Ask any soccer parent what their kid does in practice, and conditioning will come up before they finish the first sentence. Think about basketball, swimming, track and field. In every one of these sports, conditioning is just part of the deal. Nobody questions it. Nobody argues about it. It’s the air they breathe.

Then you come to fencing.

“But fencing is a cerebral sport.” “The bouts are so short.” “It’s about the blade, not the body.” “My child doesn’t need to run. She needs to practice her parry-riposte.”

I hear this all the time. And every time I hear it, I think the same thing: you don’t understand what fencing actually does to the body.

Let’s Talk About “Short”

You know what the shortest sport in the world is? The 100-meter dash. Nine seconds. Maybe ten. A few heats and the competition is done. Go look at a 100-meter sprinter. Look at their body. Every single muscle has been trained, conditioned, optimized for those ten seconds. Nobody in the history of athletics has ever looked at Usain Bolt and said, “Well, the race is so short, why would he need to train his body?”

Now think about what your fencer actually goes through at a national competition. Six or seven pool bouts, each one requiring explosive lunges, constant footwork, rapid direction changes, and maintaining a low position that most adults can’t hold for thirty seconds. Then a full DE tableau, that consists of 6 or 7 fifteen-touch bouts, each lasting three 3-minutes periods that can go to overtime. Then another age/division category the next day or maybe a team event.

Fencing is not short. It is a marathon of sprints. And if your fencer’s body isn’t prepared for that, their technique, no matter how beautiful, will fall apart exactly when it matters most.

The Illusion That Fools Parents

The confusion starts when fencers are young, and I understand why it happens.

At younger age categories, such as Y8, Y10, Y12, even Y14, a talented child can win on instinct and good coaching alone. The body is light, recovery is fast, and the conditioning gap between athletes hasn’t opened up yet. Your child wins a few tournaments, does well at regionals, and you think: see, we don’t need conditioning. We just need more private lessons.

This is one of the most dangerous illusions in youth fencing.

Then Cadet hits. The bouts are longer. The opponents are bigger, faster, more physically prepared. Suddenly your fencer is gassing out in the third period. Losing touches she would have won easily a year ago. Her legs are heavy, her reactions are slow, and her decision-making is clouded. The last one most parents miss completely. She hasn’t gotten worse at fencing. She just ran out of body. I didn’t even mention that her body itself had changed as well – she isn’t the same fast and agile girl she used to be a few years ago!

By Junior and Senior levels, the equation is absolute. No fencer without serious physical preparation achieves significant results. I have never seen an exception to this, not once, not in my entire life.

It’s Not Just About “Not Getting Tired”

When I talk to parents about conditioning, most of them think I’m talking about endurance. About not getting tired. That’s part of it, sure. But it’s maybe twenty percent of the picture.

Here’s what conditioning actually does for a fencer:

It prevents injuries. Fencing is an asymmetric sport: one side of the body works dramatically harder than the other. A fencer who only fences without cross-training is building imbalances into their body with every single practice. Those imbalances eventually become knee problems, hip problems, back problems. I’ve watched it happen too many times. A well-conditioned body with balanced muscle development and strong stabilizers is dramatically less likely to break down.

It speeds recovery when injuries happen. And they will happen as in any competitive sport (thankfully, in order of magnitude less frequency and severity than in most other sports!). The fencer who has built a strong physical foundation comes back in weeks. The one who hasn’t comes back in months, if they come back at all. And also the severity of injury varies too between physically strong athletes and not.

It keeps the brain working when the body is tired. This is the one that matters most in fencing and the one almost nobody talks about. Fencing is indeed a cerebral sport — and that is exactly why conditioning is so critical. When your body is exhausted, your brain goes with it. Decision-making degrades. Tactical awareness narrows. The ability to read your opponent, to set up multi-step actions, to pick the right moment — it all falls apart under physical fatigue. You don’t just fence with your legs. You fence with your mind. And your mind needs oxygen, which your body provides. When the body fails, the mind follows.

I have seen fencers who are tactically brilliant in the first period and make elementary mistakes in the third. Every time it’s a conditioning problem, not a fencing problem.

It builds discipline and mental toughness. The fencer who has pushed through hard conditioning sessions, week after week, knows what discomfort feels like. She knows she can keep performing through it. This is not abstract philosophy. It shows up on the strip in overtime touches and must-win team bouts, when everything hurts and the only question is who wants it more.

And it builds fencing-specific athleticism. A fencer needs a very particular combination of explosive power, lateral agility, the ability to sustain repeated bursts of intensity, and the capacity to maintain a low, dynamic position for extended periods. General fitness is a good start. But fencing-specific conditioning (high-intensity footwork drills, lunge recovery sets, sport-specific agility work) creates the kind of athlete who can physically do things on the strip that others simply cannot.

Conditioning Is Not a Crash Course

Many fencing families get this wrong. They hear the message and agree that conditioning matters. And then they sign their child up for a two-week boot camp before Summer Nationals.

This is almost worse than doing nothing. Because it creates the illusion of preparation while risking injury from sudden overload on a body that isn’t ready for it.

Conditioning is built week by week. Month by month. Year by year. There are no shortcuts and there is no cramming.

Think about it this way: you would never try to squeeze an entire season of private lessons into two weeks before a national championship. The idea is ridiculous. Yet families do the equivalent with conditioning all the time — a frantic burst of exercise right before a big event and then nothing for the rest of the year.

It doesn’t work that way. The body doesn’t work that way.

It Must Be Cyclical

Effective conditioning works in cycles. Within a single week, the load varies intentionally. Some days are higher intensity — building strength, pushing speed, and explosive power. Other days are lower, focused on recovery, reinforcement, and technical movement. This isn’t random. It’s designed so the body has time to adapt and grow stronger rather than just break down.

Across months, the emphasis shifts. Off-season might focus on building raw strength and aerobic capacity. As competition season approaches, the work shifts toward explosive movements, sport-specific speed, and maintaining the base without adding fatigue.

There’s an idea I came across recently in sports science that I keep thinking about: the question shouldn’t be “What conditioning do we need to add?” The better question is “How does our training design produce the physical output we want?” When a coach changes the tempo of a drill, the recovery time between actions, the intensity of a tactical exercise, that changes the physical outcome too. A well-designed high-intensity footwork drill is conditioning. A good tactical exercise at competition tempo is conditioning. It’s not something you bolt on at the end of practice as an afterthought. It belongs inside the training itself.

Align With the Calendar — Or Pay the Price

This brings me to something I feel very strongly about: conditioning must align with the competition schedule.

I have seen fencers, including nationally ranked fencers, who show up to a championship with sore legs because someone scheduled a heavy squat session three days before the event. All that preparation for the entire season, and they undermined it with bad timing.

This is why conditioning cannot live in isolation. The strength and conditioning work must be coordinated with the fencing coach. The coach needs to know what physical training is happening and when. The trainer needs to know the competition calendar. And the family needs to understand that more is not always better, especially before a big event.

The coach controls the load in ways most parents don’t realize. The same drill, coached differently, with different intensity, rest periods, or space constraints, produces a completely different physical outcome. A great coach understands this and manages it across the week, the month, the season.

Athlete Before Fencer

Many years ago I saw a video from the conditioning session of the Italian fencing national team, both men and women. While the drills they did were absolutely fascinating, and frankly quite mind-blowing, throughout the whole 40 minutes video there was a single mantra: Athlete before fencer. I wish every fencing parent would tape to their bathroom mirror: Athlete before fencer.

Build the athlete first. Develop the movement quality, the strength, the endurance, the coordination, the body awareness. Then layer the fencing on top of that foundation.

A fencer who is an athlete first will learn new techniques faster. Will execute them more reliably under pressure. Will sustain performance deeper into tournaments. Will recover more quickly between competitions. Will have a longer, healthier competitive career.

A fencer who skips the athletic foundation will hit a ceiling. And the higher they climb in the rankings, the harder that ceiling will hit them back.

But, and it’s very important, a fencing athlete is a different athlete than, say, track and field, weight lifter or any other sport’s athlete. Each sport, and fencing in particular, has a very different set of conditioning requirements, so it is extremely important to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all formula in conditioning.

Better Athlete, Better Fencer, Better Results

Don’t separate conditioning from fencing. Don’t treat it as an add-on, a nice-to-have, something you’ll get to eventually. Prepare your fencer for the demands they will actually face — not the demands you hope they’ll face.

Better conditioning produces better athletes. Better athletes become better fencers. And better fencers produce better results.

It starts with the decision to take this seriously. Not as a pre-tournament panic. Not as a New Year’s resolution that fades by February. As a permanent, non-negotiable part of your fencer’s development, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Athlete before fencer. Always.

Image: Morgans11, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons