Basic Mental Strategies for Fencing

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Mike Elder, the head coach and general manager of the Miami Fencing Club; that's www.miamifencingclub.com. We meet weekday evenings in South Miami and Saturday afternoons at Miami Day College. Fencing provides an excellent low impact aerobic workout for athletes from age 8 to 80. Some people have asked me how does a competitor fencer need to think abut themselves and about the sport. Fencing is often called physical chess, where we think of the game not only as a matter of the actual physical action that you see, but of the strategy to be able to try to think about what your opponent has in mind and try to act before you have to react. The whole idea is to be one move ahead of them. You have the timing on your side so just when you play a chess game, you watch the one action of the opponent. You then look at the whole board for the strategy. You call upon your armentarium of different moves you could make to choose like a good reply to that action. Fencing works very much like that only its physical and it moves very fast. Physical fencing."