Safety & Gear for Foil Fencing

Series Summary

Fencing is the art of swordsmanship. It has developed into a competitive sport, being one of four sports featured at each of the modern Olympic Games. Protective fencing gear consists of masks, gloves, breeches and plastron. Typically made of tough cotton, nylon, and Kevlar, the full-body padding is very protective and cannot easily be punctured. Sabre fencing uses right-of-way like foil fencing, but points can be scored with the edge of the blade. This follows from the original design of sabres as edged swords, whereas the rapiers which led to foil fencing were usually pointed, thrusting blades.

In this free video series, expert swordswoman Amy Boyle teaches you the basics of foil fencing. Amy will show you the basic attacks, thrusts, advances, the en garde position, and how to disengage when fencing. Amy teaches her foil fencing techniques with clear instruction followed by careful examples. You will see the coupe, the coule, glides, apels, ripostes, a ballestra lunge, and more. Amy will give you all the move for advancing and attacking in foil fencing.

Video Transcript

"Before we start talking about Foil fencing attacks I want to address safety really quickly. The basic gear you want to make sure you have before your practicing, even if your practicing informally is your mask which protects your head. It's really important that anytime you have your in danger of having a foil aimed at you even at a distance that you have a mask on. Sometimes as we're explaining some moves in very slow, choreographed motion, and occasionally I won't have on a mask. But even when we move through most of our slow motions we have this on because blades can break, points can slip off target and you don't ever want to jeopardize your face, your eyes, or even your neck. So you want to wear a mask. Also the next piece of equipment. You'll have a foil obviously but the jacket is really not optional. This material is tough enough regardless of what kind of jacket you have. That it provides good protection. You can also wear additional amour, plastrons, or chest pieces that can help protect your target area cause you will get poked and it's not comfortable. Lastly the pants are actually optional. Let me rephrase that the fencing regulation, fencing knickers are optional we prefer you wear pants. But you can when you?re practicing in your school wear shorts, wear sweats, wear anything that's going to protect your legs. I will fence in shorts occasionally so I can tell you that you get bruised. Even if your fences get deflecting from target area and your legs are not target area you often deflect a blade to your area and you end up with pretty black and blue polka dots. So you want to wear material that's heavy enough to protect your legs even though there not a target area and lastly before you begin fencing you want to test your weapon. So the foil is a stiff, flexible blade but they do break. They break rather frequently depending on the type of blade you?re using just through normal use. So you want to make sure that this is tight if you feel rattling here in the hilt you want to make sure that your guard is screwed on tight and properly and also you'll notice that there's a little safety button here. This is not an electric foil that adds a little bit of extra protection so you want to make sure that this is in place. Cause these do occasionally fall off when your playing and make sure that there are no breaks in the blade or that the tip is on here and it's safe. At least you have basic safety in place before you begin and I would also recommend that before you fence you learn parries first and than learn attacks just to make sure you have the ability to protect your target area because it's a little safer for you but mostly that's just good fencing."