing dumb things that gets them hit. I've fenced enough of these people to know that they seldom get to this level without also building a lot of technique, but all the same, this high-level fencer might be able to become a more complete and well-rounded fencer by developing their technical repertoire and the understanding of when to use it. This would give them additional tools in the toolbox to deal with someone who has fundamentals as good as theirs. 

I generally dislike financial analogies, but I still sometimes find it helpful to think of developing these different fundamentals as being a little bit like stocks on a stock market. Sometimes individual stocks are high, and sometimes low. If we take a snapshot of someone’s abilities at a moment in time, their athleticism might be high, but their technical ability substantially lower; if we take another snapshot later, their athleticism might be somewhat lower, but their technical ability is more on par with their athleticism; still another snapshot later, their technical ability might be high, but their athletic ability low (perhaps they are recovering from an injury). 

And, to extend this analogy, the important thing to focus on is that the long-term trend is that “the market is going up” - that our abilities are generally all increasing, even if they don’t all increase at the same speed, and even if a decline in one aspect of our performance is just how things go sometimes.

There’s a Place for Intellectual Knowledge in Fencing, Too

Finally, it’s important that we understand that intellectual knowledge has a place in fencing too - usually in a role that supports the growth of fencing skill. 

This article is obviously focused on the skill-knowledge aspect of fencing, but some examples of intellectual knowledge’s application to fencing might include:

• Knowledge of how to structure an athletic training program can help athletes develop their athleticism

• Knowledge of what historical or modern fencing sources say, to help inform and structure fencing training; relatedly, knowledge of history can inform how coaches and students understand the original social context of historical fencing

• Knowledge of what types of equipment can create a sufficient margin of safety to be worth getting, based on our goals, and where to get it, how to set it all up, and how to maintain it

• Knowledge of the administrative, financial, and legal issues with running a club can help the club and its members enjoy regular, reliable training with less disruptions and non-fencing-related hassles

• Knowledge of how to prepare for and participate in competitions, from both a mental and a physical point of view

If you can think of others, they might be worth adding - let me know.