What's Your Ideal Fight?

So here’s an exercise I’ve helped several folks at my local practice through.

In your head, what does your ideal fight look like?

No, having your opponent just walk onto your sword doesn’t count.

This is something that a lot of folks, particularly people trying to move from that intermediate to advanced range, haven’t ever sat down and thought about. If you want to make that jump, though, it’s something you’re going to have to answer. Every top level fighter I know can explain to you, in detail, exactly where they want you to be so that they can do what they do best. Let’s walk through this one step at a time.

Question 1: Who moves first?

This doesn’t necessarily mean who attacks first. The opening move on the chess board can be finding someone’s blade or it could be moving to create an intentional invitation. Let’s look at a few examples in order to help better demonstrate the point.

In this video Master Kai (wearing the white shirt) wants to go first. He wants to come in, bully your blade, and force you to backpedal as he comes in like a hurricane.

In contrast, here’s a video of me (in the red) from a few years ago. I don’t mind if my first move is to poke or prod at you, but really what I want you to do is to come in and overcommit so that I can take advantage of it.

Question 2: Do you want to be an aggressor or a counterpuncher?

This often lines up with question 1, but not always. Kai loves to both make the first move and to follow it up with a really aggressive game. I also like making the first move, but as you can see in the second video, it’s often to bait the other person into acting aggressively so that I can be where I’m most comfortable. Counterpunching.

Question 3: How much blade contact do you want?

Looking at the above examples, Kai very much wants to get into that bind and physically push your blade out of the way. I’m okay with a bit of blade contact, but ultimately I want to go around and strike you where you’re open as opposed to busting my way through the front door. You can be an aggressor with a lot of blade contact, but you can also come in hot and rely on feints and disengages instead. As well you can sucker people in to your tight disengage, or you can get them to overextend and then shove their sword into the ground as you watch the hope drain from their eyes.

Question 4: What line do you want to end up on?

This isn’t necessarily where you start off at, just where you end up. My attack in second isn’t all that good, so when I fight rapier I really want us to end up on the inside line where I’m stronger. To do this I’ll often set up the beginning of the fight with me on the outside so that I can disengage and strike where I’ll have better control. Remember, all of us get dumber the further down the decision tree we go. That means that you’re going to want the things you’re less comfortable with to happen earlier so that once your brain is down to 80% or even 60% you can fire off those techniques you can have running on autopilot.

Question 5: How close do you want to be?

For some folks, they work best striking with their full lunge from as long a range as possible. Other folks want to get in a bit closer and be able to strike without having to move their foot to lunge. Finally some people really just want to use their sword as a grappling lever and want to be so close they can feel their opponent’s breath. If you aren’t sure which one of these you are trying playing with all of them, shoot some video, and see which ones produce the best results.

Question 6: How can you funnel people in to where you’re strongest?

This is the hardest part of all of this. The execution phase is fairly straightforward once you know what you’re good at. Now we have to take a few steps back and figure out how we can set ourselves up for success. This will mean things like only making sure there’s one viable opening for your opponent to attack into at any given time, figure out how to force/avoid blade contact, and getting your opponent to move to the side where you’re strongest.

Hopefully by now you have a better idea of what you want your fight to look like. Now that you’ve got the strategy part down, it’s time to start honing your tactics.

Big news! My book, “Bolognese Longsword: For the Modern Practitioner” will be coming out in early December. The site I’m using doesn’t allow for preorders, but if you enjoyed this mental exercise then you won’t have to wait long for more. I’ve got an absolutely fantastic crew of people helping me make this a reality and I cannot wait for you to have it in your hands.

I’ve also got two workshops coming up. The first is I’m doing a full day Bolognese longsword intensive at the Longsword Symposium just outside of St. Louis on Saturday, November 9th. https://www.facebook.com/events/442306731738275

I’ll also be teaching “Finding Your Area of Excellence for Longsword”, which will be an even more in depth exploration of what I talked about in this article, at Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing’s inaugural event Indes-Cember on Saturday, December 7th in Champaign, IL. https://www.temperedmettlehistoricalfencing.com/events/