Sunday Drills in the Driveway changed to Drills in the Backyard, and I, indulging my Miyagi-san fantasies, spent most of the time tending my garden and yelling out at the fencers. We spent two and a half hours out there, which was pretty damn decent.
Since I wasn’t masked up, I had a better vantage from which to watch the fencers going about their drilling, and saw specific techniques that could be trained, and think about ways to train them.
And now I realize I should put together a page of cooperative/antagonistic drills so I can actually store these somewhere. But meanwhile, the first was:
The Mobius Priest Drill
We have the priest drill (unofficially named such because the Agente’s sword makes the sign of the cross during the execution of the drill).
- Agente raises his sword, presenting the underside of his hand; Patiente lunges and strikes, staying at extension.
- Agente coupes through Patiente’s sword, exposing the top of Agente’s hand; Patiente disengages and strikes the exposed hand.
- Agente parries to the inside; Patiente disengages and strikes the exposed back of Agente’s hand.
- Agente lunges at Patiente’s sword shoulder; Patient recovers, parries, and counter-lunges.
And that would be the reset point. Letia and I were working on keeping her in her full extension instead of withdrawing her sword each time she strikes, and realized we could add on a step: When she counter-lunged, I recovered and parried to the outside, which she disengaged and redoubled to strike me. So far, so good. I then realized that I could add in an additional retreat, and with another redouble she could strike me in the underside of my hand, thereby restarting the entire drill. Meaning that, yes, if I was VERY evil, I could go for as far as the field would let me, possibly working in a circle, and it would be the drill that never ends! This shall I do.
The next drill we ran was actually Rurik’s idea:
Feint-Go Drill
Rurik wanted to work on his ability to execute feints correctly, and came up with this:
- Agente takes a guard.
- Patiente feints with a vigorous extension, but no movement of the foot.
- Agente either immediately responds with a parry, or does not respond.
- Patiente either disengages the parry and finishes the lunge, or if no parry, finishes the lunge.
When Rurik got this down, I had his Agente add in footwork (including a retreat from the feint).
Dagger drill
We’ve been working cleanliness of sword-and-dagger at practices, so on Sunday I tried to drill it, too, with a rather simple, straightforward approach:
- Agente takes guard
- Patiente lunges, in the same tempo binding the Agente’s sword with his dagger and striking with his sword
That’s it, because that’s the skill the lads needed to work on (instead of large flailing actions, initiating actions with the dagger, multi-tempo actions, etc, etc)
There are a couple of variations to add on:
Agente can make one parry action with his dagger, forcing the Patiente to disengage during his lunge
Agente can retreat, forcing Patiente to pursue
2 Person Melee Game
This was the reeeeeeally fun game
I was thinking about how to train melee skills if you only have two people at practice. That always seems to be the “there shall be no melee” limit. If you have 3, you fight 2 on 1 and grand melee. Sure, with 2 you can run drills for maneuvers (run right, run left), and I suppose you could set up “targets” (mount spare swords on a picnic table) and work on one person sweeping and the other attacking. But I wanted a more active facsimile of the melee situation.
I asked myself: “what are some fundamental features of melee combat?” Multiple objectives (kill the other guy/stay with your unit/hold a flag/take a flag/push a flank/no really kill the other guy), mobility, field awareness.
I came up with an idea, and we field tested it yesterday. It is this:
- Take a scarf/flag, and hang it on a branch or pole (In this case, I held it).
- The two fighters start a good distance away from it, and just out of measure of each other.
- Whoever pulls the flag off the branch wins.
You could do this by killing your opponent, by out-positioning them, or by beating them in a foot-race, all of which happened when we ran this. This had the trait of forcing mobility, of presenting two possible end games for the fighters to choose from, and (at least doing this in my yard) forcing a necessary awareness of surroundings (You run into my herb bed, I take your feet off and use them for fertilizer).
It seemed to work really well, and it was awesome when Rachel one-shotted Rurik almost immediately.
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