Practice Report

I was going to do this earlier, but I really wanted to get that sickle play up beforehand.

Monday night I was trying to work Fabris a bit more than usual. I had my usual amount of trying to make things more reflexive and feeling correct, but that's the usual now and is pretty okay. I need to try more extended guards; they feel insecure to me, and that's unfortunate. Also, I need to improve on my lunge-or-pass decisioning and balance. Finally, if I lunge I need to either get better about dagger placement or getting my elbow up for better profiling or both.

All of that is more or less ongoing though, and that's fine. On the other hand, there were a couple new things that were pointed out to me or that I realized! (This is good! I love having new things to work on that aren't, like, immediate Huge Problems.) Wil Deth noticed that while I was fencing one particular person using Fabris, that my rear foot would kick back a bit before I lunged. This was interesting - it doesn't come up when I drill from what I've noticed (and I didn't feel like I needed to pay special attention to it when I was doing my footwork last night) so I think it was a defensive flinch. Seems like I need to trust my defenses more, ensure that they're solid, and not lose that little bit of measure.

The other thing that I recognized when I was fighting Wil later (with Fabris and a stick, so that's still a thing that I think I'm making work!) was that I have a tendency to settle into my Fabris and become very immobile. I think this is really just due to the stance and the effort it takes, and the best thing for me to do is to be mindful of it when I fight, pay attention to when I'm stepping vs my measure, and also... to do more footwork drills at home. (Because we all knew where that was going.)

Still need to work on my voids, because I want to be able to do them really cleanly, but that's an ongoing process of training my body and remembering balance. (And also doing them from Fabris' stance as well as Capo Ferro's.) Also, I want to reread Fabris' guards and keep internalizing them to a greater degree.

So yeah! Very good practice. Stuff to pay attention to, but I felt like I've been making useful forward progress.