The Results of Last Entry

Today, I am just posting to confirm that I tried a couple of things inspired by yesterday's entry and they worked.

I practiced diving in and forcing a scrum against one of my opponents who historically gives me trouble. It worked, but probably mainly because it was unexpected. There are many different ways to take someone's blade with your sword, and eventually I started performing a yield but instead of striking to the center, pushing outwards or downwards with my hilt. It worked decently well, and is something to possibly incorporate into my game against buckler people.

Additionally, I started using passing step-lunges. The full action is kind of slow, but it covers quite a bit of ground to touch people when they think they are safe. The exact action starts in a standard fencing stance, but with feet reversed. Perform a passing step, but instead of landing in a square stance, land in a lunge step. It doesn't have to be a large lunge - just a lunge. It approaches like a straight-on lunge, so the defensive blade-work remains the same. I combined it with a sort of leaning-back A-frame sword and dagger posture, to hide my true measure even more.

Lastly, I practiced a dagger-forward posture. This is to make my parrying more effective when my opponent refuses good blade contact. That A-frame pose was one example - it seemed like it would be effective against case users who refuse blade contact. The dagger goes stretched toward the most obvious line, to make it so they have to perform a larger movement get around my parry, than if I kept my dagger back in its usual home next to my right wrist.

This might be a theme for a while - thinking of how they are denying my defensive options and how they are denying my offensive options, and what I can do to overcome this denial. And of course, the exact function of each type of positioning.