Conduct of Training

Greetings, Training is an aspect of all sports and martial arts. It is something that we all need to do. It is important that the teacher in the lesson is able to construct a training session that has all the elements necessary for the students to learn what they need to learn in their lesson. This blog will focus on the conduct of training, from the planning to the execution and dealing with some of the problems that will arise in training. Hopefully this will be of interest to students and teachers alike so that you can examine your own training sessions and see how they compare to what is written here. For the teacher the training session needs to start before they turn up for training. Planning needs to be the first stage of any training session. This is a necessary process especially in order to remain in control of the training session and to ensure that you are able to teach all of what the students need to learn. The first thing you need to look at in the planning stage is the overall plan for training. You need to look at how the students will progress from the beginning stages to the end where they are able to fence with a level of competence and then further to include more advanced techniques. You don't need to plan out the entirety of the student's career at this point in time, more you need to give them the skills in order to progress in that direction. This is the first stage of the planning process. Once you have an overall plan for the training sessions on the whole you need to have a look at the individual lessons. The lessons should build upon one another like building blocks. This means that the first lessons establish the foundation for the student's fencing and then the others build on top of this. What this means is that the first lessons are some of the most important as if the basic skills are not established to begin with it will be difficult to build upon these in order to get to more advanced techniques. Each one of the lessons should be connected to the others in some way. Obviously they are all connected due to what is being learnt, but the connections need to be on a more specific level as well. Basic techniques should lead to more advanced ones as the basics are the foundation of the more advanced techniques. This needs to be established in the planning process for the training program. The next part of the process is to look at the individual lesson or lessons that will be taught on a particular night. The decision of how much to teach in a single training session is an important one and needs to be considered. There is a sliding scale from teaching not enough in the session all the way up to teaching too much. In general it is best to focus on one particular area in a lesson, though in some instances this can be branched out into more. This is highly dependent on the lessons being taught. For example, lessons on footwork all link together and may be taught as a single block as they are all related to how the feet move, but trying to link a lesson on footwork to some aspect of the use of the hands is probably not a good idea to start with. In general you should teach a maximum of three lessons per training session otherwise you will give the students problems in remembering all of the information that you have presented. This is, of course, highly dependent on the lessons themselves and also the students being taught. It is important to look at how the lesson relates to others as has been noted before. This will allow you to decide whether the lesson is best taught alone or in conjunction with another lesson. Some lessons will tend to lead to other ones and this should be noted as it will give some directions as to how the lessons should be taught. Remember though, that each lesson should have a particular area of focus and this should be what is being aimed at for the lesson. If this is not clear then the students will get confused as to what they are supposed to be learning and this is not good. The next part of the process is examining the content of the lesson and what will be taught in the training session. This can be approached in one of two ways really. You can have a lesson planned out as to what will be taught or you can see what the students want to learn and then focus on that for the session. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. The second gives the students what they want, but if the entire program is based in this method then the program tends to be very disjointed and aspects can be missed in the process. This is a very spontaneous form of lessons and should really only be used for more advanced students and the more experienced teachers as it does not allow much time for planning. The first is good as there is a structure which is followed lesson by lesson, this method does, however lack spontaneity. This means if a particular problem comes up it is somewhat difficult to deal with that problem instantly without deviating from the program. It does, however have the advantage of being able to plan what will be taught in a particular training session. The most important part is regardless of what method you use, you should focus on one aspect of the training per lesson and ensure the students understand which aspect is the focus of the lesson in order that some structure is maintained. The lessons need to have content which is interesting to the students. This means that in most cases the lessons will be dominantly practical in nature. Lessons with a great deal of theory and very little practical aspect to them tend to be seen to be rather boring by students. You should try to include some aspect of a practical nature in the lesson in order to keep the students interested in what is going on. The only way to keep the students' attention is to make the lesson interesting to them. The lesson may be very important to their progress, but if it is not interesting to them their attention will waver and they may miss important parts of the lesson. The theory lessons should be directly related to practical aspects. In this way the theory is demonstrated to be something that has great benefit in what is going on in actual fencing. Keeping the students interested in what is going on is important and should be considered carefully when planning a lesson and also teaching it. ....

The rest of this article can be found in Un-Blogged: A Fencer's Ramblings by Henry Walker, which is available in paperback from:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Blogged-Ramblings-Henry-Leigh-Walker/dp/098764470X
Booktopia: https://www.booktopia.com.au/un-blogged-henry-leigh-walker/book/9780987644701.html
Among other places...

It is also available in electronic format (pdf) from: https://buy.stripe.com/fZecP419c7CB9VKeUV

... or direct from the author.