Most fencing training is currently structured around the idea of private lessons, that is one on one interaction between student and coach.   Some clubs have been developing programs that move somewhat away from the private lesson format (see Jason Sheridon’s blog post on this), although I am not aware of any that have entirely done away with them.  Both as the coach of a small club and as a competitor, I have found private lessons to be an integral part of training, but it is important for both students and coaches to understand the role of private lessons in a training program and not to simply treat lessons as the entirety of a training program.

I see two roles that lessons play as part of a larger training program*.  First, and most important, lessons are a place for students to be exposed to new ideas.  Secondly, lessons provide a controlled environment to practice skills that the student is struggling with.  Both of these roles are interlinked and I don’t think I have ever given a lesson that didn’t include both roles.  Lessons are NOT the primary place to practice skills, that is the role of bouting.  I also think that at a larger club, much of the second role of lessons, as a controlled environment to practice skills, can be replaced with structured 50/50 drills where both people are working to accomplish opposing tasks, but the range of abilities in a small collegiate club makes it more difficult to get evenly matched drill partners.

In order for lessons to work properly within the context of training, both students and coaches have certain responsibilities they need to meet.  To be fair, this could read as student and teacher responsibilities with any topic.  In addition to coaching, I also teach university level courses and I spend a fair amount of time the first day of class explaining my approach to teaching, what I view as my responsibilities, and what I view as the students’ responsibilities.  The list is very similar for fencing.

My approach to both coaching and teaching is centered on the idea that as a coach/teacher I cannot do the learning for the student.  The best I can do is to provide an environment with the appropriate atmosphere and structure to help students learn effectively and efficiently.  In a classroom, or when running group activities for fencing, the challenge is develop exercises that are simple enough for the lower level students to understand and learn from, but open ended enough that the higher level students can fully apply themselves and are not bored.  For private lessons, the challenge is to identify which skills and concepts will be most beneficial to the student and to develop drills with that end goal in mind that are of the appropriate level.  The benefit of working one on one is that all of the details of the lesson can be tailored to the student.  What made my lessons with Sebastien Dos Santos really exciting is that he would have a list of ideas written down before the lesson that were specific to me and my fencing. We would discuss them before starting the physical portion of the lesson and some of these ideas were completely off the wall.  But, because I knew that it was a bit of an experiment I got excited to see if I could make them work.

The onus of the actual learning falls on the student.  The most effective learning occurs when a student is outside their comfort zone, but not by so much that they shut down.  Students must fully engage in training activities with an open mind and push the limits of their comfort zone.  That means that students need to be willing to take risks and be willing to fail.  We learn much more from our failures than our successes.  Much of this needs to be done on the student’s time without the coach’s involvement.  The lesson is useless if the student does not work trying to apply the ideas.  As a student, try different ways to create the same situations that you worked on during lessons.  Try to make actions work in different situations.  This is the way that you will learn what actions work in which situations.

Student responsibility checklist

  • Be excited to learn something new.
  • If you don’t understand, ask the coach to clarify.
  • Sometimes, you just need to do it a few times to understand it.
  • Try it before you decide you don’t like it.
  • If it’s hard, then you’re learning.  If you really have to think about it to get yourself to do it, your really learning!
  • Take notes after the lesson.  Even if you never look at them again, the act of writing it down will help you internalize it.
  • Pick one or two things from the lesson to focus on while bouting.  Measure success by improving those things, not by the score of the bout.
  • Visualize lesson actions and situations when not at fencing.

Coach responsibility checklist

  • What concept or concepts will this lesson introduce?  Are they the ones that will help this student most?
  • What concepts are going to be included implicitly?
  • Do the drills support learning those concepts?
  • Are the drills fun? See Jason’s post on the Wang Chung Doctrine.
  • What percentage of the time does this student need to succeed at an action?  This is different for each student.  Some shut down if they don’t succeed most of the time.  Some go into automatic mode and stop thinking if they succeed too much.
  • How are you going to increase the difficulty of each drill as the student starts to get it?
  • Does this student need drills explained in detail beforehand? Do they need more repetition?

*I am ignoring warm-up lessons because I don’t see them as an integral part of a training program and they serve a very different role.