13 Fencing Footwork Drills You MUST Know (Quick 15 mins routine)

If you're a fencer, you need to have a good footwork. Today in this video, I will give you 13 footwork exercises you guys can do either at home or in the club. So save yourself 10 to 15 minutes, and let's get started. First, let's start off with a warmup. So we're gonna just do advanced retreats with a whole strip. So advanced retreats with normal speed. Advance, relax the upper body. Good, put your arm down. You can let yourself tense the upper body. After you do your warmup of advanced retreats, you can try to speed it up to do faster advance and then faster retreats. So there it is. All right, cool. All right, the second footwork is something called a two, one, three, one. So how it works is you do two forwards, one backwards. Three forwards, one backwards. And then backwards is two back, one forward. Three back, one forward. In this exercise, focus on changing your speed and your tempo. So sometimes you wanna do two fast, one back slow. Three fast, one back slow. Or you can do two back slow and one back forward. Three back slow and one back forward. Also, you can change your size of your advances. So you can do big two and small. Big two small and one big. So honestly, footwork is just about trying to deceive your opponent and trying to make your opponent fall short or trying to make your opponent try to come into your trap. So in footwork, just remember you have to play with your kind of footwork and kind of be creative when you're doing these exercises. Now the third footwork you can do is something called advanced retreats. So advanced retreats is basically you're gonna go one forward and one backward. One forward, one back. With the advance and retreats, remember to do, when you go forward, big advances and small retreats. Big advances, small retreats. You're gonna be acting as if you're pushing your opponent. So big, small, big, small, big, small. So you have enough time to react just in case when the opponent attacks, when they feel under pressure. Also, when you do the advanced retreats, keep in mind that you wanna do advanced retreats, not jumps. So if you're doing too fast and you feel like you're jumping and not really advancing or retreating, slow yourself down so you can properly work on your footwork and focus on working on what you're supposed to actually work on. Now we're gonna move on to jumping. So this is the fourth fencing footwork drill that you guys can do. To start in a locked position, you can do jumps. So jump forwards and jump backwards. Jump forwards, you can relax your arms too if you feel too tense. And just remember, when you do jump forwards and backwards, try to remember to not jump upwards. Don't be jumping upwards like this or backwards like this. Don't be jumping in a straight line. You're propelling yourself, jumping forwards or backwards. Not too much, boing, boing, boing, you know? Now let's add a little creativity or fun into this jumping exercise. Now we're gonna do the fifth footwork exercise, which is two, one, three, one, but now with jumps. So in a locked position, we do two, one, three, one. Backwards. Cool. Now that we have warmed up our footwork, we can add lunges for something more intense. So the sixth footwork exercise is jump lunge. So how you start is you're in a hung up position and you wanna jump forward and then lunge. Jump forward and then lunge. And you're doing two back. So when you jump forward lunge, it's a two tempo action. So you wanna try to set something up. So you wanna, for example, you wanna try to do like a short fake, fake down. You try to make your opponent do some kind of parry, or some kind of attacks. So you can do fake here, and you can do this against lunge. Or you can do, do like a body fake. Just a side note, if you wanna improve your lunge, you can check out my video right here. Short summary, you'll have a longer and faster lunge. If you wanna be in a bent leg position and you wanna be able to push with your non-dominant leg. And also, second of all, you wanna be able to kick your front leg as far as possible. So you wanna propel yourself forward like an arrow. All right, now we're gonna make the jump lunge a little harder. So the seventh footwork drill, we're gonna do something called in-out lunge. So let me show you. So you're in a hung up position. You wanna do in, out, and then lunge. Guard, and then restart, in, out, lunge. And then you can retreat backwards. All right, now let's add a little more play and have a little more creative. Let me teach you guys some deceiving footwork drills you guys can do to implement in your bouts or in your training. So the eighth footwork exercise looks like this. So let's start from unguarded position. And you wanna start off with half step forward, back. Half step forward, lunge. So the half step forward is like a preparation for your attack. So you can do, while you're doing half step forward, you can do your preparation. Your feint, your provocations, or anything that gets your opponent to do some kind of action. So you can do face to the ground, lunge. Fake your hand, out. Fake out, and then lunge. Overall, you just wanna be playing with it, with the half step, and then finishing off and executing the action strongly with your lunge. All right, now exercise number nine. So let me show you how that looks like. So it's our unguarded position. And you wanna first start off with a jump in, provoke, out. You get some kind of information from that provocation. And then you go in again with the same provocation, so your opponent do the same thing again. You do jump in, provoke, and this time you finish it with a lunge. Cool. And then you can retreat back. Exercise number 10. Now we're gonna play with a little more of the retreat portion of your footwork. So this time you can start from the front, by the end of the strip, to do this footwork exercise going backwards. So you're in the end of the strip. And how this works, is first you wanna do two jumps back, provoke, out. Now you get some information of what your opponent's gonna do, you wanna try to recreate that kind of reaction your opponent did. So again, to forward, provocation, now your opponent's gonna do the action, so you can execute it with a lunge. You can get to the end of the strip, and then you can do advanced forwards to repeat that exercise again. Let's add on to more of our retreat footwork section. So we're gonna do another retreat exercise, but this time we're gonna add a parry, riposte to it. So we wanna set a trap for our opponent to fall into a provocation. So let me demonstrate how that will look. Jump in, provoke, get out. Jump in, provoke, parry, riposte with a lunge. Exercise number 12. Let me demonstrate how it works. So first, this time we're gonna do two back, provoke, out. Same thing again, two back, provoke, parry, riposte. So it's kinda like the last exercise, but this time you're adding one more jump in your retreat. So this exercise, you're stretching this a little more, so you can have a more high rate of hitting your opponent when they come at you. So basically, that is how kind of this kind of footwork kind of works. Now the 13th exercise, or last exercise that we're gonna do today, are some flush attacks. So these are some explosive exercises for our legs to charge them up, you know? So let me show you how you can do these flush attack exercises with a strip. So usually you would start at the end of the strip, and at first, you wanna be starting like moving around. You wanna be moving around, trying to play with like feints, the idea of what your opponent's gonna do. You wanna be trying to play, you wanna be trying to create like a video in your, or a simulation in your mind of you fencing. So you're trying to set and get information from your opponent. So you wanna move around, and it would be nice if you could have someone to like clap for you, to give like an initiative of when you start the flush attack. But if you don't, you guys can just move around, and you guys can move around, you guys can like set like a mark somewhere on the ground. So as long as you step on it, you have to make a super explosive flush attack all the way over there. So let me show you how that first one works. So you move around, we say the mark is over there, I punch it, and you guys can go back to where you started, and then keep doing that. I suggest you to do at least 10 flush attacks at the end of your footwork. Let me show you. All right, great work, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this quick fencing footwork drill. I hope you had a great workout, and I hope you will implement these at workouts in your exercises, or in your training, in your club, or at home, so you can develop your better footwork, so you can fence better, and overall, be a stronger fencer. Ideally for these footwork, I highly recommend you do at least three to four times a week for the best outcome. Because you don't want to be doing them, because you don't, because you want to be doing them, so you can get muscle memories, so in like fencing bouts, you can be able to execute them without really not thinking about them. So that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed. Please leave a like, drop a comment about what your favorite footwork was, and subscribe. See you next video. Peace. Boom. All right, thanks for watching. Bye.