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I think most HEMA instructors are familiar with feeling that there just isn’t enough time in class to teach everything. Making sure your classes are coherent helps a lot with this feeling, but even after that it’s a challenge – especially when your club only has one session per week. Something I find helps a lot with this pressure is trying to pick exercises to be as efficient as possible. Even small tweaks to the design of a drill/game can make a significant difference to how well it’s using the time of my students. Here I’ll outline some of the principles I’ve found helpful for making sure I’m using efficient exercises

One key feature is clear feedback. A good exercise gives instant feedback that’s easy for the participants to interpret - the most obvious example is “making a touch”. For a worked example of how this plays out, there’s a common distance exercise: two fencers touch blades; the coach moves around; the student has to maintain distance. This doesn’t really give clear feedback to the follower or leader about whether the distance is being maintained effectively. A simple modification to give better feedback is: the coach can drop their blade and the student should be close enough to touch (with a short step); or the coach can extend their blade and the student should be out of reach. By having the coach do both of these frequently and randomly during the exercise, the student is getting useful feedback about the distance they’re maintaining - close enough to easily make a touch, but far enough away to avoid a quick counterattack.

Feedback can be made clearer by making sure students are aware of the context of the exercise. What is the problem they’re trying to solve, or the situation they’ll be using this action in? If they’ve got some experience with this, then it’s much easier for them to understand the feedback that they’ll get in the exercise. Often, you won’t even need to have the coach give any feedback, the student can automatically self-identify the issue when it happens. This is where lesson coherence and curriculum design really come into play - you can set up earlier exercises or classes which will introduce problems for your students, and then use that groundwork to help them learn the solutions to those problems. If they never fence someone who attacks to a low target, then your class about dealing with that problem will be difficult for them to grasp. So teach attacking that low target first and let them struggle with finding solutions for a bit.

A second key feature is how long the exercise takes to perform - what is the rate of repetitions? This is critical for class planning: if I have 15 minutes to allot to an exercise, my students will probably get a lot more out of doing a 1 minute drill 15 times than they will out of doing a 5 minute drill 3 times. Especially because explaining the shorter exercise will probably be quicker as well, so I get to have them spend more actual time doing the exercise. For example, imagine I want to teach a hip throw. I could do this by starting at wide distance and having the student perform the full technique: getting a bind, reaching the body, breaking their balance, and fully throwing the opponent. But really the key component of this technique is entering and breaking balance - so if we focus on just those two parts with a more abbreviated drill, they’ll be able to make a lot more repetitions of the practice in the same amount of time. That in turn will make them better at executing the whole action than rehearsing the whole action would have.

Something which is helpful for rate of reps is to have a clear focus for the exercise. Efficient drills try to teach only one thing to the student at a time - doing two drills which teach one thing each will generally make you better at both those things than doing one drill which teaches both of them for twice as long. So you can make your drills quicker and more effective by making sure they’re focused. If you’re trying to teach an action which happens after the blades engage, for example, you don’t necessarily need to start from wide distance - just start from the blade engagement. Then do a second exercise about starting from wide distance and achieving the desired engagement. Now the student can focus on each skill in turn and get given feedback about just that.

Especially when dealing with mixed ability classes, it is useful to have scaling exercises. The idea here is to have simple modifications you can make to the exercise to adjust it for students of different experience, who might need to focus on different things. For example, with a beginner working with a more advanced student, you can have the beginner do their repetitions from a static position at good distance, while the more advanced student starts a couple of feet back and has to advance to the correct position on each rep - the beginner focuses on the movement itself, while the advanced student focuses on the distance required to get the movement to work. Relatively small adjustments like this can help both participants use their training time efficiently, instead of one being bored or the other being confused.

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

tea at fechtlehre dot org