One common mistake I see my students make when they start HEMA saber is that they want to go fast. They’ll move their arms around as fast as they can, whipping from an outside guard to an inside guard and back in the time I take to lean my body slightly.
From a beginner’s perspective, I can understand this. You don’t know when your opponent will attack and you want to make sure you’re safe. Are they coming from the left? No, then it must be the right! No, it was actually left! Get the sword in the right place!
The problem with this is that there is no right place for their sword to be. The right place is created by the interplay of their motions and mine. If they are moving their sword rapidly trying to predict what I’ll do, I can just wait until they overextend and then cut their arm. Their eagerness to outspeed me opens them up to a much slower attack.
I generally tell my students that fencing isn’t about moving your sword fast, it’s about moving their sword to the right place at the right time. Sometimes that does require a fast motion, but sometimes it actually requires a slow one.
I generally teach saber from Roworth and Waite, who are not very philosophical about all of this. They have a lot of suggested drills and some very interesting things to say about feints, but they seem to assume that the art of fencing will awaken naturally in a student after enough drills.
To be fair to that viewpoint, students do seem to get it after a few months of lessons. But let’s get philosophical anyway.
I first learning fencing by studying George Silver‘s English backsword. George Silver is very philosophical about everything, and gives us this great quote about distance, motion, and finding the right place for your sword to be:
through judgment, you keep your distance, through distance you take your time, through time you safely win or gain the place of your adversary, the place being won or gained you have time safely either to strike, thrust, ward, close, grip, slip or go back, in which time your enemy is disappointed to hurt you, or to defend himself, by reason that he has lost his place, the reason that he has lost his true place is by the length of time through the numbering of his feet, to which he is out of necessity driven
This quote always reminds me of the OODA loop. Distance gives you time to observe and orient, judgement lets you decide correctly, then you act so as to give yourself a true place to attack safely. It’s not a perfect 1:1 map, but if George Silver had ever met John Boyd I think they would have recognized the tactical mindset they each shared.
Given this principled approach, let’s think again about why it doesn’t make sense to always move as fast as you can. Why doesn’t that let you shrink your OODA loop and win?
The answer is that fencers are moving so fast that they can’t observe and orient. They are deciding and acting without the input they need to do that well.
Boyd’s whole plan of getting inside the adversary’s OODA loop requires being able to do the whole process in a shorter time. When fencers move their sword faster than they can orient to, they actually make things worse for themselves. By changing their situation, they have to reorient, then reorient again. They find themselves ever more uncertain about what is going on in the fight. When I’m fencing someone like that, it’s easy to wait just out of distance, letting them rush to defend a place that I hint at threatening, then attacking whatever they leave open.
By moving slower, I orient faster. That means that I can decide when I want to go faster and act to cut them.
This applies to more than fencing, of course. It often makes sense to move a little slower, so that you can gather information and understand it faster, and thus make a better decision and act decisively.