The Best Way to Improve Your Club’s Skill Level -The Watcher System

I have been asked why my class has a seemingly inverted time for sparring compared to drilling. At Sydney Korean Historic Fencing, we have a 2 hour class composed of 10 mins of a neuromuscular warm up (the advantages of which I’ll have to discuss another day), 30 mins of drills and 80 minutes of free sparring. The reason for this is that the watcher system turns free sparring time into even more effective teaching time than drills. It has single handedly been the greatest contributing factor to improving the members of my club’s sword sparring skill level since I implemented it and it synergistically works with traditional drilling to improve skill levels.

The watcher system is a relatively simple system where all sparring is done with a third person watching, “the watcher” and sparring happens in passes and bouts. A pass is any exchange up to a hit and after 8 passes the fight stops this is a bout. At the end of a bout the fighters talk to the watcher and then return for another bout, up to 3 bouts per fight. The watchers role is outlined below:

• 1. Make sure the sparring bout is safe. If there is excessive force, moves which are potentially unsafe or the fighters are getting too close to walls, bystanders or another sparring court the watcher stops the bout and they resume in a safe way.

• 2.       Count the passes and point to the person who got hit, so that bystanders who are of a lower skill level can more easily understand what happened in the pass. I do think that counting passes without keeping score is a better way to train because it makes people unafraid to try new things and work on their weaknesses, but perhaps other clubs have a friendly club competition that drives improvement instead.

• 3.       The third job, and likely the most important, is that the watcher has to give specific feedback for each fighter on how to improve their sparring, and the fighter is to implement that feedback in their next bout. This leads to a system where sparring time now becomes one on one, personalised tutelage time, with specific improvement points to be worked on.

Now, I often hear the critique of “but then you need enough instructors to be watchers so this couldn’t possibly work at my club”. This is absolutely not true and is the beauty of the watcher system. Every single club member is a watcher. The watcher has a great advantage of observing the bout from a third person perspective and then a framework for giving feedback can be easily made. The system I use is that junior members will co-watch a bout with a more senior student or myself, they will be responsible for counting the passes and pointing to the person who got hit (they should be checking to confirm they are pointing to the same person as the more senior student and this will train their observation skills as well) and then at the end of each bout they give feedback first, and the senior student either corrects their feedback if it is wrong, or adds to the feedback for more advanced implementations for the fighters to try. In this way, the newbies train their observation which will help them in their own fights, as well as what is good feedback.

So it brings us to the question, what is good feedback? Good feedback should highlight the strengths that were done well as well as identify any weaknesses and give a specific way to try to address this weakness. A good framework I have for feedback to start with is:

1. Was it a “good” bout? A “good” bout is one where fencing is clean without doubles and techniques look clean and recognizable. If it is a good bout, move on to specific feedback. If it is a messy bout, identify if it is because fighters are rushing, or if one is attacking blindly into attacks. If the fighters are rushing, advise both to slow down and reduce the intensity. If one is attacking blindly into attacks, advise them that their job for the next bout is not to hit the opponent, but instead make the opponent make as many moves as possible before they hit them. Ie. Focus on defence, but with a specific goal to achieve.

2. Look for patterns. If someone got hit by something multiple times in the bout, it is either because their opponent is really good at a particular technique, or more likely, they are not good at defending a certain area or against a certain technique. If it is because the opponent is good at the technique, advise the opponent to try to vary their game and work on techniques they are not so strong at to broaden their skillset. If it is because the fighter is bad at defending against that technique, discuss potential counters to try, or changes in their approach that leave less of an opening.

3. Highlight strengths when done well, especially for newbies. I even like to ask newbies what they think they did well, because often they weren’t even thinking about what they were doing in the bout. This changes sparring from being a reactive activity, to one where people are more aware and conscious of what they are doing, and trying to keep doing the things that make them most likely to succeed. Sometimes the strengths at newbie levels don’t help them and they are tempted to abandon them, for example, a newbie with stable, steady footing fighting another newbie who is far more athletic and jumps around with messy but fast footwork. The steady footed newbie has footwork that will help him far more once he expands his skill set, but after being hit 8 times by a leaping spastic, who can blame his initial thought that messy footwork must be the right way. Reinforcing good technique with a focus on how it will help them grow their skillset in the future, rather than what helps them make quick wins against the unskilled is the key.

4. If no other mistakes have been identified, this is a good opportunity to identify them and call for improvement. In newbies and the early intermediate, limit feedback to 3 points to focus on. Any more and its not going to be useful. Mistakes could be pass specific, such as not closing out a line when the opponent came in for a certain attack leaving them open to being hit. Or more general principles like not lifting up their back leg in an attack as they should just take a step forwards instead so they are not off balance. Every time a mistake is identified a specific action to address it should be given. If this action is unknown, you can always throw it on the fighter – “why do you think you got hit in the head when you went in for the thrust in pass 4?”.

5. If there were no mistakes, it was a good clean bout, varied techniques and hits, and strengths with a list that would take longer to mention than the bout itself, you can either just leave it as it was a good bout and highlight a couple of beautiful passes, or you can take it as a challenge to implement a constraint. This is a different ruleset to create a challenge for a fighter, often for something they are working on. For example – “your goal is to successfully end a pass with a grapple some time in the next bout” or “for the next bout you can only hit the head and the chest, shallow targets on your opponent are now invulnerable”. This will give them a challenge to broaden their skillset further, and its often a good idea to ask them to place a constraint on themselves rather than the watcher creating one for the fighters.

Feedback is not always correct! This is something I tell all the members of my club. No matter who the feedback comes from, it may not be correct and so fighters should try out things mentioned in feedback but also not feel bad about disregarding them or asking for another suggestion if it doesn’t work out well. Everyone’s body is different and things that work for one fighter may well be counterproductive for another fighter. For example, a long tall fighter with great reach will set up a lot of techniques very differently from a shorter fighter, just because the feedback worked for the long man, does not mean it is the “correct” way. The sooner we move away from “perfect form” and move towards effective form that gives the most options for the specific fighter, the better off we’ll all be in the Asian sword community. You’ll always have that one annoying student who disregards good feedback and thinks their way is best despite it being horrible but you can only take the horse to the water.

Now this sounds all well and good but why don’t we just make the whole class sparring then? The drills are still useful in building a framework and expanding peoples technique pool. Sparring with a watcher patches up weaknesses, but building new avenues to become strengths is better done through drills so that people have ideas of new things to try in their sparring. In this way the watcher and drills work synergistically to create well rounded fighters with a broad arsenal of techniques while still cleaning up their weaknesses and not wasting precious class time making a broad assortment of drills for the whole class to do to address specific issues in a few club members.

Hopefully this sounds like a good thing to try and implement at your club if you run a club. It may take some time to set up and get people to understand how to give good feedback, but ever since implementing the watcher system, I cannot imagine a better way to run my classes. I took this method after training with the Stoccata School of Self Defence in their Strathfield and Baulkham Hills Branch under their excellent instructor, so I am hugely grateful to him for introducing me to this system and helping me develop my own sparring and my clubs level through this system.