Plus 10%

A few months ago I traveled out of state with a good friend of mine to a decently large fencing event. That morning she decided to help out with the novice tournament where instead of having all of the novices fight each other, the tournament organizers had them fight against some more seasoned folk and then add up the totals of how well each of the novices did. As a higher level fighter, my friend decided not to bring out her best as she would have just absolutely demolished all of these novices, something that wouldn’t have really taught them anything useful. So instead she decided to drop her game down to their level and then see how well they performed. Apparently one of the men she fought against didn’t realize she was being nice and later that day went around bragging about how he went right through her.

A few weeks later the two of us were talking about this and I had a suggestion in order to help prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Plus 10%. What this means is that when you, as a more advanced fighter, are working with someone who’s newer of even mid tier, you fight them at plus 10% compared to where they’re at. It’s one thing if you’re doing a structured drill with someone where you each take turns according to a tightly controlling script. This is more for non-cooperative drills and free sparring.

There’s no great reason for you, as the more advanced fighter, to drop all the way down to the level of the less experienced fighter. They likely have other people at their level they can square off against, so if that’s what they’re looking for, it’s not the best use of your skills. That said, unless they just want a fight to see how they compare, it isn’t particularly helpful if you go all the way to 100. If they jut get smoked every single pass, then that’s an overwhelming amount of information and they’re not going to learn much if anything at all. Instead, by scaling down to plus 10% you’re able to give them a challenge that’s ever slightly out of reach without it feeling unattainable. They’ll still recognize you for the better fighter you are, but now they can see what next steps they need to take with their game in order to get to that next level. This doesn’t mean you need to reveal entire road all at once, just the next couple steps. Then, when they’ve gotten to that next point, you recalibrate to where they are now and then add 10%.