Private Fencing Lessons

Private fencing lessons were worth it. Inevitably, some one-on-one time with an instructor becomes a valuable thing. After eight weeks of group lessons twice a week, 30 minutes of solo time with a great instructor, Len, was a big impact.

And yet, as is so often the case, we worked only on the most very basic skills during our session.

Len and I hadn’t ever worked together before. So he started me with my en guarde position. He tweaked the position of my feet a little, and we moved on to how I hold my foil.

I’ve been told that I hold my foil way too close to the center, that I need to keep my foil much more to the outside when I’m en guarde. Len helped me really ‘feel’ the correct position, and gave me some insights as to the ‘why’… and ‘why’ always helps me to maintain an unfamiliar skill until it becomes familiar muscle memory. In the case of my guarde position, having my foil so far toward center means I open up the whole of my ribcage to an attack outside my blade. Not good. Len made sure my foil and forearm are in proper alignment, fixed my hand position, and we moved on to my basic footwork.

Len had me advance and retreat, then he had me lunge. We pretty much stopped at the lunge for the rest of the lesson. Not that my lunge was bad. Len told me to my face that my lunge was pretty good and had good extension (what he said to Zach after I’d left might be something different <GRIN!>) but that I had to be wary of some mechanical issues to avoid injury. This is especially important given that I’m coming to fencing relatively late in life. With that in mind, Len fixed the following in my lunge:

• My foot needs to land further forward. At the terminus of my lunge, my knee should end up behind my foot, not beyond it. The angle formed by my thigh and shin should still be obtuse.
• I tend to pronate my foot on my lunge, landing on my instep and big tow. That throws my knee inside, and pushes my back end out. With my back end out, my spine angles and the reach of my foil shortens.
• I tend to sight down the foil like it’s a rifle. Len moved my had further outside on my reach. Again, back to guarding my ribs as a target zone, and to get around my opponent’s parry.
• The timing should be that the foil tip touches my opponent BEFORE my front foot lands in the lunge. If the foot lands before the point touches, I have to extend my reach. and push my knee in front of my foot.

And that was the whole 30 minutes. There’s a huge long list of things wrong with my lunge, but if I just fix my foot (further out, no pronation) then everything else migrates back into proper alignment.

By the end of the session, I was already feeling how my form was snapping ‘to’. I’d never really felt a good form, so it was great to actually feel it for a few consecutive minutes. It was a lot like the first time I stitched together a half dozen turns on alpine skis: uncomfortable and awkward at first, but once I’d felt how a good turn set up the dynamics for a successful subsequent turn, my technique locked into place. Same thing here. Sort of.

R took a private lesson, too. His feedback? It was boring. All he worked on was lunging and parrying, which seemed stupid and a waste of time to hear R tell it. R wasn’t so impressed. But then, R is in it for the ‘battle’. He’s twelve. He’s impatient. He delights in flailing away with a sparring partner as his learning mechanism. And, that technique works for him. Shoot, it worked for me, too, when I was his age. Afterall, a five minute lesson with a splitting maul and a wedge was all I needed. After that, they just let me flail away until I could read the weakness of the wood all by myself, and split tree rounds that others had given up on. That’s where R is in his life. I’m very clear that I’m no longer in that place in MY life any longer. I’ve learned to love the repetition of the drill. My body needs more opportunities to get it ‘right’.

Nevertheless, I’m betting that the information from the lesson will sneak into his fencing this week. Whether he would admit to it or not.