Why don’t drills and lessons teach this?

Actually, lessons often do teach this if you know what to look for. The coach may not beat you over the head with it as much as necessary, though.

Class drills don’t seem to teach this much, possibly because they’re trying to train fencers for points 1 and 3 above, not point 4. This can be a drawback because there is no incentive not to just launch the attack immediately on finishing the preparation.

An example is the last drill which we did in Maestro Richards’ seminar. The preparation sequence was double-advance, double-retreat, advance, half inverse advance, press. When we practiced possible finishes after this preparation, the options for the defender’s response were:

• Do nothing. Attacker hits.
• Press back. Attacker disengages and hits.
• Circular parry. Attacker counter-disengages and hits.
• Retreat and present the blade. Attacker takes the blade and hits.

From these four exercises, except for the need to hesitate a bit to see what the opponent will do, there doesn’t seem to be any reason not to just go ahead and lunge. But an additional response which was presented in the demonstration but not practiced, was:

• Bail out backwards and take away the blade. Attacker must start over with preparation.

Additional possibilities such as defender retreating but not changing the attitude of the blade are conceivable. In a way, these “negative” responses are among the most important to practice, because they show the pupil how important it is to not attack if a one-tempo situation has not been established. Without practicing these situations, the pupil is not shown why they must remain balanced at the end of their preparation and not immediately fall into a lunge. The coach can tell them this, but for driving a point home, explanation isn’t nearly as good a teacher as getting hung out to dry in a lunge that falls short.

Analogy

Consider launching an attack to be like launching the space shuttle. When getting ready for a mission, NASA performs countless internal preparations – the astronauts, the shuttle itself, ground control systems, fuel supplies, and on and on. But when the shuttle itself is ready to go, they don’t immediately press the launch button. They also have to consider all the external factors. Is it the right time of day, so that their orbit will intersect the satellite they’re supposed to repair? Is the weather too cold or too stormy? Are there owls nesting in the air intakes? All sorts of things like this also have to be considered, and only when internal and external factors together say that it’s a good situation for a shuttle launch, does the launch take place. Actually, once NASA did get impatient and launch Challenger without considering all the external factors and their implications. To continue our analogy, Mother Nature took one extra retreat and put out a point in line, and Challenger ran straight onto it.