More Productive Drilling

Years ago I was at a theme park where I went to go see their aquatic show. They didn’t have anything particularly unethical, like Shamu, just a seal and a sea lion they had rescued and trained to do a few tricks. One of the things that stood out most to me was the trainer’s use of these little clickers. The animal would do a trick and then immediately be thrown a small fish to snack on. Before that fish even got into the air, though, the trainer would use their clicker. You see the same thing when people train dogs. The reason behind this? They’re trying to shorten the feedback loop as much as possible.

I want you to think back to when you were in school and had to take a test. You studied for it (or didn’t), took the test, and handed it in. However, by the time you got it back a couple of weeks later you couldn’t figure out what half the comments were about as most of what was on there had fallen out of your head already. That is a long feedback loop. You inputted something, and then it took a fairly long time before you knew whether it had worked or not.

One of the nice things about fighting is that the person on the other end doesn’t have to sit down and grade multiple pages of answers before they can show you whether what you did worked. You know right then whether or not you hit them and whether they hit you.

Now how to apply that to drilling? The optimal success rate for any given drill should be about 70-80%. If someone always succeeds in a drill, then it’s time for the next level. If someone’s success is essentially a coin toss, then it’s time to back things up a bit and look at a smaller piece of the puzzle. With that in mind, the way you can use feedback loops to help people improve is fairly simple. If they did it right, they get to hit you. If they do it wrong they don’t get to hit you. For some students that failure scenario might also involve them getting hit on top of not landing a hit against you, but getting smacked in the face can be a lot more discouraging than just not landing a touch.

Your goal as a drill partner should be to get the information as to whether something is working across as quickly as possible. You could try saying “good” every time you get hit, but that on its own is going to take longer than just letting the touch land. As well, verbal acknowledgements, particularly if they aren’t done every time, can lead to people seeking your approval over trying to get the technique down. By just making sure that proper technique results in a hit, this helps you avoid seeming like you’re playing favorites.

The other piece to this is to ensure that techniques you aren’t working on in that given moment don’t make their way through. If I’m working with someone on their ability to attack through my sword and I parry in order to test their structure, one of their responses might be to yield around my blade. Now that’s a perfectly fine technique on its own, but if that’s not what we’re focusing in on then just telling people “That’s not what we’re doing” likely won’t cut it. Verbal explanations can be a helpful tool, but if the incorrect move is still working, that doesn’t really create an inherent incentive to change. Instead, you might need to commit more strongly to your parry and add some footwork in to make sure the yield won’t get through.

With all of this in mind my question for you is this. What else can you change in your training to help shorten even more feedback loops for you?

I had a really wonderful time this past weekend teaching a day long Giganti workshop. I’ve got the chance to run quite a few of these at this point and each one stands out as a truly unique experience. We spent almost the whole time focusing on the mechanical side of things covering plates 1-7, 21-24, 30-32, and 35 all from Giganti’s book 1. That’s 15 out of a total of 42 plates. Maybe someday I’ll have the time to run a group through the entire book beginning to end.

In other news I’ll be teaching at the Longsword Symposium down by St. Louis November 9th doing a whole day of Bolognese longsword. https://www.facebook.com/events/442306731738275

If you’re interested in having me out for a workshop on rapier, sidesword, or longsword please do not hesitate to reach out.