Theoretical Understanding

If you know how to drive or do some other complex task, then you may recall when you were first learning that it was very hard. You may have been so focused on just not stalling the engine that you missed the stop sign. Greg, the stop sign! (or some equivalent). When we don’t really have a good cognitive understanding of what we are doing, and have not practiced experiencing certain things, then it takes a great deal more time and energy to recognise the parts. This quickly leads to working space (a part of our Executive Function that combines understanding and short term memory) becoming overrun. Once your working space is full, you cannot comprehend the next part, which leads to losing the next thing that happens, because you can’t recognise it in time before the next thing happens. This may lead to choppy memory, where some actions are recalled, but most are missing; or a total loss of the rest of the fight.

The more you understand the parts, the better you understand the why, and the more you practice recognising those bits, the faster and more efficient you get at storing the story and events of what happened, which improves your memory and later analysis.

Scaffolding

We humans learn information by comparing it to information we already know.

This new thing is like this other thing I know, but different to that in this way.

If I were to tell you a fact without any explanation that you are very unfamiliar with, then while you may recall the words for a while, without a deeper understanding of what that actually means, you will shorty forget the words and any minor meaning you may have gleaned. You may not even know that I have told you a fact later.

When we learn about a particular sword master’s system, we are learning a scaffold of moves, stances, wards and attacks that we can build other moves that we witness on to.

We can manually use this knowledge to improve our cognition during a fight or training. Firstly, we want to start with a set of simple ideas, then build complexity to those once they are mastered.

1. For example, you can attack by thrusting on the torso centreline. Anywhere that lands is good.
2. On the centreline, below the navel is generally a thrust downwards, above the navel and below the armpit lateral is a horizontal thrust, and anything above the armpits is generally a rising thrust.
3. Thrusting off the centreline can force your opponent to move in the direction you desire, setting them up for a cut.
4. We can split the head/torso into 9 regions, with the centre square being the horizontal middle third of the torso between the navel and armpits, allowing you to attack different segments with a partially withdrawn blade between thrusts, or if your opponent is backing away, with a step and re-thrust with a new direction for a new target.
5. And we can go on increasing complexity as your understanding rises.

Using this, we can get an escalating level of understanding.

1. A thrust is coming for your torso. Void or sweep your blade to block.
2. A thrust is coming below your navel, so low block; or it is above your navel, so upper body block.
3. A thrust is coming for your face, so highline block, then it is going for your lower body, so lower defence block.
4. A thrust is attacking your left hip, the fencer is withdrawing minimally to re-target, so side step and attack back, where your side step gains distance. They have recentred and are now doing a combination of right hip to left shoulder with an advance step between, so advance step to their left shoulder as you basket block and thrust back.

We are effectively using layering of our initial understanding chunks. Chunking is when you put several items together that have a common theme, so that you can recall them in a cluster of information rather than many unrelated ideas.

We store and recall information better when we have an understanding of meaning for the item and we connect the concept to something else that we understand.

For example, an apple is a part of a plant. The kind of plant is a tree. The apple is edible vegetation. The category of apple is fruit, both because it is sweet and it has seeds inside surrounded by pulp. We can eat an apple raw, or cook it. Stewing apple is very tasty, as is apple crumble. Apples can be red or green, although sometimes it is yellow.

When you think about apples, you already have all of these knowledge connections in your mind built up through years of learning about apples as you casually experience them. What we want to do is manually build up this knowledge connection to things that you want to learn.

• A thrust is one of the three forms of attack you can legally do in the SCA
  • Thrust, push/pull cut, percuss for CnT
• A thrust is pushing the tip towards your opponent such that it touches them.
• The thrust is generally faster than a cut.
  • A good thrust travels a straight line at the tip.
    • For your tip to travel a straight line requires doing several counter rotations of your arm segments, isolating the tip while the basket, hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder do various circles to maintain that tip control.
  • A thrust can curve, but large curves are slower and perhaps a cut is better
  • A cut can be turned into a thrust by rotating the blade to the short of the sword
    • A short of the sword thrust has a range disadvantage, but that is often counteracted by the speed advantage of doing a cut like move, but with a thrust result
• Most thrusts are best done with a horizontal push, with your palm horizontally up or down.
  • Palm is generally up if your opponents sword is on your non sword side
  • Palm is generally down if it is on your sword side
  • This creates a barrier for their sword that makes it hard for them to counter attack, if you have caught their sword.
    • Their sword should be caught by connecting their top 1/3 point to your bottom 1/3 point
    • Close enough is good enough
    • This fails if your collecting their top 1/6 as they will evade your capture

The more we create recognition of the various uses of the sword and why we might do that, built in basic chunks that evolve in layers, the easier it is to glance at the sword, recognise it and have deeper knowledge about what that means. This speeds of recognition and recording, which leaves more brain space for doing other things, like travelling your decision tree.

Decision Tree

A decision tree (or flow chart) is a series of “if this happens, then I’ll do that” points. Often we rehearse these in slow motion during training, building speed and variations as we become more comfortable with the movements. This can be lots of fun, but also can easily become overwhelming.

For example, let us say that you want to learn some things to do against a person stepping into your space and thrusting at your upper third.

1. What can you do about this that keeps you untouched by their sword, but doesn’t weaken your ability to keep them under threat?
   • In this example, we will do an upper body block, where you bring your sword across your body, tip higher than their sword, basket lower, to push their blade to the outside, point towards their face
   • Then to land the blow, you may need to step and push your blade towards them; or just a slight extension of your sword if they are too close

Practice these steps at slow speed until you have a sense of it, then speed it up until you can at least do this accurately at medium speed. Your opponent shouldn’t increase the resistance to your counter, unless you do a very poor counter. They should increase the speed with you.

Now we add another step. What can you do about a thrust to your lower third with the same philosophy from above?

Once you have practiced that to a medium speed and got comfortable with that, your opponent is now going to randomise which attack they launch with a step. Slow this back down until you are able to manage both options without difficulty, practice and gradually speed up.

There are 4 major components to drills.

1. Speed
2. Complexity
3. Resistance from your opponent
4. something else that I can’t remember right now

You have now practiced a decision fork. This is a part of the overall decision tree that you will form, from beginning to the end of the match. We are not predicting every move, we are training good responses to slightly different moves so that we can manage this in our automatic system so that our cognitive system is analysing patterns rather than specific moves. As your decision tree improves, you will automatically jump to the part that is relevant to the current conditions.

Chess is a lovely game that was developed in India millennia ago and spread around the world. It was an aid to learning military tactics. When you start, your forces are lined up on one side of the board and oppose the enemy on the far side with a mirrored set up. There are only so many moves you can start with, and only so many responses to those initial moves. It is quite possible to memorise all of these options. At around 5 layers deep it becomes prohibitive to have memorised all of these moves – grand masters have memorised them, and that is why they are grand masters. For the rest of us mere mortals, we can look ahead a few moves and know what to do.

A good player has a number of tactics they will use, specific small scale set ups where they might attack two pieces with the same knight, or pin a queen to the king by threatening the king behind the queen. Then there are strategies such as control the centre of the board, or cross as many attack pieces past the centre line into the enemies territory as you can keep safe, or be aggressive so the other person has to become defensive.

In our decisions tree, we can create the beginning sequence of our match. I’ll lay it out here as a strategy first (high level of abstraction).

Now this will be done more as a decision tree.

This is a good beginner branch of a decision tree. The first step is simple – start an attack. Then some decisions need to be made depending on if the opponent does nothing, advances or retreats.

At the bottom of this branch list is a jump to another part of the decision tree. Another jump point is where you exit to reset, where there should now be distance between yourself and your opponent. What happens next depends on your relative positions and thus the beginning of a new decision tree.

To practice this, you start with just the first two layers of depth at a slow comfortable speed. Once you step in, does your opponent step in (take action), wait (take action) or retreat (take action). Once this has become fairly smooth, your opponent now can do more than just step, to make it through to the third layer, and once that is done, until you get all the way through all of the layers and retreat, whether you defeated them or not. As this becomes easy to navigate, increase the speed a bit. Once they becomes easy, increase your opponents resistance level. Once you have all of that at speed, add in extra options your opponent might do (one at a time) until that is easy. If that gets hard, slow things down until it becomes easy, then speed up.

Philosophies for your decision tree should consider:

1. Moves should be the most efficient option (little effort, little time of completion – assuming all speed is the same)
   • If a stressed time move is used, define why this is the option you would use eg direct attacks are too well blocked, so out of line attacks are useful; or this enables my cloak to tangle their equipment without tangling my own sword
2. Steps
   • Should change the range either towards your opponent or away from your opponent
     • Steps that maintain the range should have a justification for why you didn’t change range, but still gained advantage of control
   • Should most often be mixing a left or right component
     • Direct advancements to the opponent (down the line) are generally reserved for lunges
     • Direct retreats are ideally a temporary step to increase the opponents calculations, perhaps 1 in 5 retreats are directly backwards. (Otherwise the opponent only needs to watch 2 zones instead of 3).
3. Noting where positions end up close enough that this is now a jump point
   • Factor in momentum

Perceptual Speed

Perception is a combination of sensory input and cognitive recognition.

It takes time to see a thing, recognise that thing and then store that thing for later recall and reflection. If the speed that you recognise things is not quick, then a faster fight will lead you to not be able to store most of the action, which will lead to choppy recollection.

The two factors to consider in this are

• Keeping training bouts below the threshold of recognition, but by too much
• Improving the speed of recognition

Useful Speed of Bouts

It is important to fence with speed, but if that is faster than we can store, then we can’t learn from that.

During training, find the speed that you can stay present and then later recall. If you find that you can’t recall later, even though you felt that you were fencing slowly enough to be present during the fight, then try a bit slower and see if that works. If it doesn’t, then the problem is the scaffolding is poor (see above).

Assuming that you are recalling the fight, then slowly ramp the

Improving Speed of Recognition

Improving the speed of your recognition means improving both your theoretical understanding and practice seeing and internally naming or matching the move to what you know.

To improve your theoretical understanding, start with a minimal set of moves, such as the Eight Cuts. Learn where they move starts and where it goes to. Learn why it moves like that. Learn tells of how to differentiate this move from the other moves.

Now practice these moves with another person (or in front of mirror) and name them as you witness them. As you get good at naming them, increase the speed of the moves. Once you are good at naming the moves at speed, learn and add additional moves.