A mother of a beginner fencer came to me recently and signed up for ongoing group classes. Then she watched some private lessons and asked if her daughter could take them too. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Actually, private lessons are a necessary part of fencing development—there’s no real way to advance without them.”

“Great,” she replied enthusiastically. “I’d like my daughter to have a private lesson once a month.”

I had to stop her there. “That won’t work,” I explained. “It would honestly be a waste of your time and money.”

She looked puzzled, so I continued: “Let me ask you something—does your daughter take piano lessons?”

“Yes, every Tuesday.”

“And if she skipped two weeks between lessons, what would happen?”

The realization dawned on her face. “She’d forget what she learned. She’d have to relearn things instead of moving forward.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Fencing works the same way.”

The Seven-Day Cycle

There’s something deeply embedded in human culture about the weekly cycle. Seven days. It appears across civilizations, throughout history, in religious traditions, in our school systems, in how we organize work and rest. And while the origins of the seven-day week are more cultural than biological—traced to Babylonian astronomy and later adopted by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions—there’s a reason this pattern has persisted for millennia.

I believe it persisted because, whether by accident or observation, our ancestors discovered something fundamental about how humans learn and retain skills. The weekly cycle aligns remarkably well with how our brains and bodies consolidate new information and motor patterns.

When you learn something new—a fencing action, a piece of music, a language phrase—your brain doesn’t just store it like a computer saving a file. Instead, it goes through a memory consolidation process, when that skill you learned is strengthened over time, particularly during sleep.

This consolidation is most effective in the first few days after learning or practicing something. But without reinforcement within about a week it begins to weaken. The skill becomes “rusty.” What felt natural and automatic starts requiring conscious effort again. The muscle memory fades.

This is why everything from piano lessons to language classes to sports training—including fencing—operates on a weekly schedule. It’s not arbitrary. It matches the rhythm of how our brains actually work.

Skipping a Week

I’ve seen this pattern play out hundreds of times in our club. A fencer takes a private lesson, works on specific techniques and tactics. The following week, they return for their next lesson, and we build directly on what they learned. The progression is steady, cumulative, forward-moving.

But when a fencer misses a week—vacation, illness, schedule conflict—the next lesson feels different. Not too much, but noticeable to your coach and you. The movement patterns we worked on aren’t as crisp. The tactical timing needs recalibration. We spend the first ten or fifteen minutes essentially recovering ground we’d already covered, getting back to where we were two weeks ago before we can move forward.

And this is after missing just one week.

Now imagine spacing lessons four weeks apart intentionally, as that mother suggested. Each lesson would start with this recovery phase. The fencer would spend half the time relearning what they’d partially forgotten, barely advancing to new material before another two-week gap reset the cycle.

The same principle applies to group classes. When fencers attend consistently every week, they maintain and build upon the skills and conditioning developed in previous sessions. Their footwork stays sharp, their reactions remain quick, their tactical awareness deepens progressively.

But the fencer who attends sporadically—missing weeks here and there—finds themselves constantly starting over. While their peers are learning new actions and refining advanced tactics, the inconsistent fencer is still working on fundamentals that won’t stick without regular reinforcement.

Compounding The Weekly Training

But what’s truly powerful is that consistent weekly training creates a compounding effect that transforms your development trajectory.

Think about it this way. If you’re learning a new attack in fencing—let’s say a disengage with a lunge. In your first private lesson, your coach introduces the mechanics. Your brain and body are trying to coordinate the blade work, the timing, the distance, the explosive leg movement. It feels awkward, requires intense concentration, and probably doesn’t work very reliably.

But you practice it that week in group classes and open bouting. The neural pathways start forming. Your muscles begin to remember the pattern.

One week later, in your next private lesson, that same action feels more natural. You can execute it with less conscious thought, which means you can start working on tactical applications—when to use it, how to set it up, how to recognize the right moment. You’re building on last week’s foundation rather than rebuilding it.

Another week or two of practice both in private lessons and group classes, and the action is becoming automatic. Now you can work on variations—what happens when your opponent reacts this way versus that way? How do you adapt mid-action based on their movement?

Within a month of consistent weekly training, what started as a clumsy new action has become a reliable tool in your tactical arsenal. And each subsequent week adds another layer of sophistication and confidence.

This is the power of the weekly cycle—each session builds directly on the previous one while the learning is still fresh and the neural pathways are still actively consolidating.

Compare this to monthly lessons. That first awkward attempt at the disengage? A month later, it’s not much less awkward because you’ve forgotten most of the nuances. You’re essentially learning it again from scratch. The compounding effect never gets a chance to start.

Why Children Are Conditioned to Weekly Cycles

There’s another reason the weekly training schedule is particularly important for young fencers: they’re already programmed for it.

From their first days in school, children live their lives in weekly cycles. Math on Monday and Wednesday. Soccer practice on Tuesday and Thursday. Language lesson every Friday and piano lesson on Saturday morning. Their homework, their activities, their social routines—everything follows a weekly rhythm.

This isn’t just scheduling convenience. It’s how kids learn to manage time, build habits, and develop discipline. The weekly pattern creates predictability and structure that children’s developing brains respond well to.

When fencing fits into this same weekly pattern, it becomes part of their routine rather than a disruption to it. It’s easier for them to remember, easier to prepare for, easier to maintain consistency with. The fencer who has private lessons every Tuesday at 5pm doesn’t have to think about when their next lesson is—it’s always Tuesday at 5pm, just like piano is always Saturday at 10am.

Compare this to a sporadic schedule—lessons every other week, or whenever the parent can find time in an overcrowded calendar. For the child, this randomness makes it harder to develop the habit, harder to maintain continuity, harder to build the mental and physical consistency that excellence requires.

There are, of course, times when more frequent training makes sense. Many serious competitors supplement their weekly private lessons with additional sessions, particularly when preparing for major competitions or working on specific weaknesses.

But even these intensive training periods maintain the weekly cycle as their foundation. A fencer taking two private lessons per week isn’t replacing the weekly pattern—they’re doubling it. They’re still getting that crucial weekly reinforcement, just with an additional mid-cycle boost.

And even the most dedicated fencers rarely maintain more than two or three private lessons per week for extended periods, because beyond a certain point, you need time between lessons to practice, to consolidate, to let your body and brain process what you’ve learned.

The weekly cycle isn’t just about preventing skill decay—it’s also about giving you enough time between focused instruction to actually absorb and implement what you’re learning.

The Long View

The fencer who shows up every single week, who maintains that steady rhythm of lessons and practice even during unmotivated periods, even during plateaus, even when progress feels invisible—that fencer almost always surpasses the initially more talented athlete who trains sporadically based on fluctuating enthusiasm.

At the end of the day, fencing excellence isn’t built in dramatic training montages or intensive boot camps. It’s built in the quiet, consistent accumulation of weekly lessons, weekly practices, weekly refinements.

The weekly cycle works because it matches how humans actually learn, how our brains consolidate skills, how our bodies develop motor patterns. Fighting this rhythm—trying to compress learning into monthly sessions or sporadic intensive periods—is fighting against fundamental aspects of human biology, our cultural programming and habits.

The consistency required to show up every week, to maintain your commitment even when you’re tired or distracted, to gradually build something over months and years—these are life skills that will serve you long after your competitive fencing career ends.

So when that mother asked about monthly private lessons, I wasn’t being arbitrary or difficult. I was recognizing a pattern that has guided human learning for millennia, one that we experience in every area of our lives, one that every successful fencer we’ve coached has followed.

The path to fencing excellence isn’t mysterious or complicated. Show up every week. Practice deliberately. Build on what you learned. Repeat.

It’s simple. It’s unglamorous. It’s the weekly rhythm of improvement that compounds into something remarkable over time.

And it works, week after week after week.