Tag: coaching
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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…
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How I Learned To Stop Trying And Finally Fixed Knee Collapse
I spent a lot of time trying to fix people’s knee collapse. But the solution ended up being to stop trying to fix it, and just give them more realistic training activities.
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CLA Class Example – Body Language and Deception
This is a writeup of a class I ran recently which I think makes a good case study in using the Constraints Led Approach to teaching.
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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…
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Constraining the Squinter to Fix Cutting Issues
At Bucks, we go through the Lew Gloss in order on a cycle, which helps inform what we will work on in a particular practice. We recently started the schillhaw (which I will henceforth refer to as “squinter”), and it reminded me of common issues people tend to have with it. One of the most…
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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…
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Exploring Differential Learning (Part 1)
Class at Bucks Historical Longsword follows a fairly regular format, we usually do about one “simple” game and one or two “complex” games (simple game being a game with fewer viable paths to success than a complex game, IE direct attack is simple, sabre march is complex), usually based on a passage from the Lew…
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Cues and Kinematics: Brief analogy of animation and motor skills
In Computer Animation and Robotics (but we won’t discuss the latter since I honestly don’t know much about it), there are two ways of controlling kinetic and motor actions in actors, usually referred to as Forward and Inverse Kinematics. The purpose of both of them is to get joints/bones in characters to achieve a certain…
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Buy-in: Implicit Rules in Games and Drills
The idea of “buy-in” is something that I think a lot about when designing drills and games, so in this article I’d like to give a clear definition and breakdown of what I mean when I talk about buy-in. I don’t want to create a definition that everyone has to use, but this will be…
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Putting it into games: Keep fencers playing
For any coach or instructor interested in tuning your sessions to be more based around games, a useful early consideration is how you structure your sessions to keep fencers focused on the task of the game and what they want to achieve with it. When I first started using more game-like sessions it wasn’t initially…