Fencing doesn’t happen all at once. You don’t walk into the club one day and suddenly execute perfect attacks. You don’t fence one great bout and become successful at the national scene. You don’t have a single breakthrough practice that transforms everything.

Instead, your success builds up over time – lesson after lesson, bout after bout, and day after day of showing up and doing the work.

A fencer who trains consistently for a year doesn’t train harder in any single session than the fencer who shows up sporadically. They’re not working with more intensity in that individual practice, maybe even less intensely. Instead, they’re just applying steady, persistent pressure to their development.

And that’s what makes the difference.

We’re impatient in a search for immediate results and instant gratification. Because of that we often look for the magic drill, the secret technique, or the transformative camp that will accelerate everything.

Unfortunately there are no such things, otherwise every club will have a national champion, an absurd assumption when you voice it loudly. But because of our culture of watching sports dramas about Cinderella’s success stories, we are wired to believe in such magical one-offs that transform us to become great. And as a result we don’t consistently apply pressure when we have the chance. We skip practice when we’re tired. We take weeks off when motivation dips. We train intensely for two weeks before a tournament while taking it easy all the other time.

And, unsurprisingly, we crumple under pressure when it arrives at competition, because we haven’t built the foundation through consistent training.

The fencers who improve are the ones who show up consistently, they are those who constantly exerciuse self-discipline. They apply gradual, persistent pressure to their training. 

Consistency beats everything:

Three practices a week for a year beats six practices a week for two months.

Consistent tactical work in every bout beats occasional intensive strategy sessions.

Regular competition experience beats cramming tournaments right before nationals.

Steady pressure, applied over time, produces results with a surprisingly small amount of drama.

That’s how fencers actually get better–not through heroic effort or sudden breakthroughs, but through showing up consistently and letting it do the work gradually.

As banal as it sounds, but the strip rewards persistence more than intensity. 

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