Flashcards and Flow

I know, I said I was going to talk about lessons and consistencies that we've seen so far in Book Two of Fabris. Well, time remains a terrible lie and instead I'm going to chat about some other things I've been kicking around in my head. Specifically, flow drills.

I've loved using flow drills when I'm practicing longsword or sidesword. They're dead simple: just flow your cuts together, moving from guard to guard smoothly. They almost automatically scale themselves, too. You can do them as slowly as you need to, you can pause and think about what to do next, you can do them standing still or while stepping through the actions. Ideally, you want to be able to move relatively quickly and smoothly through a variety of actions without pausing more than is necessary. They're helpful for working on a variety of things, and once you hit a certain level of "doing without thinking" they're just meditative to work through.

I've been trying to work out how to easily apply it to rapier fencing in a deliberate way. I don't want to be going from guard to guard with an attack in between, just because that lacks the feel of a flow to me. I could just go through all of Fabris' sword and dagger guards in sequence - I did that for my entry in the So You Think You Can Sword competition from a couple months back - and that's a fun as hell exercise but it only works that single sequence of transitions. It's as much a memorization exercise as it is a physical one, too.

I could just move through a handful of Fabris' guards - probably the sword and dagger ones - but I want to do something a bit more deliberate to start with. Also, I know that it's really easy to fall into habits or avoid more difficult or less obvious transitions, consciously or not.

I was thinking of what to do here, and I remembered a short sequence that Remy did with Alfieri's dagger guards. Besides being much more bite-size in length, I was struck by how he was able to easily loop them, going 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. That struck me as being about the right number of guards to use; I could loop them like Remy's sequence, or I could potentially work all the combinations smoothly: 1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-... and on and on.

Then it hit me. Flash cards. I could shuffle up all the guards and pick out however many I wanted, and be forced to work transitions between random guards in a random initial order.

So I've printed up all of Fabris' sword and dagger guards and have cut them out and I'll post later with thoughts as to how this works out as a training aid!