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As an open skill, fencing is defined by variation and improvisation. This means that two key skills to develop are recognising situations and selecting actions — collectively, I describe these as ‘decision making’. Whichever weapon you teach, whatever goal you have from teaching HEMA, whatever level of experience your students have — good decision making will be foundational to success. Last week I wrote an article about ‘coached drills’, a type of paired exercise which focus on honing decision making. This week builds on that with a few specific exercises I’ve found particularly useful for helping students work on their decision making skills.

The first is a very simple exercise I took from Coach Allen Evans See Cues in Tempo. which I call Go / No Go. It works as follows: establish the distance from which this student can make a direct attack and hit past your attempted parry. This is the critical distance of the drill. Then have them take one simple step backwards from that critical distance. For the drill itself:

• Student steps forward to critical distance
• Coach may step back at the beginning of the student’s advance. If so, the student does not go (if they do go for the attack anyway, the coach should have an easy parry/riposte).
• Alternatively, the coach may wait. The student should recognise this and immediately launch their attack on completing the first step forward, hitting past the coach’s attempt to parry.

This can be elaborated on in a number of ways - a late retreat (allowing the student to go with a more complex indirect attack), blade actions from either the coach or the student, etc. The most important feature is that the student is only trying to attack when the situation is correct for their attack. Internalising this will significantly improve your student’s success at landing attacks in actual fencing.

Next is a more generalised variation that I think is common to nearly every teacher, the reaction drill.⊕ Go / No Go is actually just a specific reaction drill — but it’s such an important skill to develop that I make a point of discussing it separately. This begins from some initial situation, such as a bind or a step forwards. The coach then can give one of a number of possible responses, which the student replies to with an appropriate counter-action. When using reaction drills, start with reasonably constrained ones: two possible choices which are opposites to each other, such as hard or soft blade pressure, or stepping forward or backwards. It’s very important that the participant acting as the ‘coach’ is able to reliably give the correct response to the fencer’s decision, which should be in the form of “the fencer makes a hit” if they chose right or “the fencer is hit” if they chose wrong.

Both of the preceding exercises are quite “set” - the decision point and range of possible actions are both reasonably constrained. This is valuable for newer students or when introducing new ideas, since it helps to isolate one concept. However, it’s also important to practice selecting actions in a much more open environment, and to create your own opportunities for actions. As a coach, you can help students learn this by engaging in planning-focused sparring. In this exercise, the coach and student roles are pre-decided. The student is allowed to do anything they want to do, while the coach tries to give consistent responses to the same actions from the student. Because of this consistency, it’s easier for the student to experiment with creating plans and setting up techniques. The coach should aim to vary their responses sensibly based on differences in the student’s action — for example, a feint way out of distance should be ignored, while one that is at a good distance can be reacted to. However, it’s important that the coach is aware of what level of perception & control the student has, so that the student can connect their own actions to the coach’s responses, instead of being unable to recognise why the coach is doing different things on different exchanges.

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

tea at fechtlehre dot org