What kind of goal do you set for yourself at fighter practice? Do you have a plan? I asked that of everyone I fought Thursday night. Most of them could not tell me. One person said "to press you and bring the fight to you." That person has a future. The others had nothing definite. One person said "I never plan my fights out, I just react," but that is not what I'm talking about.
I used to carefully plan my attacks. Following the traditions of Radnor and Paul, I would work on certain techniques and plan to use those in my fights: a wavy rising snap, a butterfly, a seven-blow combination. I never would have won crown if I didn't have a deliberate plan on how to deal with Alfred of Carlysle. Now a days I try not to plan my fights out. When dealing with defensive as opposed to offensive fighters, fancy offense doesn't do much either than get you killed. I throw just a few shots and pull out whatever technique seems like a good idea at the time. I don't plan most fights out--except with lefties.
But I still set goals for practice--techniques I want to use, limits on what I can do, wins versus losses (not a good one for practice), things I should try. If you don't do that you never advance in our game.
WORKOUTS
Last week was a good one. Counting push ups (50 every day) I did 14 workouts. A couple of those were doubles on the same day, and it includes fighter practice, but I'm happy because it also includes a nice 4 mile run, a really tough aerobics class, and some wicked lifting with the Tabata timer. Now I have to have a better plan for recovery!
TECHNIQUES
I put a lot of limitations on myself for this week's practice. This is partially because I was the only knight, so much of what I would be doing would be training but I still wanted to accomplish some stuff for myself, but also because drilling and focusing is good practice. My goals were to concentrate on my A Frame defense and just a few attacks-- a head/body combo (the figure 8 kind, where you pull your shot through and then back hand the body, not the pseudo butterfly, where you throw a looping shot from above into the arm pit), and thrusts off of cuts--snap, off side head, and wrap. As these things go, I did end up throwing a few leg shots as well, and I didn't always follow through with the thrusts because I was killing people with my straight snaps a lot, and with a few wraps as well. The goal was to tighten up my defense, counter punch, and work on a very simple and limited offense.
FIGHTING
There were four other fighters at practice: Servit, Conrad, Kaithlin, and Zach. Against the first three I had good timing shots working. I would kill them with straight snaps as they started their attacks, or perhaps with wraps. Kaithlin has a strong defense but no offense. She has a coffin lid shield, so once I got the angle down I was hitting her as soon as she moved. I explained the technique to her and gave her some defenses to use against it. Servit was not moving his body through his shot at all, and had his long shield strapped so that it exposed his leg too much when he tried to close it to block body shots, We did pell work with him to fix that. Conrad still has a very tight defense. His one real technique is very silver like. With his short heavy sword, he tries to cut your arm whenever you throw a wrap. the key is, don't throw wraps. Zach, of course, required me to throw all my plans out the window because he's fast and left handed. I just tried counter punching with him out of several different defenses. I won about half of our fights.
It is 77 days until Crown Tourney. My next time in armor will be Nutley on Wednesday (unless I can make the Monday practice in Haslet).
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