How to Hold a Fencing Sword

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Brad Bogus. Now I am going to guide you through some of the basics with the handwork involved in foil fencing. I have already showed you how to hold the weapon, now I have the glove on. The way you hold the weapon as far as your arm goes, you want to keep it a 90 degree angle to your body so that your elbow is right near the bottom of your rib cage. Now you don’t want it jammed up against your rib cage because that is too tense and restricts movement. You want to loosely relax maybe your elbow maybe a couple of inches from your body and held at a 90 degree angle with your weapon facing your opponent. The way you hold this weapon to your body is with a slight bent inwards. You don’t want to hold it out because it gives them a little more target area. You want to close it off a little bit helping protect you in any kind of basic situation. So you see that it kind of bends inward a little bit this way partly because of the curve of the blade but also that is how I am intentionally holding it to give me a little more security on my target area with my opponent. Your back hand you hold at a 90 degree angle but you hold it upwards. I am sure you have seen this in a lot of sword fighting movies but it is there for a reason. So this is your basic position with your hands. You are going to move and advance on the strip and keep this arm up relatively most of the time until you make a lunge. When you make a lunge, this back arm drops kind of a counter balance you see so you keep your weight distributed even on the strip. So you are on the strip, you move, you lunge, back arm goes down, front arm extends to make your attack and that is how you keep your attack and counter balance working while you are doing your fighting on the strip. This is the basics of your handwork. "