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It’s important to have an effective warmup as part of any physical exercise session. As with many other teaching topics, there are a number of common ideas which are not particularly effective. These might still be better than doing no warmup at all, but that’s a very low bar. This article contains some principles and specific recommendations I’ve found the most support for and which seem to give the best results in practice.

A warmup is not a workout. This is the first and most important thing to establish. The purpose of a warmup before class is to get participants physically and mentally ready to engage in the class. In contrast, a workout is about improving the physical fitness of participants. If you do choose to use a workout as part of your historical fencing classes, then it should ideally be placed at the end of your sessions. This ensures that participants will be properly warmed up already. It also ensures that they are not trying to learn new complex physical skills while mentally and physically exhausted by hard exercise.

Don’t cool down after the warmup. Once your participants have completed an effective warmup, they should be physically and mentally fully ready to begin the class. One of the worst possible things you can do at this point is have everyone stand still and cool down again while giving a lecture on the topic of this week’s class. Lectures are fine, but if you’re going to use one then put the lecture before the warmup, so that when the warmup is done you can quickly show the first exercise and have students immediately begin training.

I split the warmup itself into four main stages. None of these should be super long or intense — as noted above, the purpose of this is not to give students a workout, but to get them physically and mentally ready for the class I’ve got planned.

1. Light cardio. The purpose of this section of the warmup is to have students break a light sweat and get their heart rates slightly elevated. If it’s intense enough that people are tapping out to take a breather, it’s too intense. If you have a significant mix of physical ability levels in your class, then it can be particularly useful to select exercises which scale by the participant. Good exercises for this part of the warmup are light jogging, perhaps mixed with very short sprints, or games like ‘tag’ or ‘catch’.
2. Dynamic stretches. These are for general mobility and body coordination, waking up the joints and getting them ready to move. Exercises like lunges, squats, running with high knees, arm/shoulder circles, simple body twists and so on are all useful here. You simply need to make sure that all the major joints your students might use are gently activated. Depending on how exactly you choose to structure your warmup, these can be effectively split between sections 1 and 3 to give a three stage warmup.
3. Sport-specific movement patterns. These should build on the mobility exercises in the stretching section and focus on specific movements that students will likely perform in your class or system: examples can include lunges, simple footwork patterns, and so on. The goal is both to help ensure that students are physically ready to perform these movements and to start activating their mind to move in the (often quite artificial) ways that it might need to in martial arts. It’s often valuable to have students do these with swords, which my friend Ken describes as ‘sword proprioception’: long sweeping cuts, basic thrusts against a wall target, and simple guard transition exercises can all be effective.
4. Mental engagement. This final section builds on some of the patterns established in section 3, but with a direct focus on helping students switch on their fencing brain and begin thinking/acting in a way appropriate to the topic of this class. I normally do this with a simple competitive game of some sort — this might be played with bare hands (for example, ‘fencing’ with the goal of touching the shoulder or knee) or with swords (for example, gentle sparring aiming to make head touches). My friend Adrien’s club often play tactical games using pieces of pool noodles as ‘swords’, which are a fantastic way to combine speed and safety.

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

tea at fechtlehre dot org