Loose play vs practice bouts

For all of us interested in fencing comes a time when “freeplay” or loose play, is introduced to practice. But unfortunately for some of us there never comes a time when we get to do practice bouts. The importance of practice bouts is unfortunately often underestimated in HEMA, and most people don’t even understand how they differ from standard loose play. While practice bouts are not something you need to introduce to your training very early, they become a very handy training tool for more experienced students.

Practice bouts are essentially judged bouts ( you can use any ruleset you want ) where you count points. One fencer wins and the other fencer loses. Loose play is free-fencing without counting points. Let’s move on to analyze their positive and negative sides compared to each other, and look what they bring into your training.

Loose play:

+ a chance to introduce newly learned fencing actions to your repertoire

+ learning how to approach and solve frequent situations differently

- fencers don’t care if they are hit. Or if they hit the other guy. ( since you don’t lose points for failing a parry, you are not as eager in parrying. Same applies for offense)

- not caring about being hit results in lower speed and lower concentration

Practice bouts:

+ finding out your own strong points and weaknesses (“favorite strikes”)

+ higher level of concentration, higher speed of fencing actions

+ caring about being hit and hitting the other guy ( Imagine how much more you would care if the swords were sharp and you’d loose your head for a failed parry. Thus learning to care about not being hit is extremely important )

+ confidence boost for actions you are able to pull of successfully

+ higher level of stress, emotion and motivation

- fencers are not eager to apply actions that they are not 100% comfortable with. this may lead into a very limited repertoire. And limited repertoire means that it is easier for your opponent to figure out counter actions to your own actions.

- limited repertoire also means you are extremely predictable

- higher level of intensity means higher level of risk of injury for both participants

- needs more resources as you need a competent judging team. This also results in your getting less fencing time ( though I have to say that learning to judge is a valuable learning experience for a fencer, since it requires lots of similar skills as fencing does, like ability to perceive what is happening in a fencing bout )

Both of these training methods are obviously important for our development as fencers. Overusing either method  leads into some negative side effects. Doing both actively leads to optimal results.