Smash Bros, rather than Fencing, and Hard Reads

 It has been a long time since I made a blog post! Let's make one today.

Since the pandemic started, I have been doing basically zero fencing. A little bit of stray fencing work here and there, but no consistent practice and nothing really useful for improving my fencing. But what I have been doing is playing Smash Bros Ultimate.

Smash Bros is a series of fighting games unlike any other. It is highly air-focused and mobile, and has mechanisms in place to put penalties on too much defense and too much offense both. There are a ridiculous number of characters. I play one named Ridley.

Ridley is a giant space-demon-bird. He is a large character, but not heavy - in real terms, that means it's easy to hit them with attacks and relatively easy to kill them at low health. He is a little bit slow, but he has a decent amount of range on his abilities. He is a high-risk-high-reward character.

The reason I say all of this is to talk about a thing called a "hard read".

A hard read is when you do something based on what you think your opponent is going to do, but hasn't done yet. This comes up in fighting games a lot. Characters in fighting games move much faster than people do in real life, and in fighting games people usually have many fewer choices of action at any given time, versus in real life.

Playing Ridley requires a lot of hard reads, but he has the tools to restrict most characters' choice-space in order to let them make those guesses. As well, played correctly you can minimize the cost of failed reads in order to open up your opponent to different guessing games.

Hard reads exist in fencing, too. The place I would say the concept exists most is in Destreza-esque fighting.

When fencing Destreza, one spends a lot of time with their arm fully-extended. This is good, in that it allows you to gain better opposition and have a strong defensive posture. But it makes life more difficult for attacking. Most attacks from a Destreza-esque posture require an opponent to be at a very specific distance - doubly so in a non-C&T SCA context.

This is because we have fewer joints to un-bend for the action of making an attack. When extending into an attack, we need to make sure that it is going to contact in the "line" of the assault. For a thrust, this is forward along the direction of the blade. For a cut, this depends on the particular sword. Regardless, the elbow and shoulder, working together, can radically reposition the attack at any point.

For Destreza, this is not as much the case. For a thrust in LVD, an opponent stepping slightly in one direction or another can completely mess up an attack. Where an Italian might be able to launch an attack that could hit at anywhere along a few feet of length, a Diestro has maybe a foot of length which can really strike at most, if not even more like a point.

This means that a Diestro has to predict exactly where their opponent will be. This is difficult, since in SCA rapier we generally aren't allowed to physically interpose objects to restrict our opponent's movement. So, we need to guess.

In order to not just lose all the time, this means we need to minimize the cost of a failed guess - that is to say, our defense must be impeccable. In general, when planning an assault in Destreza, I try to make sure that my opponent won't be able to attack me when I attack, regardless of if they are moving backwards or forwards. The right-angle position and extended arm help with this, because they cover so very much space, but they are not perfect by any means.

Bored of writing now, time to be done.

Running?!?!?

I decided halfway through writing this that it should be in my blog. I'm not a doctor, but these are all things I've found work well for me over time. I'm not a marathon runner and my speed isn't super fast, but these things seem to work.

My standard running checklist for when something is going less-than-ideally is as follows:

1. Check my torso and head positioning.

Breathing is a difficult subject. You're doing cardio, so the exercise you're doing is optimized to place that system under stress. The thing you're trying to train up is your diaphragm and chest cavity's ability to pull in and expel air.

The most important thing I corrected here was my posture - maintaining a light engagement through your mid to lower back is super important for giving your chest cavity the space to breathe. The "bracing method" would work here, with perhaps a bit less engagement through the abs.

Further related to posture, I find that rolling my back "upwards" helps to "open up" my chest and allow me to engage my chest musculature a bit better, to allow me to get more muscles involved in pulling in oxygen. The position is a bit like the "idealized body position" that Devon described in class and said *not* to do when in a fencing guard. In this case, I thiiiiiink it's okay because you're doing it for a specific purpose. Alternately, it's very possible that my chest cavity is shaped in a way that means I need to do this to optimize, but other people don't need to.

Looking forward or upward makes it easier to breathe. Looking downwards with your face creases your esophagus, which means the air going into your lungs has to change direction more, and thus experiences more friction with your esophagus.

Mouth-shape matters here. I usually find that a shape closer to an "O" or a circle makes it easier to pull air in for some weird reason. The other thing I do here sometimes is open my mouth wide enough to bare my teeth, which engages tissue in the nasal passages enough to open them a bit more, which allows me to combo mouth-nose breathe. Unless I do that, pulling in air through my nose is a complete no-go while running, especially outside.

2. Check my breathing pace.

The most important thing for me these days, after dealing with all of that, is breathing pace. So, how often you breathe in or out.

One thing to keep in mind here is that the cycle of breathing is easier if you only cycle from about ~25% full to about ~75% full, averaging around 50%. The farther from 50% your lung capacity is, the harder you have to push to get there. This means that up to a point, you can breathe shallower and more often.

Eventually you hit diminishing returns here - rapidly changing from inhaling to exhaling requires energy too. As well, the faster you breathe the less efficient the oxygen exchange in your lungs grows. This means that for your breathing, you have to optimize among a whole bunch of different things.

Usually my ideal pace is about half a breath per time my foot strikes the ground. So, right foot hits and then I breathe in, and then left foot hits and I breathe out. This usually feels a little too fast at the start of the run, and gradually feels better as I continue. I tend to have pretty close to three steps per second when going for a run, which should give you an idea of the pace of breathing.

For selecting a pace of breathing, I usually try to synchronize it with my steps. If your lungs feel tired, you need to give them time to recover. This means you need to breathe slower for a while. So after a really hard hill, I might switch from an in-out pace of 1-1 to 2-2. So - start breathing in with the step left, then step right, then step left again and start breathing out, step right, and repeat with a step left and breathing in.

I've found that developing breathing strength is more effective if I go through "reps" of breathing faster and harder, then slower to let my lungs recover. So, I go through the following sequence:

-Start at 1-1

-Go for a while at 2/3-2/3 (counting out that I should have four breaths per three steps)

-Go for a while at 1/2-1/2 (one in-out per time a foot hits the ground)

-Maybe go for a while at 1/3-1/3 (in-out-in or out-in-out each time my foot hits the ground)

-back to 1/2-1/2

-back to 2/3-2/3

-back to 1-1

-Down to 3/2-3/2 (two breaths per three steps)

-Down to 2-2 (one breath per two steps)

-Down to 3-3 (one breath per three steps)

-Maybe down to 4-4

-back up to 3-3

-back up to 2-2

-back up to 3/2-3/2

-back up to 1-1

-Repeat

This is a weird sequence to time out, but it provides steps upwards and downwards in breathing-exertion that feel to me like they are progressive in terms of effort, so long as you don't let your breathing get too shallow. The faster sequence forces you to push your lungs harder, and the slower sequence lets your breathing-muscles dispel some lactic acid and recover.

Generally though, a 1-1 breathing sequence is the most efficient sequence as far as I can tell from my heart rate.

Breathing is also important for dispelling heat - I usually end up breathing faster and shallower when it's hotter out. At that point the thing my body is trying to do isn't get oxygen - it's shed heat.

 

Paying some passive attention to counting out my breathing also helps me to not get bored.

2. If my ankle hurts, or both my knees and shins hurt, I'm probably hitting the ground too hard.

It's likely that you might be bouncing up and down too much. This is usually what causes ankle or knee/shin problems for me. Try to make your gait more efficient in terms of how far your head goes from the ground.

 

It's also possible that you need to stretch after running. I do some ankle stretches after - wall leans with leg both straight and bent, and standing on my tippy-toes several times for strength. That's a whole post on its own.

I need to wear athletic insoles because I have somewhat collapsed arches. These are the ones I wear. I wear them in all of my shoes, including my running shoes.

3. If my knee hurts, I'm probably heel-striking more than I should.

 

One fix for this is to make your foot strike the ground more toward ball of the foot. Usually the ideal place for me feels like the middle of my foot. There's a bit of contact, bend, and bounce with my ankles, but not too much.

It's also possible that my shoes are tied too tightly or too loosely. Usually for me I end up heel-striking more if my shoes are too loose, because when my toes strike my feet shift around in them.

 

It's also possible that your gait is inefficient in a weird way. Generally, if you are going either uphill or downhill, you need to decrease the size of your gait based on the size of the hill. This is because otherwise, you're pulling yourself up with your thighs, rather than letting yourself bounce forward.

 

It's also possible that you're not using your shins as a lever appropriately. Look at this gif of someone jogging. Note how as the runner extends their leg, their knee moves "backwards" relative to their ankle, and their ankle moves "forwards" relative to their knee. It's harder to see, but during their stride, their knee bends so that their ankle moves "backwards" relative to their knee, and their knee moves "forwards" relative to their ankle.

 

This results in a place on the runner's shin that essentially only moves forwards, and acts as a fulcrum between the knee and the foot. The lower this is, the slower you go, but the more leverage you have and the less stressful your stride is on your knee. I like to imagine that my feet are going around a wheel, and the shin-fulcrum is the middle of the wheel. If I'm going uphill or downhill the wheel gets smaller, and if I'm on a flat the wheel gets larger.

Essentially - the more your knees move back and forth relative to your feet, the more shearing stress you are putting on your knees.

4. If my shin hurts, I'm probably toe-striking more than I should.

Easiest fix here is to do the opposite of the above - try to make the place that you're striking the ground farther back on your foot, closer to your heel. Generally you should also be aiming to have your foot impact the ground pretty "flat" relative to the angle of the ground. So angle your toes up some if you're going uphill, and down some if you're going downhill.

Or make your stride less fast and more leverage, like I rambled about above in the knee section.

Or you could wear shin sleeves. I have a pair of these.

(I got interrupted here and lost momentum, so I'm going to slack-ass the last bits of this.)

5. Make sure I'm not running too fast.

 

I frequently have to step my speed back a whole lot, until it feels like I'm barely doing more than walking with some bounce in my step, in order to have successful runs.

6. Make sure I have a semi-positive point of view on run.

Getting out and doing anything, even one minute of exercise, is better than nothing. Beyond that, the point of cardio is to raise your heart rate for a period of time, rather than to cover distance. If you wanted to cover distance we have cars. The health benefits of a run are based on how long you're in cardio heart rate zones.

The Pokétron and the Overtron

I am pleased with myself. Before you continue - this post has very little if anything to do with fencing.

Last night, I re-implemented a tool for taking an arbitrary "team" and giving advice about the best choices to minimize the weaknesses of the team. This is because I have been playing a lot of Overwatch. One problem in Overwatch is that sometimes, the character you select is just bad against the other team's composition. However - it's hard to tell the difference between performing badly and being counter-picked. So, we solve the problem with technology.

Originally, the tool was created for fighting the Pokémons online. I naively scraped "weak against" data from Smogon University, and then used that data to create teams for whom there were no un-compensated-for weaknesses.

An example. So, I have added Swampert to my team. Swampert is weak to Celebi and Mamoswine. Celebi is weak to Skarmory and Venusaur, while Mamoswine is weak to Skarmory and Bronzong. We're going to pretend that there are no other weaknesses, for the moment.

So, the program would advise that I use Skarmory, since Skarmory counters both and doesn't add any new weaknesses. Yay!

If the options listed did add weaknesses, then I would check to see if they were weak to anyone currently on the team. If they were, that would be fine. If they weren't, then they would be a less-good option according to the program.

In reality, this relies on having a good, simple data-set. It's a very useful program for Pokémon, for instance, because the data-set is so large and there is a website sitting there with ready, scrapeable data. It's all simple sets though, and didn't take *that* long to implement.

The reason I've done this recently, is because Overwatch has a similar extended-rock-paper-scissors element to it. So, I've implemented the Overtron. What I do is I input my team, then it tells me what the best choices are, in ascending order of awesomeness.

There's some weirdness to the data. In the Pokétron, there are a few Pokémon who, according to Smogon University's dataset, are so dominating of the meta-game that they were almost always the best choice. Skarmory and Scizor were the two particular ones, with Skarmory frequently being between 400% better than the next-best option, and then the next several options being only about 20% different from each other.

It's hard to tell if this is because the data is generated by humans, or if Skarmory was actually that dominating of the meta-game.

Similarly, the data-set I'm using for Overwatch friggin' loves Reaper and Winston. Loves 'em. The brief testing I've undertaken has allowed me to see that yes, they are good options very much of the time. But it's still hilarious to me how this algorithm has such dominant "favorites". It's probably a sign that I either need to modify the algorithm, or I need to edit the data-set.

Part of me believes that this sort of set manipulation could be used to determine effective maneuvers. Because fencing does have a subtle sort of rock-paper-scissors to it, in various maneuvers. Sadly, the data-set is probably too squishy for me to ever create the Fencingtron.