Training Log from Budapest—I.
It's been roughly two months since our 'day one' working with competitors and instructors at the Hungarian HEMA club Kard Rendje, and time has come to share our experiences and plans.
Kard Rendje has regular trainings in three cities with the main focus on longsword, and in all of these 'branches', there are competitive fencers and instructors whose goals are definitive for our mutual efforts.
With regard to the club's structure and interests, we have agreed on once-every-fortnight workshop together in Budapest, between which occasions, the club's instructors would process new information, and integrate the methods and exercises in their regular classes. We have set up a 'video reporting' system, which allows me to have insight in their application, address observations I may have, and plan the next session accordingly.
It is an important aspect of our cooperation that we respect each other's field of expertise. This requires regular retrospectives and behind-the-scenes coordination. When I have drawn up my basic lesson plan, I turn to the club's instructors to agree on the choice of actions and technical interpretation that matches both their preferences and my actual purpose. Similarly, after each session, I gather feedback and make sure to answer questions, clear up any confusion regarding the method used, and adjust my approach if necessary. This is essential, especially at the beginning of our process, since we may still call this phase the groundwork.
The first two weeks, including the first session, were dedicated to introducing ourselves, drawing up the main characteristics and potentials of the contribution we would provide, and to give enough information—both verbally and in the Salle d'Armes—to the team, so that we could make plans and assign priorities to the goals elicited.
We have established the following three basic goals in descending order of importance and urgency: (I.) the club needs to create a general training routine that will support the competitive fencers' preparation on a daily basis; (II.) we want to coach several fencers in order to improve their results in competitions; and (III.) we shall pay attention to the members of the club who might be interested in learning fencing theory and specific coaching methodology in order to become coaches themselves, further improving the club's resources.
Our Goal I. is a natural part of all training sessions. Since we meet once every two weeks, I play the role of a 'consulting coach': to each session, I bring a structured set of exercises, which I also send the head instructor in e-mail afterwards, naming the objective of the given session, purpose and the key points of the exercises. While error correction is one of the most important part of a fencing coach's daily job, here, I don't have a daily opportunity to do that. Instead, I make sure to follow a curriculum wherein each exercise and session supports the next, leading to gradual understanding and naturally avoiding several mistakes that might come up when choosing a different style of coaching. The information given at once should be possible to process with some effort in 2 weeks, after which time we meet up to can check again, reinforce, further unfold, or modify elements if necessary. The video reports are especially helpful for me in this regard.
Now, after the introduction, let's look at the training plans!
The first part in each session is about footwork. Since the participants arrive to my class after the beginners' session, I do not need to spend much time with warming up, rather the opposite, I have to make sure that they have the possibility to loosen up, rest a little, in order to be open to new information and have sufficient coordination for learning.
During our groundwork, I teach fencing footwork, which provides agile and efficient movement, and comes with a well established coaching methodology to set up the necessary coordination and correct errors systematically. Elements of this footwork are frequently used in longsword, and I choose ideas that are easy to translate to longsword-specific exercises. Furthermore, I have two additional arguments for having suggested this method: first, while the advantages of it are clear, in the two weeks between our sessions, the club has the possibility to study it in relation to their already established footwork routines and include the conclusions in their feedback; second, I have an admitted goal of providing a 'carte blanche' in the tactical sense, in order to evade possible existing unnecessary or even obstructive habits that are already in the movement patterns of our fencers. To my experience, it is easier to understand elements of movement when one can learn them separated from already existing and very similar patterns. As we progress, and as fencers get proficient in certain tactically essential details, they will be able to adopt these new habits in their free-play as well.
In our first session, we started with fencing specific running and skipping exercises, then introduced the key points of advancing, retreating, lunging, and started the educational exercises for compound footwork. We discussed the differences from their usual movements, the reasons and importance of these, and came to an agreement on the methods with the fencers and the instructors.
For example, we discussed the tactical definition of the movement and desired circumstances of an attack, then compared it to the interpretations they had been using. We found out that from then on, we had to make it clear whether we were talking about a first intention (all-out) attack, or a seemingly similar but second intention action, both of which have their own places in the 'tactical space' and a different preparation game. I started paying extra attention and taking notes, to understand how different the significance of these two very similar but tactically and methodologically different actions is in longsword practice, compared to what we see in fencing.
The next part of the first session was a selection of tactical games, which teach many essential aspects of fencing tactics and tempo, independently of the weapon. Continuing this set already with weapons and equipment, we performed sparring under limiting conditions. Here, too, my goal was to be able to separate pure tactical sense from the complicated movements educated fencers might do out of habit.
We closed the first session with a discussion about individual impressions, questions, and expectations, which we continued in a restaurant nearby... It was a rather leisure, introductory workshop, but with essential exchange of information.
As we arrived to the time of our second workshop, I had already got feedback from the club on the past two weeks' work, conclusions, and some questions.
We started the second session with a little warm-up, loosening, and then, footwork. We practiced the movements that were already known to the group, and this time I focused more on educational exercises for compound footwork. This is a topic that needs considerable input of work on the club's side, but I can say, they have made visible progress since.
As part of the footwork routine, I introduced exercises for distance management and reactions to various alternative stimuli as well.
The second main part of the workshop dealt with a set of hand-foot coordination drills that should be performed regularly on a dummy or mask. This is a simple, easy-to-remember routine that we will later expand, and that can be done at home or while one is waiting for a partner during a session. Since we then worked in pairs, we could include partner exercises as well.
In the third and last part of our second session we started to work on tactical exercises. These consisted of traditional wall exercises and assault-like sets, carried out either in the 'master-student' style, or as bout-elements with specifically reduced options.
I have in fact just mentioned an important factor in our Goal III.—at this phase of preparation, I rely largely on group training methods. This means that in 'master-student' type of exercises I also teach the relevant coaching practices to fencers. Instructors of the club are unsurprisingly extremely quick on the uptake, and are able to support our competitive longswordists with precise stimuli.
The goal of our next two sessions, based on positive feedback during the time passed, was to introduce tactical exercises with 2-3 options, a framework for many of our future methods.
In order to define weapon-specific actions that the club's members feel familiar with, I asked the instructors to collect a few actions that serve the purpose of our workshop. Based on this information, I created the training plan with educational exercises and the usual footwork block.
After going through the footwork exercises, hand-foot coordination routine, and a special exercise to make tempo as picturesque as possible, we continued with the educational exercises.
As such, we used wall exercises matching the final tactical lesson, in order to make sure fencers understood the difference between the stimuli for each option.
Finally, we assembled our main exercise. We used three different conditions, but first used them in two consecutive two-alternative exercises. This was important in order to keep the performance dynamics realistic.
In the end we connected these, and our fencers were able to perform some successful repetitions. Afterwards some of the competitors mentioned that these conditions felt extremely realistic—which, naturally, made me quite happy.
This is where we are now, and I have just prepared my training plan for next week.
We will discuss the fencers' experience in the recent competitions, progress with the technical elements involved, and connect these to the already known exercises, talk about the possibilities of feinting with the longsword, and open-eye actions...
We'll be back with the next issue of our log soon ;)