Building a session

The universal skeleton

Abstracted from the British block, the FFE's five-part lesson architecture and the Swiss session breakdowns, the defensible order is:

1. Warm-up — general movement, no weapons. 5–10 minutes, longer if it mirrors the day's content.
2. Game or reaction exercise — 20% of a beginner session in the British model.
3. Footwork — lines facing the maître d'armes, or named fencer-led patterns.
4. Revision — cooperative pair work on the previous session's content.
5. New content — one item only for beginners.
6. Applied opposition — conditioned bouts, escalating from directed to themed to free.
7. Cool-down and spoken debrief — the FFE explicitly requires a verbal synthesis of what was mastered and what to reinforce.
8. Formal class salute.

The one federation-published block

British Fencing's GO/FENCE beginner programme, 10 sessions of 50 minutes:

• Warm-up — 5 min
• Game or reaction exercise — 10 min
• Footwork — 5 min
• Revision — 5 min
• New topics and free fencing — 25 min

Every session ends with free fencing and a formal class salute. The technical progression across the ten sessions is worth copying as an ordering, whatever your local kit and format:

1. History, the three weapons, terminology, safety; stance, advance, retire, thrust; grip; free fencing on commands.
2. Footwork to a hand signal; kit, the hit, the thrust, the lunge, distance.
3. Parry quarte, parry sixte, riposte.
4. Ballestra; counter-ripostes, first and second.
5. Flèche.
6. Reaction warm-up work.
7. Semi-circular and circular parries — octave, septime, sixte, quarte.
8. Compound attack by one-two; judging.
9. Scoring, timing, pool sheets; individual pools or a mini-tournament.
10. Individual pools or a mini-tournament.

Two things stand out. The lunge arrives in session 2, before any parry. And refereeing and pool administration are taught inside the beginner course, not deferred to a separate club role.

The FFE bout taxonomy

The FFE's Recueil pédagogique contains categories and principles, not named drills — so use it as a vocabulary, which is what it is good for. Four bout types by purpose:

• Assauts à thème — bouts in which only specified behaviours score.
• Assauts dirigés ou d'application — directed or applied.
• Assauts libres, d'échauffement — free or warm-up bouts.
• Assauts compétitifs — competitive.

Organisational formats: travail seul (solo), par deux (pairs), face à l'enseignant (footwork lines facing the master), en ateliers (stations), en équipes (teams). And a distinction worth making explicit on every drill card: travail en coopération, two partners, versus travail en opposition, two adversaries.

Footwork work is categorised as general exercises, specific exercises and sequences, combined arm-and-leg exercises, and opposition without a weapon or mental imagery. Every one of them can be run with eyes open or closed, in cooperation or opposition, and — a specifically FFE lever — with the fencers' laterality changed.

The warm-up, quantified

The FFE gives two governing principles and one number. The principles are alternance — alternate cardio-respiratory work such as runs and multi-jumps with work on muscle groups and segmental chains — and progressivité. The number: if heart rate is held on average between 150 and 160 bpm (minimum 140, maximum 180), the main objective of the warm-up has been met.

The build rules that go with it: adapt to age and condition; general before fencing-specific; warm every muscle group and joint; keep it dynamic and playful; hydrate; use small equipment — cones, slats, skipping ropes, tennis balls, table-tennis balls, hoops; vary the type of warm-up between sessions. Stretching is explicitly optional, left to the master's judgement.

The FFE also treats the footwork session as its vehicle for physical qualities: coordination, balance, speed, change of rhythm, explosiveness and mobility, developed at the same time as decision-making, concentration, observation and distance management. One further instruction is worth quoting for its precision: prefer play-forms — task-constrained playful exercises — over free games.

The other published warm-up standard comes from the DFB's testing manual: before diagnostics, a thorough 20-minute warm-up covering mobility, speed and explosive-strength capability, and trunk activation, with an easy cool-down afterwards.

Four club templates

Beginners — 60 minutes

• Warm-up, general movement, no weapons — 6 min
• Reaction game — 10 min
• Footwork line facing the master — 8 min
• Revision, cooperative pairs — 6 min
• New technical topic, one item — 12 min
• Conditioned bouting, one theme only — 14 min
• Salute and debrief — 4 min

Intermediate — 90 minutes

• Warm-up mirroring the day's theme — 10 min
• Footwork lines with named patterns: single advance; advance–retreat; advance–advance–retreat — 12 min
• Distance pair drill, three-option preparation work — 15 min
• Blade pair drill, multiple cues with multiple responses — 15 min
• Rotating individual lessons for 2–3 fencers while the rest drill — 15 min
• Conditioned bouts, directed then themed — 18 min
• Cool-down and spoken debrief — 5 min

Competitive — 90 minutes

• Individual warm-up and pulse raiser — 10 min
• Tempo-stealing footwork: pattern break, change of step speed and size, deceptive half-steps — 12 min
• Choice-reaction pair work: real cues against false cues — 15 min
• Second intention and counter-time — 15 min
• Free bouting to 5, refereed, rotating — 30 min
• Cool-down — 8 min

Pre-competition — 45 minutes

• General warm-up — 10 min
• Footwork, rhythm, change of direction — 8 min
• Warm-up individual lesson, 5–10 min per fencer — 20 min
• Short warm-up bouts — 7 min

Free fencing: match the clock to the weapon

Elite time-motion data across all three weapons at a World Championships gives mean work time between "Play!" and "Halt!" of 17.9 ± 3.1 s at épée, 5.8 ± 2.5 s at foil and 1.7 ± 0.4 s at sabre, with work-to-rest ratios of roughly 1:0.9, 1:2.6 and 1:9.2. Effective combat time as a share of the bout runs from about 62% for women's épée down to about 9% for men's sabre.

Sabre exchanges last under two seconds. Design sabre drills to that clock, and do not run an épée-shaped conditioning block in a sabre session. One honest caveat: published work-to-rest ratios differ by up to threefold between studies for the same weapon, because researchers disagree about what counts as "work" — some count only the interval between the referee's commands, others include preparation movement between halts. If you build a prescription on a ratio, say which definition you used.

Numbers, ratios and piste spacing

• British Fencing: generally no more than twelve children per coach should fence at any one time, and fewer than twelve for groups of young children. Above that, split the group into relays — larger numbers can still take part together in footwork and games without weapons. This is a fencing-at-once safety cap, not a safeguarding ratio.
• Switzerland: one qualified J+S leader per group of 16 in fencing, identical for children's and youth sport. A subsidised J+S session runs 60 to 90 minutes.
• Canada: one certified coach per 8–10 at Active Start and one per 5 at FUNdamentals — the strictest published ratio in fencing.

Piste spacing, from the British safety guidelines, framed as recommended and subject to risk assessment: at least 1 m between adjacent piste edges on the scoring-box side; 2.5 m on the refereeing side, or the referee wears eye protection; 1.25 m from any scorer or spectator to the piste edge; at least 2 m between rear lines where pistes run end to end; and an unobstructed run-back as near 1.5 m as possible behind each rear line.

Two safety instructions from the Swiss children's material are worth printing on the wall: the point is always directed downward during explanations, and the mask stays on the head — because children very quickly want to imitate Zorro. And the framing rule that accompanies it: never suggest that fencing is a dangerous sport. It is not.

The games layer, honestly

British Fencing devotes 10 minutes of every 50 in the beginner programme to a game or reaction exercise — the clearest federation commitment to game-based learning found anywhere in fencing — and it names a vocabulary of twelve games plus a set of warm-up formats. The rules of those games have never been published — anywhere, by anyone. The public guide names them and slots them into sessions, and every other public British Fencing document of the period contains none of them. The full descriptions were handed out on a leader course that no longer runs; no downloadable version has ever existed.

So: a named games layer exists, it is federation-endorsed, and it occupies a fifth of a beginner session. What it does not do is give you the rules — and any set of rules circulating under those names is somebody's invention. Ask British Fencing directly rather than reconstructing them, and note that generic playground games sharing a name with two of the twelve are not the fencing versions.

What is published, and is directly usable, is the Swiss J+S children's material: glove-toss warm-ups on the move, jumping over scattered equipment on one leg and two, tennis-ball coordination circuits, skipping-rope work, a masked treasure hunt, fencing-footwork relays in single file, ten consecutive passes, and a warm-up led by one or two of the children themselves. Each carries the federation's own recommended age — 6 or 8 years — and its printed duration.

Finally, a modern current worth knowing about. The constraints-led approach is being institutionalised in British fencing through Phil Carson's work, endorsed both by the originating academic authors of the approach and by the presidents of Scottish Fencing and the British Academy of Fencing. Its position is that skill, game-sense and technique develop together through awareness of intention, perception of distance and a feeling for tempo. It is not an official British Fencing curriculum document — and there is no evidence in either direction for Teaching Games for Understanding in fencing, so do not claim it.

Sources

British Fencing, Club & Coach Guide: Working in and with Schools (GO/FENCE) and Standards and Guidelines for Safety in Fencing, 23rd edition, June 2026 · FFE, Recueil pédagogique Animateur-Éducateur, September 2024 · J+S Trainingshandbuch Fechten and J+S-Kids Escrime lesson set (BASPO) · DFB/IAT Athletiktest manual v2, April 2023 · Tarragó, Bottoms & Iglesias (2023), PLoS One 18(6) · Phil Carson, The Constraints-Led Fencing Coach. Verified July 2026.