GD4H

Category: Concepts

  • Causing Attraction: Non-Dominant Foot Forward in Longsword Fencing

    In ecological dynamics, the term Attractor or Movement Attractor shows up every now and then. Attractors can be seen as preferred motor pattern solutions in the current activity context. When an action is seen as intuitive or habitual, it might be the attractor at work. Habit and intuition can be nebulous concepts however, so to…

  • Closed and Open Games

    Is there any pair of terms more popular in coaching than “open” and “closed”? Just in common use in my HEMA circles, we have “eyes open” and “eyes closed” (after Zbigniew Czajkowski); “open loop” and “closed loop” (confusingly, “eyes open” == “closed loop”); and “open double” and “closed double” from Longpoint’s rules. And I’m sure…

  • Adaptation and Noticing if Your Opponent is Left Handed

    Sometimes I will see two people fencing, and either a few exchanges in or after the bout they will say “I didn’t notice you/they were a lefty” or some variation thereof. When I was briefly fencing left-handed due to tennis elbow in my right elbow last year, I sometimes got the same thing. Sometimes people…

  • CLA is Not Games

    A misconception that I see a lot, especially among people who have a passing familiarity with the term but have not looked at it closely, is that the constraints-led approach (CLA) means learning through games. I’m even willing to take partial responsibility for this; after all, this website is called “Game Design for HEMA,” and…

  • My Journey to Right-of-Way

    At this point in my longsword career, right-of-way is one of my favorite rulesets to fence under. Before you get disgusted and click away, hear me out – I wasn’t always like this, I used to be a right-of-way hater just like most of the HEMA community. It was a slow transition over the course…

  • The Flexible Value of Sparring

    A concept that often gets discussed in my HEMA coach circles is “value above sparring” (VAS). The concept is that there should be measurable value added by non-sparring activities in your classes which makes it more useful for fencers than simply sparring for the same amount of time. This is an important measure to gauge…

  • Monday Musings: Sparring Habits

    In discussions of how to structure a curriculum, it’s common to see statements like “allowing students to spar early means they’ll build bad habits”. I don’t think this is true – but even if it is, it’s worth pondering this question: If sparring at the end of a class builds habits that are ‘stickier’ than…

  • The Kendo Kote Dilemma – Why Single Choice Cooperative Drills Don’t Work

    Originally published on Fechtlehre . When I trained kendo, the two main attacks that we drilled were kote (right forearm strike) and men (head strike). The way we practiced our basic strikes with partners was through single choice cooperative drills, IE one side provides a chosen stimulus, and the other must react to the stimulus…

  • Aliveness – Stepping Stone or Red Herring?

    In the Information Processing Approach (IPA) format of teaching an action, the coach first isolates the action from its context, sometimes breaking it down into its constituent movements, and then has the athlete repeat the simplified action. The hypothesis is that the athlete will gain “muscle memory” through repetition of the action, which they can…

  • Breaking the feedback loop to make bad games

    The following are the results of a game design challenge to design games which have the biggest discrepency between their apparent usefulness and their actual ability to teach sills. Sean FranklinGame List: 6 Games for a Complete FencerExplanation (and introduction to the challenge): 6 Bad Games – Lessons From The Rondo Tea KewGame List: 6…