I’ve written a lot about consistency, showing up and the power of the weekly rhythm in fencing training, including reviewing Andre Agassi’s memoir Open from that angle. 

Agassi dedicates hundreds of pages to this same theme—he showed up to practice, day after day, year after year, even when he hated tennis. That consistency, more than his natural talent, made him a champion.

But Agassi also makes clear that maintaining discipline is hard, and every honest discussion of consistency would acknowledge this.

I’m sure you experienced this firsthand too. The weight loss goal that lasted three weeks. The conditioning program you started with enthusiasm and abandoned by month two. The promise to learn guitar, or Spanish, or to read one book per week. The PhD thesis that sits unfinished because you can’t maintain the daily writing habit. If you look back at your life, I believe you would admit that the pile of your unfinished initiatives is big, because keeping discipline is hard in every area of life. Managing your child’s fencing training is no exception.

Maintaining the weekly cycle—private lessons, group classes, conditioning—requires the same discipline that fails us in so many other commitments. It’s hard to sustain when motivation fades, when schedules get chaotic, when life offers a thousand easier alternatives.

So here are practical strategies to help you maintain your child’s training consistency. Not motivation, which is unreliable, and not willpower, which depletes, but mechanisms that make consistency easier to achieve and harder to abandon.

Treat Training as Non-Negotiable

I believe that this is the foundation everything else builds on. It sounds simple but in reality of our lives it is anything but.

Whatever is included in your child’s training—private lesson time, group class days, camps, planned competitions—these aren’t things you fit in when convenient. They’re fixed commitments, like school or work. Everything else should get scheduled around them, not the other way around.

I know this sounds rigid. Many parents resist this framing because it feels inflexible, especially when juggling multiple children’s activities, work demands, and family obligations.

But if fencing training is negotiable—if it’s the thing that gets moved or skipped when something else comes up—then everything else will break down, including losing the compounding effect of consistent training.

Treat fencing training the same way you treat your school or work obligations. If your child has a private lesson every Tuesday at 5pm, that slot is blocked. Schedule dentist appointments, playdates, tutoring sessions around it. Consult your child’s competition schedule before planning family events. The training commitment extends beyond just showing up to practice—it includes protecting that training from conflicting decisions.

Of course, life happens, and sometimes illness, family emergencies, or other unavoidable conflicts occur and your child will miss their training. But they should be exceptions, not the pattern.

You can’t make everything perfect and you shouldn’t. Your goal shouldn’t be perfection, but consistency over time—showing up most weeks, maintaining the pattern more often than you break it, treating gaps as exceptions rather than the norm.

The fencers who progress consistently are the ones whose families treat training time as sacred, not optional.

Plan Ahead for Disruptions

While training should be non-negotiable some disruptions are inevitable, but some of them are often predictable.

You know vacation is coming in July. You know there’s a family wedding in October. You know your child has final exams in December and June.

These aren’t surprises. So don’t let them become training disruptions.

Talk to your coach ahead of time. “We’re going on vacation for two weeks in July. Can we do makeup lessons the week before or after? Or can you give my child specific practice assignments to work on while traveling?” Or even better, “Do you know any fencing club in the area so maybe my son will attend their open fencing?”

Most coaches can help you maintain continuity even through predictable gaps. Maybe it’s video analysis of your recent bouts that you can review during vacation. Maybe it’s some conditioning you can do in a hotel gym or airbnb rental’s backyard. Maybe it’s scheduling an extra lesson the week before or after.

The key is planning. Don’t wait until you’re back from vacation to figure out how to resume training. Have a plan before you leave so the weekly rhythm can continue in modified form, or so you can quickly get back into it when you return.

The same applies to school breaks, competition season, injury recovery—any foreseeable disruption. Advanced planning with your coach transforms potential training gaps into managed continuity.

Communicate Honestly with Your Coach

If you’re going to miss your regular lesson, let your coach know as early as possible. The earlier your coach knows, the more options exist for maintaining continuity.

Usually coaches think in the medium to long term periods. Knowing your vacation ahead of time they can better plan your child’s preparation for important competitions, taking into account the training gap that will happen in the middle.

Maybe they can reschedule that week’s lesson to a different day. Maybe they can suggest specific things to work on before, during, and after the gap. They could think about what load to put on your child and how to properly spread it out. The result sometimes is very different from what they would do if you haven’t had this vacation.

But if you wait until the last minute to communicate, none of these options are available and instead of an opportunity to prepare better, you and your coach will scramble over limited existing options to get your child to the finish line.

I’ve noticed that the families who communicate proactively—”We have a conflict in three weeks, can we reschedule?”—maintain far more consistent training than families who only communicate reactively—”Sorry, can’t make it this week.”

Your coach isn’t a mind reader. Help them help you maintain the weekly rhythm by giving them information early enough to work with.

Track Your Consistency

A simple training log will do a good job in initial tracking your consistency until you really get into a habit. It can be anything – a calendar, a notebook, a spreadsheet—whatever format works for you.

Note when you attend classes, take private lessons, practice on your own. You don’t need to write a long essay – a checkmark or brief note will do..

The visual record of showing up week after week builds its own momentum. You see that string of checkmarks extending across weeks and months, and breaking the streak becomes harder than maintaining it.

This is the same principle behind “don’t break the chain” productivity methods. There’s psychological power in seeing consistent progress, even when that progress is just showing up.

And the log serves another purpose: it makes gaps visible immediately. If you’re tracking attendance and suddenly notice you’ve missed two weeks in a row, you can course-correct before the pattern becomes entrenched.

Without tracking, it’s easy to lose awareness. There is no ‘maybe’ in a question whether you have been consistent or not. The log will tell you the truth and eliminate a vague assessment of your consistency in your memory. 

If you combine it with your fencing journal – well, man, you rock! This would become your great development tool for years to come!

Avoiding Self-Sabotage

One of the biggest obstacles to maintaining the weekly cycle isn’t external—it’s the decisions parents make that unknowingly undermine their child’s training.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: parents commit to their child’s fencing development, pay for lessons and classes, drive to tournaments, invest time and money—and then make scheduling decisions that sabotage all of it.

The most common is the vacation scheduled the week before Summer Nationals or major tournament. The family returns exhausted, jet-lagged, the fencer hasn’t touched a weapon in two weeks, and now they’re supposed to compete at the highest level. The parents wonder why their child underperforms, not connecting it to the timing they chose.

Often parents assume that they will do an intensive make up later. “We’ll just do extra lessons when we get back.” But training doesn’t work that way. You can’t compress two weeks of learning into one intensive makeup session. The compounding effect requires consistency, not compensation.

None of these decisions come from bad intentions. Parents genuinely believe they’re making reasonable choices, balancing multiple priorities, being flexible and practical.

But they’re undermining the very consistency they’re trying to maintain.

The solution is simple but requires discipline: before making any family scheduling decision, check the fencing calendar. Tournament dates, training schedule, competition season timeline—all of this should be part of your planning process. 

Talk to your coach about what makes sense. Does this family vacation conflict with major competitions? Does this event fall during a critical training period? Will this timing disrupt the weekly rhythm we’ve worked to establish?

And if the answer is yes, either choose different timing or acknowledge you’re prioritizing something else over fencing training—which is fine, but be honest about it. Don’t sabotage your child’s development and then wonder why they’re not progressing.

The families whose fencers progress most consistently aren’t the ones who never have conflicts. They’re the ones who plan around the training commitment rather than expecting training to flex around everything else.

Image by Mart Production under free usage license