Three To One

Some of the best advice I ever received on how to coach came from Guy Windsor. What he suggests is simple and incredibly effective. It encapsulates so much of what I see being done right by the top level coaches and what I see being done wrong by some of the others. It’s an easy rule that makes a huge impact in how well a student can take information in. The rule on it’s own won’t guarantee success, but it’ll sure make it more likely.

Fencing is ultimately a physical art. We can write about it, give speeches, and draw diagrams. However, at the end of the day, fencing is about two people moving around with swords in their hands. This part seems pretty obvious, but so much of fencing instruction ignores this essential feature. We as teachers and coaches have so much that we’ve learned and often try and pass all of it along at once. A phrase I’ve heard more times than I can count is folks telling students to “drink from the firehose”. This implies that your teacher is going to throw everything that have at you and it’s your job to try and drink up as much as you can. While there are definitely people who have succeeded with this approach, it’s not a particularly effective one. It also makes the mistake of centering the lesson on the coach instead of the student. When running a class or working with someone one on one, the purpose of that session isn’t to demonstrate how knowledgeable you, as the authority figure, are on a subject. It’s to help the student or students progress along their journey.

There are times that you might give them a little bit more than they can handle or a little bit less than they have bandwidth for, but ultimately you want them to walk away with something they can digest. Sometimes that means they’ll walk away with something immediately actionable and other times it’ll be something that they’ll sit and ponder on for months. Either way, though, if you’re giving them something to chew on, first make sure they have room to fit it in their mouth.

Okay, so back to that rule I mentioned. The rule is just:

“For every minute of explanation there has to be at least three minutes of implementation.”

What that means is that it’s fine if you take some time to verbally explain what’s going on or what you’re about to do, but you should spend at least three times that amount on actually doing the thing. It doesn’t matter if that’s highly structured drills or more loosely coached sparring. In a physical art people learn best by physically doing it.

I’ve seen so many teachers try and fill space during the lesson by talking the whole way through and students who try and connect to it by bringing up a story that only vaguely relates and then spending the majority of the lesson on that instead of the task at hand. I understand those urges, I really do, but it’s important to save those for later and to spend the lesson working through the actions themselves. It’s imperative that you give clear instructions and helpful feedback, don’t just hit your student a bunch and hope they figure it out. That said, the only way to really get better at doing swords is by actually doing it and getting it all in your bones.

Guy’s online courses: https://swordschool.teachable.com/courses/

Photo credit: Jana Howson