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Following a meeting held by the newly elected coaching committee we have come up with a few ideas and a rough plan of how we will be running the fencing sessions from now on. Here are some of the key points from the meeting along with the current coaching plan which we will be testing out over the next few weeks:
· Fencing not fitness – It has been pointed out that a lot of time in the Tuesday sessions is focused on fitness and not fencing. We would like to remind people that it is their own responsibility to maintain the fitness levels necessary to become a good fencer. Whether this is done by going to the gym/swimming/cycling/running/going for a walk or even taking the stairs instead of a lift is up to you but the onus is now on you.
· Warm up – the Tuesday warm up will now start at 6.30 on the dot (baring transport problems) this will give everyone enough time to turn up and get changed and yet mean we won’t lose half of the session because we are all chatting. We will also try to vary the warm up a bit. One week mask ball another running round in circles and basically whatever ‘fun’ we can think of. The warm up will last 15 – 20 minutes and will include time for stretching.
· Footwork: back to basics – on Tuesday we shall be starting a slightly more structured session on footwork based on a course suggested to us. This will take us all back to basics and hopefully help us to rid us of our bad footwork habits which unless corrected only get worse.
· Blade work - lesson plans are currently being drawn up for structured blade work sessions and are most likely to feature a different weapon each week. That way people who want to improve in that weapon can and those that don’t can go off and do their own thing. This will also give the teams time to do the training that they wish to do.
· Free fencing - The last part of the Tuesday session and the whole of the Sunday session (and any extra sessions people want to do in the activities room) will consist of free fencing. We have a few more working spools now so we should be able to have another piste on the go for those that are really averse to doing a little bit of steam.
· Everyone does everything - Some of us (including myself) are guilty of skipping the warm up and then hogging the pistes which isn’t fair on the others. With this in mind from now on if you want to fence on the electric pistes unless you have a really good excuse or arrive late you have to do both the warm up and footwork sessions. If you don’t then you will be restricted to fencing steam. This may sound a bit strict but you have to admit, its fair, besides a bit of footwork never hurt anyone (besides we wont set up the pistes until after the footwork session)
So essentially the training sessions will now follow the following structure:
Tuesday
6.30 – 20 mins warm up
6.50 – 20 mins footwork
7.10 – 20 mins blade work / team training (not in effect until we get some proper lesson plans sorted)
7.30 – Free fencing
Sunday = Free fencing
Please note this is only a provisional plan which we will be trying out over the next few weeks and is open to adaptation following suggestions anyone wants to make. Any help you may want to give us with the coaching whether it’s running the warm up/footwork/blade work sessions one week will be very welcome. We realise most of you will have exams over the next few weeks so we will not impose the finalised plan until next year. We are also currently trying to figure out how the sessions will be run next year when we get all of the new fresher’s and we will keep you posted when we figure it all out.
Hope this is ok and I’ll see you all on Tuesday.
Your loving coaching committee
Xx
p.s. sorry if this is a long post
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