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Often in teaching we draw quite sharp distinctions between different types of exercise: this is a technical drill, that’s a decision-making exercise, this is a sparring game, etc. This can be useful — having a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve with each exercise will normally help make sure it’s filling that role properly. But it can also be useful to have models that emphasise the continuity and similarity between different types of exercises. I found this particularly helpful when trying to scale the difficulty of an exercise for a mixed ability group (such as when giving an event workshop). The model I normally use is based on two variables: choreography and compliance.

Choreography is the level to which actions by one or both fencers are pre-specified. In a fully choreographed drill every action is predetermined, while open sparring is a fully unchoreographed exercise where both fencers are free to take any action at any moment. Between these you have a number of intermediate options: specify the action but allow variation on the timing or distance; specify a set of possible actions and allow the fencer to pick; specify a particular action but otherwise allow free fencing; specify a role or tactic but leave the execution of that to the fencer’s discretion, etc.

By varying choreography, you can work on decision making and adaptability. Highly choreographed exercises significantly reduce the relevance of decision, allowing students to focus on technical execution when they’re learning a movement. By reducing the choreography variable, you can systematically increase the importance of correct timing and choice of actions, which is critical for employing a technique in free fencing. Treating this as a variable gives a way to ensure the challenge of exercises is appropriate to the skill of the participants.

Compliance is the level to which a fencer’s actions are allowed to succeed. In a fully compliant drill every action will be made to be successful, while in tournament sparring fencers are actively trying to disrupt and interfere with the successful execution of their opponent’s actions. As with choreography, there are many intermediate options: allow the action to succeed if it is roughly ‘correct’; impose a difficulty standard which actions may pass or fail; allow any intensity of execution but forbid active disruption; etc.

Compliance is connected to the speed/intensity of the exercise and the level of force used in strikes, but it’s not wholly equivalent to these. Simply doing your own actions as fast and hard as possible is not maximally non-compliant. Full noncompliance requires a certain lack of choreography, allowing a participant to ignore an unconvincing feint or to punish a poorly executed retreat by adjusting their attack’s target to hit anyway. By manipulating the compliance of an exercise, you can help students improve their execution of actions, requiring better structure and more efficient movement to deal with increasingly more realistic situations.

By identifying these two (nearly) independent variables, you can design exercises which provide an appropriate level of challenge for development. Common exercises like ‘defend the wall’ can be analysed in this framework (medium choreography, low compliance) which helps when trying to place them in a curriculum or decide which students to assign them to. I find this model particularly helpful when preparing workshops for events where I expect a relatively mixed ability group — I can classify the exercises I prepare in this way to make sure the progression is sensible. Even more usefully, I pre-design adapted versions of each exercise with small tweaks to the compliance or choreography, to allow me to scale each exercise to individual participants.

I welcome questions, comments or feedback on this article. You can reach me by email:

tea at fechtlehre dot org