Fighter Practice, 05/05/10

Did a bit of fencing at fighter practice last week. I went up against Alke, who hasn't been around recently but is always a fun fight, and Zhivana.

I wasn't really in the analytical headspace while fighting, but I did do some musing on drills, which I'll share and expound on below:

The Angry Druids Drill

This drill involves an attack in 2nd/3rd and small forward motion, much like the standard Italian lunge. The key difference is that instead of going straight forward, I pop my foot out to the side and let the motion carry me laterally, essentially moving my body in a 45 degree angle toward my opponent, rather than straight at them.

I've practiced this drill a fair amount over the last few weeks, and am slowly getting it into the autopilot section of my brain, where my first reaction to a forward attack from a right-handed person is to wait for them to withdraw and counterattack by popping out to the side, or engage an incoming attack with an off-hand parry and simultaneous counter in the lateral position.

So far, the results have been good. I have yet to pop out into an oncoming blade, or do one of the spectacular blade-bending pratfalls that elicits sympathetic "OOH!"s from the audience in my head. I've even, like, killed people with this shit. Bene, si?

Well, it still doesn't feel quite right. The problem is, I feel like it takes significantly more effort to get out of the lunged position than it does to get into it. It could be a couple things, and I'm not sure which one it is:

1. My weight is too far over on my left leg when I land, or
2. I'm leaning forward too far and throwing my butt out behind me to compensate, or
3. My foot isn't correct, which makes my knee not right, which throws my hips out of alignment, or
4. My foot isn't right and because of that, I'm losing my center and getting too much weight over on my left side, or
5. Some combination of 3 and 4 (I think it might be this one).

Whatever the issue is, I don't feel like I can recover from this position fast enough to protect myself--it's about as fast as a regular lunge, but because my weight gets redistributed oddly, I feel stuck in it and have trouble drawing back up to my regular position.

I appreciate that the proper execution of this drill is made and broken by the position of the hips during and immediately after the forward foot (for my purposes, my left foot) hits the ground. At first I really wasn't moving my weight enough, or I'd move it too much--I'd either end with my left leg sort of pointing off in the distance somewhere with no significant change in my torso compared to a standard lunge, or I'd end up with 80% of my weight on my left foot, my knee bent just absurdly far, my right foot almost coming off the ground behind me, and way lower to the ground than I usually am when I lunge. I imagine I looked extremely silly.

In short, I feel like I'm doing much better with this drill than I was, and I find it really effective and useful--but something about the execution just hasn't quite clicked yet. Ponder ponder.

In other news, a different drill is working great for me. I can't practice it by myself, but it's incredibly easy to use against an opponent (although that same ease of use makes it difficult to use in all the guards, because I'm only using it for the guards my opponents attack me in). It's a simple flick of the tip as an attack is coming towards you--effectively, it's a small parry with the false edge of your blade that becomes an attack with the strong through a quick turn of the wrist.

It's difficult to describe in text, but incredibly easy to use in real life, and works much better with my brain than the classic Italian "parry that is also attack" style. I don't often trust myself or my skills enough to parry-attack correctly, and I think the self-doubt and hesitation results in me getting killed a lot more than improper technique... :) The simultaneous parry-attack is one of the first things I learned in fencing, and I know I do it right--I just don't believe it when I do it, if that makes sense.

So, pluses and minuses. I know I'm making progress, although it feels much slower than I'd like. :) Onward and upward.