Support Your Strengths

There are two main approaches to practice I see people concentrate on. The first is what we might call the “well-rounded strategy”. This entails finding the areas of your game you’re lacking in and spending your time leaning into them. Some examples of this might be a fencer who relies on blade contact trying to fight without it, only attacking to the outside line when your default is the inside line, or switching to fight with your off hand. The other option is what we might call “the specialist”. This is someone who’s found the one or two things that really click for them and then spending their time leaning into them. Some examples of this include setting up a particular invitation and biding your time until all your opponents attack into it. As well it could include picking a simple tempo and waiting to act in it, or it could mean that you spend the whole time only looking for hand shots.

I would like to propose a third option.

Before we continue I want to note that there’s nothing wrong with either of the first two options. They’re both helpful growth strategies and I definitely recommend spending time with the both of them. That said, on their own I don’t think they paint the full picture.

Something I’ve been doing lately is what I refer to as “supporting your strengths”. To do this, you need to have already pinned down what it is that works for you in a fight. If you don’t have that down yet, go and have someone else watch your fights as you try different things out and have them tell you what they saw working for you. Once you have some idea of where it is you’re finding success, it might be time to try this new approach.

We can conceptualize a skill as a part of our body. If you’re lucky enough to have spent a decent amount of time in physical therapy, you’ll have learned that if one part of you is hurting, you generally don’t just concentrate on that muscle/joint on its own. Instead, you’re going to spend most of your time strengthening what’s around it. We can do the very same thing with our fights.

At this point in my career, I know I’m a tempo fighter. I have pretty good blade mechanics and can try and play measure games if I want, but when push comes to shove tempo is the thing I focus on in a fight. I wait, and wait, and wait, then when I see an opening I take it. By now I’ve logged countless hours honing that reflex, knowing when it’s time for me to act and when it’s not. Of course there’s still improvements to be made there, but lately I’ve been focusing in on what I can do to support acting in tempo that aren’t directly related to my sense of rhythm in a fight.

Just because I can identify when to fire my cannon, that doesn’t always mean I’ve loaded up enough powder in order to reach my target. In order to address that, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my lower half. In swordplay, as with any martial art, it’s pretty easy to focus almost entirely on what’s going on with your arms. At the end of the day, though, it’s your legs that are going to get you to your destination. Looking at some of my old videos one of the major things that stands out is how upright I am. There’s a slight bend to my knees, but I haven’t really sunk down and coiled up my springs. All the people in those videos beating me though? They’re crouched down, ready to strike. Knowing that everyone breaks form during a fight, a lot of my training recently has been to bend my knees just a bit farther down than I am realistically going to go during a fight, so that when I do come up it’ll be to a space where my muscles are still engaged.

Once I have one piece of the puzzle fairly locked in, then I go on and drill the next one until I don’t have to think about it. Then I do it again with something else that will help support my strengths such as refining my lunge order, or setting up with only the invitations I intended as opposed to the openings I hadn’t realized were there.

In other news, we were finally able to do the photoshoot for my upcoming book “Bolognese Longsword for the Modern Practitioner” last weekend. It was by and far the most intensive shoot I have ever been a part of, partly due to both appearing in and directing the photos. I’m really happy with how they turned out and am incredibly thankful to both my photographer as well as to all the friends who turned out and will appear in the book. Now I just have to sift through the 164 instances in my book I wrote that I needed to insert pictures and then send the whole thing to my layout guy.

In other news, I was just confirmed as an instructor for the Vancouver International Swordplay Symposium (VISS) this May, teaching my class “Identifying Your Area of Excellence” for longsword fencers. This year has a truly wonderful lineup and unlike similar events instead of it just being a bunch of taster classes, VISS offers the opportunity for you to pick from a few intensives and dive deep down into them. I highly recommend signing up, especially as early bird pricing only goes until the end of the month.