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This is one of the most difficult skills to develop when it comes to teaching. Most HEMA teachers I’ve met are very keen about what they’re doing (which is great) and therefore try to cram as much as possible into each lesson (which isn’t so great). This goes double when the club isn’t able to meet as often as might be ideal — it’s really easy to look at how frequently your class can get together and try to put enough content into each session to cover everything you think they should be learning. However, this will be less effective than pacing each class well and not overloading the students. Here are some tips that I’ve found helpful to keep in mind.

Stay on topic. Pick a topic that is the focus of each session and stay tightly tied to it Creating Coherent Classes.. This naturally helps prevent trying to over-stuff your class with concepts and techniques. It also helps to make everything in the class easier to remember, since each section will reinforce the others. Because you’re addressing the same topic with multiple different exercises, a student who doesn’t fully get the point of one has a chance to understand the class topic through another exercise.

Don’t sweat perfection. Learning fencing is hard. If the class are clearly completely confused by the point of what’s going on, then don’t rush on, but you definitely don’t need people to be doing every repetition completely perfectly to move onwards. In fact, if your exercises are on a single theme, it’s quite common for later exercises to provide a new perspective that helps students understand the topic quicker.

New material first. Just after a good warmup Good Warmup Principles. is when students will be most ready to learn something new. They’re physically primed and mentally switched on. You can exploit this by moving directly into the new content you want to teach, instead of starting out with revision of previous sessions. Putting new material towards the end of the instruction time risks students being tired and mentally overloaded already, causing them to struggle to take it in.

Watch for fatigue. As students get tired in a session, they’ll be less able to learn new things or properly play their role in exercises. Structuring short breaks into your class helps to manage this and keeps productivity up during the exercises. Putting less intense exercises after more intense ones is also a useful way to let students catch their breath. Of course, learning to work through fatigue can be useful, but that’s best trained with skills that students are very familiar with, not when introducing something new.

Give time for integration. Don’t try to put too many exercises into a class, even if they’re all on the same topic. Students need time to learn to settle into a movement or tactic, figure out how exactly it applies to their body and style of fencing. Similarly, don’t interrupt and give feedback after the first or second repetition of an exercise, unless it’s clear that the students have completely misunderstood it. Give them time to practice and try out variations for themselves before you step in. Often they will discover the correction for themselves.

Of course, all of these are guidelines and there can be exceptions to each one. In particular, working with a mixed-ability group can introduce a number of complications, since what is ‘new’ and ‘complicated’ will be different between students. Fatigue will also develop much faster for some groups than others. Two mitigation strategies I’ve found useful are: setting up groups of 3-4 for exercises instead of pairs, which allow people to sit out and catch their breath more easily; and using flexible exercises that can be adapted to different skill levels, which allow a similar level of challenge for both new and experienced students.

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

tea at fechtlehre dot org