Core technique

En garde

Feet in an "L" at right angles, dominant foot forward and pointing at the opponent, rear foot turned 90°, feet about shoulder-width apart. Knees significantly bent, weight between both legs. The weapon arm about a hand's width from the body, elbow bent, blade slightly upwards; the rear arm bent with the elbow slightly below shoulder level. "First position" at the start of the bout is heels together at a right angle, weapon pointed down. The referee places each competitor with the front foot immediately behind the on-guard line, 2 m either side of centre.

The hand position differs by weapon. Foil and épée guard in sixte — supinated, point above hand, covering the outside high line. Sabre guards in tierce — pronated, covering outside high and flank.

• Sabre, Soviet school (Nazlymov): a slightly wider guard than the classical French one, to bring the bigger leg muscles into play and to stop beginners falling off balance. The arm stays loose; the cut never reaches more than 90% of extension so its direction can still be changed; the hand is carried back close to the body and moved forward only at the last necessary moment — enough to show the attack to the referee without offering the hand and arm to a stop-cut.
• Épée elbow discipline (Sise): pull the elbow in to line up with forearm, hand, guard and point. Two reasons — an outside elbow is an exposed target, and it forces the forearm bones to rotate during extension, so a poor elbow position makes the point drop and pull inside as the arm extends.

Advance and retreat

Advance. The front foot lifts heel first, travels, and lands heel first; the rear foot then pushes off and follows to restore the guard. Nazlymov's teaching cadence is a call of "eeeeeh — one": on "eeeeeh" the front foot moves slowly forward, landing on the heel; on "one" the back foot comes up quickly, rolling onto the front foot. The slow-front, fast-rear cadence is the point — it keeps the fencer able to start a step, see a change, and reverse without losing balance. The governing principle behind it: momentum is the enemy of the fencer.

Advance faults: a late or slow rear foot, which slows the whole action; leaning the torso forward to gain distance, which telegraphs and destroys the ability to retreat; rising and bobbing; landing flat-footed.

Retreat. The rear foot moves first, touching down with the ball of the foot; the front foot then slides back. Retreat size is a tactical variable, not a fixed technique — Victor Bukov's correction replaces the full retreat with the hand pulled back by a half-retreat with the hand staying forward, which keeps a fast direct riposte available. Faults: withdrawing the weapon arm while retreating, which kills the riposte; an over-long retreat that resets the whole distance problem; retreating with the front foot first.

The lunge

The arm extends first — at the priority weapons this is not style but a rules requirement. At sabre it is sharper still: the attack is correct only when the arm's straightening precedes the launch of the lunge and the hit arrives at the latest when the front foot lands.

The single most valuable coaching point in the sourced literature concerns the direction of force. Fencers instinctively say the rear leg pushes backwards. It does not — the floor is not behind the fencer, it is underneath. Apply the power from the rear leg directly down and into the floor, using the whole of the rear foot: visualise breaking through the floorboards with it.

Recovery backwards is not a front-leg action either. Once the front foot is off the floor the front leg can no longer apply power to it, so the fencer uses the traction of the rear foot and adducts the rear leg while bending the rear knee — pulling as much as pushing back to guard.

The biomechanics agree. Elite fencers show higher horizontal peak centre-of-mass velocity and higher rear-leg peak horizontal ground reaction force, with superior rear-knee peak power, moment and range of motion; intermediates show greater front-knee flexion before extension. In elite lungers the rear knee starts less flexed (about 20° versus 38°) and then extends through a much larger range. Muscle activation splits the work cleanly: rear leg = knee-extensor propulsion; front leg = hip-extensor braking.

The five faults worth naming:

1. Hand and foot out of sync — foot before hand. Novices show roughly twice the elite hand-to-foot delay. Correction: isolate the extension, then extension-into-lunge on a cue.
2. Dropping the point during the lunge, from a tense shoulder. Correction: make the shoulder like water — test it by extending, aiming, and jumping up and down while keeping the point still.
3. Over-lunging or leaning to reach distance that is not there. Nazlymov: the lunge is always short, balanced and solid; long lunges are to be avoided.
4. Pre-flexing the front knee before extending it — the intermediate-level signature. Correction: cue the rear-leg drive down into the floor.
5. Recovering with the front leg only — slow, and it leaves the fencer stranded.

Ballestra, flèche, flunge

Ballestra: a short forward hop, both feet landing together, heels off the floor, close to the original guard and typically under a foot in length, immediately followed by a lunge or flèche. It loads the legs elastically for the attack and lets the fencer alter tempo. British Fencing introduces it at session 4 of a ten-session beginner course. Faults: jumping up rather than forward, landing with the feet apart and killing the rebound, and pausing between the jump and the lunge.

Flèche: weight transfers onto the front foot, the rear leg initiates, the ball of the leading foot provides the explosive impulse, and the rear foot crosses ahead of the front; the hit should land as the back foot lands, just after the arm reaches full extension. Measured against the lunge in six world-leading female épéeists, the flèche was about 58 ms faster in movement time (510 versus 568 ms), achieved through roughly double the gastrocnemius activation and about 23% greater rear-leg vertical force — with identical reaction time. The advantage is entirely in execution, not in decision speed.

And it is illegal at sabre. The flèche, and any forward movement in which the rear foot completely passes the front foot, is forbidden; the offence is first group and the offender's hit is annulled while the opponent's stands. The flunge — a flying lunge that never crosses the feet — exists because of that ban. Because the sabre hit must arrive at the latest when the front foot lands, a flunge landing after the front foot grounds is not a correctly executed attack for priority purposes.

At foil the crossing step is legal but tactically fatal: continuous steps forward with the legs crossing constitute a preparation, and any simple attack has priority over them. At épée it is legal and unpenalised. The technical trade-off is the same everywhere — crossing the feet sacrifices the ability to accelerate or change direction suddenly.

Three classes of footwork

The most useful taxonomy in the coaching literature, and the one to organise a footwork block around:

• Manoeuvring footwork — place-holding. Keeps a safe distance and, in better fencers, explores the opponent's reactions while a plan forms.
• Preparatory footwork — actively exploits tempo, creating a one-tempo situation for yourself and denying it to the opponent. The better the fencer, the less time spent manoeuvring and the more spent preparing.
• Attacking footwork — short, explosive, covering the remaining distance. It must be faster than the other two so the acceleration reads as a genuine attack, and it must end in balance — except the flèche, which carries past the opponent.

Parries

The rulebook splits them simply: parries are simple, direct when made in the same line as the attack, and circular (counter-parries) when made in the opposite line.

The two parry systems are genuinely different systems. Foil and épée run sixte / octave plus quarte / septime. Sabre runs a smaller, structurally different set — tierce for outside and flank, quarte for inside and chest, quinte for the head — with seconde covering low-outside and no octave at all. Prime survives at épée as the yielding parry of prime, a live taught action against a circular-sixte riposte with engagement.

Mechanically, sabre parries block rather than deflect, and because sabre cuts, the parry needs static positioning taken as late as possible so the feint cannot deceive it — the opposite of the foil and épée habit of parrying early and in transition.

Types worth teaching by name: simple or lateral; circular, which returns to its starting position; semi-circular or diagonal, crossing high line to low; the ceding parry, in which the defender rotates the blade around the opponent's during the final stage of the attack and deflects it in the same line — specifically the answer to a prise de fer or opposition attack, and the choice against a physically stronger opponent because it uses their strength against them; and the opposition parry, in which contact is never lost.

Sentiment du fer has no published formal definition, but the practice is well documented. Offensively: the pupil closes their eyes, the master engages, and the pupil names the line from the fingers alone, or answers a press with a straight thrust if there is no resistance and a disengage if there is. Defensively: after parrying, pre-select the intercept parry for the expected renewal — the instant the opponent's blade leaves yours, you know the renewal has started. As Sise puts it, this "gives the illusion of super-human reflexes because the decision-making process is moved from after the reprise starts to before the reprise starts."

Attacks, ripostes, renewals

The attack is the initial offensive action made by extending the arm and continuously threatening the target, preceding the launching of the lunge or flèche. Simple attacks are one movement, direct or indirect; compound attacks are several. The straight thrust, the disengage and the coupé — which passes around the opponent's tip, the blade pulled up and over — are the simple family. The one-two defeats a lateral or semi-circular parry; the doublé, a full circle finishing in the opposite line, defeats a circular parry.

Ripostes, in the rulebook's own words, may be immediate or delayed. Simple direct hits without leaving the line in which the parry was made; along the blade hits by grazing along it; indirect by disengagement hits in the opposite line, passing under the blade from a high-line parry and over it from a low-line parry; indirect with a coupé passes over the opponent's point. A counter-riposte is the offensive action of the fencer who has parried the riposte.

Renewals, again verbatim from the rules: the remise is a simple and immediate offensive action following the original attack without withdrawing the arm, after the opponent has parried or retreated and has either quitted the blade without riposting or riposted late, indirectly or compoundly. The redoublement is a new action, simple or compound, against an opponent who has parried without riposting or merely avoided the first action. The reprise is a new attack executed immediately after a return to the on-guard position.

Counter-attacks are offensive or offensive-defensive actions made during the opponent's offensive action: the stop hit; the stop hit with opposition, made while closing the line in which the attack will be completed; and the stop hit made within a period of fencing time. Point in line is the position in which the sword arm is kept straight and the point continually threatens valid target — an attack into it must first deflect the blade, and failing to find it (dérobement) hands the right of attack to the line-holder.

Preparations and the beat-timing rule

The blade preparations worth cataloguing: beat, press, engagement and change of engagement, feint, sweep — a slow attempt to find the opponent's blade, designed to fail — invitation, and the false attack or false parry. Their common function is to steal time from the opponent or to restrict what their blade can do.

Taking the blade (prise de fer): opposition maintains contact throughout; the bind forces the blade into the diagonally opposite line — a diagonal transport; the croisé forces it high-to-low or low-to-high on the same side; envelopment leads it through a full circle without losing contact, ending in the same line — a circular transport; the coulé slides along the blade to establish leverage. Its coaching value is specific: it is to the advantage of the shorter fencer to master controlling the opponent's blade over multiple tempos, because the press and the beat before an attack are far riskier — the opponent can simply replace the point.

The most actionable timing rule in the corpus is Evans's, and it belongs on a drill card:

Two rules-level constraints govern the beat itself: it retains the attack's priority only when made on the foible — the outer two-thirds of the blade — and a beat on the forte is badly executed and gives the opponent the right to an immediate riposte.

One more sourced fault, from sabre: large-amplitude feints expose the arm to counter-attack. Feints must be small and delivered on the advance, not as a stationary blade wave.

Distance and tempo

Fencing time is defined in the rulebook as the time required to perform one simple fencing action. It is a relative quantity, not an absolute one — which is exactly why it is a refereeing judgement rather than a machine measurement, and why sabre's referee-dependence is structural rather than a failure of officiating.

• One-tempo distance — the distance at which a single-tempo action reaches.
• Preparation distance — defined operationally: find the distance at which the fencer scores with a direct simple attack, then take one step back.
• The épée dead zone — épée has two distinct distances because it has two classes of target. The hand and foot are close but small, well defended and fast-moving; the body is easier to hit but much further away. So a fencer can be too close and too far at the same time: past the near target, short of the deep one.
• The danger zone — established physically rather than verbally. Both fencers extend from the guard; the taller places the point on an easily hit target; the shorter notes how far their own point reaches. Thereafter the shorter fencer attacks no deeper than that spot.
• In-fighting — closed distance, where the weapon must be withdrawn before the point can threaten.

Tempo is best defined as a relationship between distance, speed and technique — deliberately broader than speed or rhythm, because a fast action over a long distance can take more objective time than a slower one made close. The governing principle: single-tempo actions are always preferable to multi-tempo ones, and attacks should not be stretched across multiple tempos unless you are controlling the opponent's blade, actively or passively.

Four documented ways to change tempo: establish a pattern and break it; break the opponent's pattern; change the speed or size of the step — including covertly bringing the rear foot closer to the front heel while advancing, which shortens the lunge you will need; and deceptive footwork — half-steps, jumps, slides, where a half-retreat often fools the opponent into finishing a full step into a one-tempo situation. Any tempo-stealing footwork must satisfy three conditions: it must actually steal distance, it must end in balance, and it must be reversible mid-motion.

Weapon reality check: épée is characterised by controlled, quick bouncing, and modern épéeists fence just outside one-tempo distance to the opponent's forward targets. Sabre exchanges last 1.7 ± 0.4 s. Foil sits between.

Grips and the fingers

The French grip is the traditional hilt with a large pommel, favoured at épée for fine finger manipulation and effective reach. Pistol or orthopaedic grips come in named families — Belgian, German, Russian, Visconti. The Italian grip, with finger rings and a crossbar, is used only at foil and épée.

Sizing is the best published coaching point: choose a grip small enough to sit in the fingers, not filling the palm — hold the handle like a writing implement, not like a baseball bat. Force measurement backs it up: on an instrumented handle, the index finger produces the largest share of grip force, and the thumb-and-index unit exceeds half of total digit force.

A concrete finger sequence for the circular parry at épée, from parry sixte toward supination: relax the aids — little, ring and middle fingers — while keeping contact, and the blade drops; squeeze the little finger using the index as the fulcrum, and the blade pulls inside; then squeeze the ring finger, then the middle, and the blade returns to sixte. Practised rhythmically, this builds a tight circular sixte. Circular quarte is trickier because it needs more from the manipulators — the thumb and index.

Rules limits: handle length 20 cm maximum at foil and épée and 17 cm at sabre; on an orthopaedic handle, the fully extended thumb tip must be no more than 2 cm from the inner surface of the guard.

Sources

FIE Technical Rules, 18 December 2025 (t.8, t.9–t.15, t.22, t.83–t.89, t.96–t.106) and Material Rules (m.4) · Paul Sise, 42 Views of Épée, 2007 · Allen L. Evans, A Coaches Compendium, including notes on clinics with Vladimir Nazlymov · Guan et al. (2018), Eur J Sport Sci 18(2) · Gholipour et al. (2008) · Guilhem et al. (2014) · Borysiuk et al. (2019), IJERPH 16(13) · Akbaş et al. (2026), J Biomech 205 · Tarragó, Bottoms & Iglesias (2023), PLoS One 18(6). Verified July 2026.