Old Stuff - 10-05-06 Recap
This week covered the advanced range drill, two shot combinations, and three shot combinations.
The advanced range drill begins (like the regular range drill) with you and your partner facing each other at critical range. At critical range two people of the same reach should be able to just lunge and hit one another. For those of you who are shorter you should practice your opponent’s critical range where they can just reach you (but make sure to close like a mongoose from there, don’t hang out there). In most cases this is the distance where the tips of your swords cross by an inch or so. Next, one of you takes the lead and begins moving forward and backward with advance and retreat. The person without the lead adjusts to maintain the critical range. So far, exactly like the regular range drill. Now, to make it advanced, hold your swords pointed to the side at your waist, wherever is comphy for you. This removes the sword as a distance cue and makes you judge distance by looking at your opponent (like you are supposed to any way). Periodically check the distance with the swords. To make it really advanced have the leader throw in other footwork like skips, circling, or sidestepping. In this case the person with the lead should work on their footwork of course, but in addition they should work on sneaking up on their partner, which is most easily done with an inward spiral. Of you can work on sneaking away from your partner with an outward spiral. The other person simply tries to maintain the range. Practice with both people leading, and with both hands.
Two shot combinations are the bread and butter of fencing. If I stand there and attack my opponent, with single attacks, without preparation, even the most new of newbs will block every one of them. There are actually many preparations (beats, Froissement, circling in, blade pushing, feints), however, today we focus on the feint. A two shot combination is one feint and one shot. The feint opens your opponent’s defense, preparing them for the second shot which hits. To practice this, begin by making a slow extension to your first, fake, target. When your partner blocks, disengage and lunge at your real target. Of course feints fall under the topic of lying, which I posted about earlier. In practice you will have to work at making your feint believable and credible. To make them believable, try changing the speed of the attack. Start slowly and then rapidly finish the extension. Or simply try extending at targets you can reach, like the hand. Also it helps to extend at basic zones that we practice in the parry drill. Finally to bring about credibility you will have to attack with a one shot once in a while just to keep your opponent on their toes. If all you do is two shots your opponent will start to ignore the first shot.
Finally, we covered three shot combinations. If two shots are the bread and butter, three shots are the gravy. Principally, I try to use two shots. Two shots are quicker, and work great for your average opponent. With three shots you run the risk of your opponent ignoring you and just hitting you in the face at your second feint. However, when fighting a skilled opponent, with tight defense, it is often necessary to move to a three shot combo. Sometimes, one feint is just not enough to break up their defense. When you try a three shot combination it helps to work backwards. Say you want to hit the front leg in eight. The logical place for their sword to be right before you do that is high in six, so eight will be your third shot, and six will be your second. Lets start with a shot to four then. So, our last shot is to eight, our second is to six, and our fist is to four. Great! By the time you throw two good feints at four and six, your opponent’s defense should be broken up leaving them helpless and waiting to get hit in the leg.
Things to think about:
- Proper range is very important. If your opponent sneaks up on you, and you don’t notice. You are hosed. They will hit you with an extension and you will think they have the speed of the gods. You won’t know what hit you. By controlling the range you control the most important aspect of the fight.
- You must learn to judge the range to your opponent accurately based on their body. Try looking at their center of mass, or across the shoulders. Do not attempt to judge the range by the sword! The sword lies in so many ways it is impossible to list them.
- An advanced fighter should work on anticipating where their opponent is going by watching for tells. Often times you will find that someone shifts their weight one way or the other before they advance or retreat. Once you see that you can cut them off at the pass, and get where they are going first, negating whatever advantage they were trying for.
- Feints are probably the best (and certainly the most used around here) form of preparation. You need to work on developing feints that are believable and credible.
- A common mistake is when trying to develop believable feints is to lunge on the feint, and then try and disengage to hit the real target. While a lunge is very believable it is a terrible thing to do on a feint. This will leave you closer to your opponent, and that much easier to hit when they don’t buy your feint. Further, it is difficult to disengage when you are so committed.
- Three shots are hard to think about at first. But they are well worth in when fighting an opponent who is willing to believe your feints and has good defense. You will find that against such an opponent two shots won’t be enough to open them up most of the time.
- Some opponents aren’t willing to believe feints until they are very credible. That is you may have to throw out many one shots before you try your slick two shot combination.
- Similarly, two shot combos build credibility for you to move to three shots. Wont they be surprised when after the third two shot combo that they bock, a third shot comes out of no where and hits them right when they were thinking about their counter attack.