Personal developments.

Thanks to the teaching, I'm not really sparring as much as I'd like and the drilling is only really while I'm working out how to explain concepts and set things up for the class. That said, I try to ringfence time for a bit of freeplay at the end of lessons... For all sorts of reasons I think that freeplay is essential to discover your weaknesses and to try out ideas with a non-cooperative partner. Even better if you can video and analyse it later. Before I started running lessons (and as recently as Rapier 2011) I was a very stiff fighter. I've made part of my teaching approach teaching against my flaws. That is, because I see myself being quite rigid, I emphasise flow and movement. Mostly because I'm aware of that bad habit when demonstrating and I feel that I have to prevent others from copying me too closely. From the videos (bad quality, I'm afraid, I won't be sharing them here) I can see that my explanations and reframing of the ideas has really helped me. I've relaxed into the fight a lot more and I'm only edging into things when it's necessary. I still need to do more drilling with the dagger, I know it on an intellectual basis but it's just not coded into muscle memory and I tend to just hold the thing while making the rapier do all the work. This needs to change.