Fencing Strength
Ever fenced the best pool of your season, then felt completely empty before your first DE? That is not a mental problem — it is a conditioning problem. Most fencers are training for the wrong sport, and fixing it is the difference between fading and finishing strong.
Why do you feel empty before DEs?
Because you have trained your endurance but not your recovery between bursts. A fencing day is dozens of maximal efforts separated by short rests, and if your body cannot reset quickly between them, you run out well before the medal rounds. Feeling gassed after pools is a training gap, not a character flaw.
Fencing is an anaerobic sport
Fencing lives in short, high-intensity bursts with very brief rest — that is the textbook definition of anaerobic work. If your only conditioning is long, steady-state cardio, you are building the wrong engine. Jogging for 40 minutes does almost nothing for the specific demand of exploding, resetting, and exploding again.
What anaerobic training actually looks like
The fix is anaerobic conditioning: short, hard efforts with structured rest. Sprint intervals are the clearest example — near-maximal sprints with enough recovery to repeat the quality. This trains your body to clear fatigue and go again, which is exactly what a long DE bracket asks of you.
Build a routine between pools and DEs
Conditioning is only half of it. Have a consistent reset routine between your pool bouts and your DEs — how you breathe, refuel, move, and refocus in that gap — so the moment that actually counts feels familiar, not frantic.
If you want your conditioning and your competition-day routine built for you, work with Coach Rich one-to-one.