Anyhow.
Practice. Right.
Practice was good yesterday. I hadn't been to practice in a while, but my new perspective on Destreza is already paying dividends. The new way I've been doing Destreza has been to only allow one place for my opponents to disengage to, and to always immediately push my opponent's sword to the cone of parallax, as per the earlier posts on parallax.
Reposting this picture. Cone/planes of parallax are on the right, and it grows wider as you get closer.
In my new Destreza-ish paradigm, there are a few specific actions which need explaining before I can say anything else. Assuming this all continues working, I'll probably make a more detailed post about them in the future, but here's what I have been doing. These are all sword actions, not footwork actions.
- Spiral inwards
- This is when I perform a circling motion with my sword, leading with the tip. The point of the motion is to "pull" my opponent's sword toward a direction, making their weak naturally slide onto my strong by the way my blade is angled.
- Generally, you slide from a stronger part of their blade to a weaker part of their blade as you do this, to make sure you touch a weak enough part of their blade to move them.
- Spiral outwards
- This is when I perform a circling motion with my sword, leading with the hilt. This "expels" or "pushes" my opponent's sword outwards. This leads to their weak naturally sliding toward my weak.
- Generally, you slide from a stronger part of their blade to a weaker part of their blade as you do this, to make sure you touch a weak enough part of their blade to move them.
- Push
- This is when I use my fully-extended-straight arm to push on their weak with the middle of my blade. Sometimes I angle in behind their sword a bit, in order to make my opposition stronger. As Fabris says, blade-angle is what matters most in opposition.
- Angled weak over/under strong ("Weak atajo")
- This is when I extend my arm along the plane of parallax, with my hand angled such that my blade points inwards toward their body. The implied point of contact with my blade is very close to the hilt here, so that the point of contact is along the plane of parallax.
- Line in Cross / Narrowing ("Strong atajo")
- This is when I perform a firm, wide parry. My arm should be extended along the plane of parallax, as should my blade. My blade should be angled such that I have as much width in the plane of parallax as possible.
So, given those building blocks, I did a couple of different things.
A spiral inwards transitioning to a spiral outwards with a strong atajo as we moved to the plane of parallax worked pretty well. It seems like that particular set of movements is super hard to escape with bladework, because of how strongly it limits where your opponent can move. It was hard to transition into an attack, but I think that's just something I need to drill with a partner. I probably just need to abandon the atajo earlier and go for a stab. I don't like how dependent on my off-hand I am for attacking from this position, though.
A push transitioning into a strong atajo on the opposite plane ended up being basically the same as the previous paragraph. Both of these actions were harder to attack when my atajo ended up on the left side, rather than when they were on the right side. I tried throwing cuts from those positions, too, but I don't think that the geometry is appropriate for being able to throw a quick cut. I also think that this action might be equivalent to the previous action, but for the moment they are separate in my brain.
Going directly into a strong atajo and then transitioning into the corresponding weak atajo on the opposite plane worked super well, and didn't have the problems with attacking that the previous two actions had. It was harder to get the positioning correct to safely go directly into the strong atajo, though. As well, I can't just attach this onto the above two actions because my body kept ending up too close to their body to transition into a weak atajo, when I did this.
All of the things worked okay, aside from the problems with attacking mentioned above. All of these problems would have been solved with a dagger, but I didn't have a dagger. Oh well.
*****
After that, I fought some with my traditional ideal setup of 45-inch sword and dagger. The work I've been doing with my 37-inch sword is really starting to show in my 45-inch game. My opposition is far, far better than it was before. I also have a more specific definition of find-gain-attack, which helped for performing safe thrusts.
Basically, the "find" is a push to the inner cone of parallax while gaining the appropriate amount of penetration, and "gain" is a movement to have as much width as possible while continuing to push their sword to the outer cone of parallax. Then the thrust is a thrust, taking advantage of the time and distance covered during the previous two steps to trade width for stabbings.
As an aside - I have had a problem with the non-specificity of "find" and "gain" for a long time. This new definition is pretty spiffy, and seems accurate according to all of the definitions of "find" and "gain" that I've seen.
By the end of the night, my knee was hurting a bit, so I tried doing a more upright Italian stance. That wasn't the best idea in the world - I ended the night with a knot in my glutes, which was a weird feeling.
*****
So, in closing, this is the stuff I need to work on:
- Work on safely abandoning my strong atajos earlier to attack.
- Wear my right knee brace when fencing.
- Start thinking about why my point control isn't as good as it could be.
- Teaching, which will have blog post soon.
Have a good day!
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