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The foundation of practice in most HEMA clubs is paired exercises. I’ve found it useful to have systems for categorising paired exercises, to help understand what I’m trying to achieve when putting a given exercise into a plan. Obviously any categorisation system is somewhat arbitrary, since the possible variations in exercises are nearly infinite. This is one framework that I’ve recently found useful for thinking about what the nature of each participant’s role in the exercise is. It divides exercises into three main types.

Mechanical: In mechanical exercises, one participant is doing an action and the other is acting as a pell. There’s no component of decision making or competition in such an exercise. The active participant is focused on the execution of their action and feedback/advice is provided verbally by the second participant (e.g “that was good” or “aim more to the weak of my blade”). Sometimes the second partner’s role isn’t just static - they might be required to provide a moving target of some sort, such as sweeping their sword from side to side to let the first partner work on thrusting into the opening as it appears.

Simple examples of mechanical exercises can include: practicing using finger squeeze in a cut on a sword held out by a partner; practicing beat-attack by hitting an extended sword and then the training partner; practicing counter-thrusting by doing the action against a partner walking forward with their sword extended.

Coached: In coached exercises, one participant has a selection of possible actions and the other is facilitating a decision point to choose between those actions. The active participant is focused on selecting what to do or when to do it. The coaching participant is creating the decision point and providing feedback, primarily by ensuring that a correct decision leads to ‘success’ (typically making a touch) and an incorrect one leads to ‘failure’ (typically receiving a touch). Feedback can of course also be provided verbally.⊕ Note that “do not do an action” is often a very useful ‘action’ for a coached exercise to feature as part of a selection.

Simple examples of coached exercises can include: fencer advances, coach either waits (fencer attacks and hits) or retreats (fencer does not attack); fencer attacks, coach parries (fencer disengages and hits) or counterattacks (fencer counter parries and hits); from a bind, coach reduces pressure to provide a cue and fencer acts on it to hit directly.

Competitive: In competitive exercises, both participants have a task and may have constraints on the ways they can try to achieve it. Each participant is trying to win the exercise by succeeding at their task within the restrictions given, and the exercise will generally be designed such that success for one fencer precludes success for the other. Free sparring can be considered as a competitive exercise, but the same underlying idea can be used for much more constrained exercises that help to develop specific skills. Competitive exercises help participants hone their execution of the the action(s) or tactic(s) they’re tasked with performing, by executing them against active resistance.

Simple examples of competitive exercises can include: participant one tries to land a direct attack, participant two tries to parry, adjust distance until attack lands about half the time; participant one attacks as much as they can, participant two tries to parry as much as possible without retreating; either participant can attack or defend, if the attacker hits they win, but if the defender parries successfully then they win.

A fun use of any tool like this is to analyse other classes — what types of exercise are they using? Are particular types of exercise generally more useful for teaching particular types of lesson, or particular sources? Does the way that they’re explaining the exercise fit with its purpose in the workshop? As with all typologies, these aren’t completely discrete categories. Some paired exercises blur the line between any pair of categories. But it can still be a useful framework to keep in mind when preparing a lesson.

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

tea at fechtlehre dot org