I recently stumbled again upon The Nine Gifts book, to which I contributed an interview about attention — what it means in fencing, how we develop it, and why it transfers to life outside the sport. It got me thinking about something I rarely write about directly on this blog, even though focus and attention might be one of the most important things fencing gives our children.

But first, let me start with something that has nothing to do with fencing to drive the point home (pun intended).

The Driving Analogy

One of the most common activities in modern society is driving a car. So think about what happens when you drive yours. When you’re fixing your mind on the road, you’re constantly aware of everything happening around you — other cars, pedestrians, bicycle rider, traffic signs, potholes, animals, a police car tucked behind a billboard, and the billboard advertisement of the latest and greatest AI invention. You’re watching the road, keeping conversation on your phone or with your passengers, or listening to news, music, an audiobook or your favorite podcast simultaneously, processing hundreds, if not thousands of inputs without consciously cataloging them.

But in most parts (and I definitely hope always!) you are utterly aware of what matters most on the road. Because of that awareness, you can predict what will happen next. You see the body language of a pedestrian showing that she’s about to cross. You notice the left arm of the biker who wants to turn. A car in the next lane drifts slightly, signaling a lane change before the driver even hits the blinker. The traffic light turns from green to yellow and your foot is already moving to the brake if you are far away or to the gas if your brain estimates you can pass the intersection before the red light turns on. A dog pulled toward a cat and its owner inadvertently released the leash.

That’s attention. You’re not just seeing and watching, but you are predicting and anticipating.

Now imagine your child developing that level of awareness at twelve years old. That’s what fencing does.

Why Fencing Is Different From Other Sports

Every sport requires focus and attention. A swimmer needs to concentrate on her stroke, her breathing, her pace. A runner needs to manage his effort over the course of a race. But the critical difference between these sports and fencing is that in swimming and running, what you do doesn’t change what your opponent does. You’re competing in parallel and your focus and attention are internal.

In fencing, everything you do provokes a reaction from the person standing in front of you, and everything they do demands an immediate response from you. A split second of inattention — a wandering thought about the last touch, a glance at the scoreboard, a moment of distraction from a noise in the venue, be it your opponent coach or even your own parents yelling you an instruction that contradicts the one you just received from your own coach — and you get hit. The feedback is instant and unforgiving.

This is what makes fencing uniquely powerful as a training ground for attention. Your child isn’t just learning to concentrate. They’re learning to concentrate on someone who is actively trying to disrupt their concentration. And not only disrupt, but do it with a sword in their hand aiming at your child! There is no other common youth sport that trains this skill with the same intensity.

People say fencing is chess at 90 miles per hour, and that’s true as far as it goes. Like chess, you need to calculate and anticipate your opponent’s moves. But unlike chess, you don’t have time to sit and think. The calculation happens in fractions of a second, while your body is moving, while your opponent is attacking, while your heart is pounding. That combination of mental processing speed and physical execution under pressure is extraordinarily rare in youth sports.

Being in the Zone

Athletes in every sport talk about “being in the zone,” and it often sounds mystical — some elevated state that descends on you if you’re lucky. In fencing, it’s something more specific and more trainable than that.

Being in the zone, from my perspective, means being able to filter out everything irrelevant. The crowd noise, the bout happening on the next strip, the parent yelling from the sideline, your own internal chatter about the last touch — everything that can distract you and disrupt your focus. In the zone all of it disappears. One hundred percent of your attention is on one task and one task only: the opponent in front of you.

And when you achieve that level of focus, something remarkable happens. You start to see more, not less. You register subtle cues from your opponent — a shift in their pose, a hesitation in their blade, a slight change in the distance, a pattern in their footwork. You would miss these cues entirely if your attention were scattered. The bout seems to slow down, like in the original Spiderman movie when he discovered his super powers in the first school fight after being bitten by the insect. You feel like you have more time. You’re not actually faster, but your processing is so focused that you’re effectively seeing the future, predicting what will happen a fraction of a second before it does.

This isn’t a gift that some fencers are born with and others aren’t. It’s a skill that develops through thousands of hours of training. Every bout, drill, and lesson is a repetition that strengthens this capacity. The fencer who has been training for five years doesn’t just have better technique than the beginner. They developed a completely new skill — ability to pay utmost attention when it matters, and their relationship with it is fundamentally different.

The Transfer to Life

Once I heard an interview with an Olympic Champion Inna Deriglazova, who was asked whether fencing skills transfer to everyday life. The interviewer jokingly asked if, because fencers deal with sharp weapons, she could cut vegetables faster. She laughed and said no, but then she said something that stuck with me: “It does help me be much more attentive on the road. I can see much better and much more clearly, and predict what’s happening around me than an average driver.”

An Olympic fencer talking about driving, an example I brought above because of that. It sounds mundane, but what she’s describing is profound. Years of training her brain to process rapid, high-stakes information on the strip had permanently upgraded her capacity for attention in ordinary life.

This is the transfer that parents don’t see when they’re watching their child lose in pools. They see the score and result. What they don’t see is the invisible training happening inside their child’s brain — the strengthening of focus, the development of predictive awareness, the ability to process information under pressure and make decisions in real time. As a father of four competitive fencers, I can confidently confirm these skills in real life.

These are life skills. The child who trains this capacity on the strip carries it into the classroom, into conversations, into exam rooms, into job interviews, into every situation where the ability to focus deeply and respond quickly matters. And in our world of constant distraction, shrinking attention spans, and endless digital noise, this capacity is becoming rarer and more valuable every year.

The Mind Is a Muscle

I believe the mind is a muscle. We train it the same way weightlifters train their bodies. A weightlifter who can lift 500 pounds doesn’t need that strength in daily life — but when they go home and pick up heavy furniture or carry groceries, they do it effortlessly. The training overprepared them for ordinary tasks.

Fencing does the same thing for the brain. We train our minds to operate at such a high level of focus and speed that when we step off the strip and into ordinary life, everything feels manageable. The exam that stresses other students, the job presentation that terrifies a colleague, a social gathering that feels awkward for many—these situations, despite their high stakes, feel manageable, because you’ve been here before in high stress, high stakes situations and learned to manage yourself in them.

Your child may not realize this is happening and you, as a parent, may not see it on the results sheet. But every time your child steps onto the strip, puts on their mask, and gives their full attention to the opponent in front of them, they are training a capacity that will serve them long after they’ve hung up their weapon.

And in a world where most children are being trained by their devices to scatter their attention across a dozen inputs simultaneously, your child is doing the opposite. They’re learning to go deep. To filter out the noise. To focus completely on one thing, in one moment, against one opponent.

That’s not just fencing. That’s preparation for everything. And by the way, colleges recognize these qualities in their applicants and put their applications on top of their slush pile.

Photo by Unsplash from Freerange Stock licenced for free usage under CC0 license