Health Benefits
The sport of fencing is an elegant, prestigious and modern combative sport based on tradition. It's a challenge both physically and tactically between two opponents. It reflects the success qualities, which are important to contemporary young people who seek a challenge to both body and mind through an effective blend of patience and determination, discipline and competitiveness.
Fencing is a great sport for boosting your body’s health and fitness through mentally demanding yet fun exercise. Here's our quick introduction to the health and fitness benefits of fencing exercise. The health benefits of fencing include both physical and mental gains.
The most direct health benefit of fencing is the exercise component of the sport. Each fencing session is a full-body workout and challenges muscles ranging from those in the feet and lower legs all the way up to the neck, shoulders and arms. Fencing places a number of physical fitness demands on its participants. The sport develops fitness, agility, speed, strength, coordination, balance and timing. Physical ability is just as important is having a strong mental edge. It involves the analysis of strategy, tactics and psychological control, as well as mental awareness, coordination, strength, balance, dexterity and aerobic fitness. The amazing tactical complexity of modern fencing has earned the sport of fencing the nickname "Physical Chess with speed of light".
The art of fencing requires quick responsive movements to counter attacks from an opponent and to place the opponent on the defensive. It emphasizes agility, alertness, and endurance. Fencing is a great cardiovascular exercise, using several sets of muscles at a demanding intensity level over an extended period of time.
With its complex physical maneuvers, fencing helps develop muscle strength, flexibility, and coordination. The positions and movements in fencing must be precise to be powerful. And in order to perfect that precision, the body must become flexible and strong. In fencing, as in a martial art, power and precision go hand in hand.
Research has shown that a mind regularly challenged is less prone to degenerative diseases of the brain like Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Fencing has a number of health and fitness benefits to improve your body’s performance. These can include:
Coordination
The art of fencing is built on coordination in actions like attack, parry, riposte, counter-riposte, counter-attack that focus on sword movements and footwork. Unlike sports such as running, cycling or rowing, fencing requires you to move your body in a multitude of ways. Arms and legs have to work together in a harmonious fashion as you attack, defend and counter attack. Although there are common positions that you will adopt during a fencing match, many of the other movements you will perform during a fight will be purely reactive. Developing good coordination will make your movements smoother and less clumsy.
Mental Agility
Fencing has also been called physical chess due to the logic and strategy tactics behind the movements. Fencing enhances your analytical and strategic capabilities by emphasizing a cool and calculating manner before passion and improvisation. You must rely on split-second physical and psychological observations of your opponent's skills and fencing personality, whether passive or aggressive, to advance their own skills and positions. Fencing is a workout for the mind, requiring split second thinking to outwit your opponent.
· helps relieve stress and be a great way to let off steam and frustration,
· helps develop powers of observation and understanding of strategy,
· helps develop judgement and deduction skills so as to anticipate your opponent’s actions,
· helps develop problem solving skills.
It was discovered that fencing can enhance mathematical performance and improves perception of geometric shapes. The analytical and abstract concepts of fencing heighten mathematical skills.
Anaerobic Fitness
Fencing is an explosive start/stop sport where periods of high intensity activity are interspersed by periods of recovery. Fencing will develop your ability to perform activity independent of oxygen consumption. As your anaerobic fitness improves, you will find that you can work harder and for longer before lactic acid builds up in your muscles and forces you to slow down or stop. Lactic acid causes the burning sensation you experience in your muscles when working anaerobically. With training, your body produces less lactic acid and also is better able to clear the lactic acid out more quickly upon cessation of activity.
Aerobic Fitness
Aerobic fitness describes the ability of your body to take in, transport and use oxygen and is linked to cardiorespiratory health. Although fencing is predominately an anaerobic sport, your heart and lungs will get a good workout as you recover between the intense periods of activity and your body deals with the lactic acid that has built up within your muscles. As an aerobic exercise, fencing supports heart and mental health by increasing oxygen in the blood and releasing endorphins that promote a positive sense of well-being. Oxygen increases in the blood also heighten circulation, boost the immune system and enhance the body's ability to remove pollutants such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid.
Aerobic exercise is continuous movement that involves the larger muscles in your body, including your hips, legs, abdomen and arms. Looking something like a cross between boxing and dancing, fencing requires nearly constant lower body motion coinciding with defensive and offensive upper body moves. In response, your heart beats faster, your breathing quickens and your body burns calories for fuel.
Aerobic exercise provided by fencing can be beneficial to the body’s heart health, endurance, and lung capacity and reduce the risk of heart disease. Practicing fencing can help to regulate cholesterol levels, improve circulation and also decreases your risk of developing coronary artery disease by increasing your good cholesterol levels and decreasing your low-density lipoprotein, or bad cholesterol.
As with all aerobic exercise, as well, fencing burns calories, helping participants to lose weight and maintain their ideal weight. Fencing also helps tone and defines the body.An hour’s active fencing burns over 400 calories and a competitive nine minute bout can use up as much energy as a 1.5 km run! This type of exercise can also be effective at lessening the risk of developing osteoporosis. Getting about half an hour of this aerobic exercise a day can help to fully realize the health benefits of fencing.
Cardiovascular Response
As your respiratory rate increases and deepens during fencing, the oxygen levels in your blood rise. When your heart rate increases, your small blood vessels, or capillaries, widen. As they widen, they carry more oxygen-rich blood to your muscles and remove waste products, such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Working your heart out regularly makes it stronger and stronger hearts pump blood more efficiently.
Flexibility
The physical health benefits of fencing also include increased flexibility. Fencing requires the use of a wide range of motion to respond and deflect opposing attacks. The core, arms, and legs all develop a good deal of flexibility in regular fencers. Fencing is a sport of lunging. It takes good lower body flexibility to make longer lunges and to lunge lower. The deeper you can lunge and the farther you can stretch, the more able you will be to hit your opponent but stay out of his reach. Deep lunges will improve the flexibility in your thighs, hips and glutes as well as your upper back, lower back and shoulders as you reach forward to try and tag your opponent. Because the lunging motion is used in most attacks, mobility and flexibility in the hips is important.
Strength and Endurance
Fencing involves constant footwork. To exhibit skill in the sport, it's necessary to be able to move quickly, demonstrate lightness on your feet and be flexible with movements. Fencing bouts involve many attacks and counterattacks. You need good muscular endurance to avoid becoming fatigued during a match. A fencing match will consist forward and backward movement in the on guard position will be finished with and recoveries, so lower body muscular endurance is critical. Because your sword arm will be constantly moving while bearing the weight of the weapon (sabre and foil 500g, epee 750g), upper body endurance is also vital. These movements will increase your leg strength and endurance.
The fencer must develop strong calf muscles able to take the brunt of any sudden, quick and explosive leg movements..
The core and stomach muscles are largely responsible for balance, posture and stability, all of which are vital in fencing. A weak core means that a fencer won't be able to keep his balance and will have trouble executing movements properly. In contrast, a fencer with a lot of experience has definition in the core, abdominal and midsection area from numerous balance and stabilization exercises as well as hours in combat.
Every time a fencer lunges forward, backward or to the side, he/she works his/her thigh and quadriceps muscles. Even weight distribution in a lunge helps fencers stay upright and become more effective at their sport. In addition to lunges, fencers challenge their quad muscles whenever they dart in any direction or perform a split-step movement to center their weight and gravity.
Shoulders are one of the primary muscles that fencers use in training and combat. Fencers exercise and tones shoulders when darting forward to thrust or pulling backward to avoid an attack. Common training exercises for fencers also include martial arts movements and shadow boxing, punching and sparring, which also work the shoulders and upper back.
Bouncing is an integral part of fencing and requires fencers to brace the lower back to maintain balance and move effectively forward and backward along the fencing strip. Often fencers stay on the balls of their feet when bouncing and to brace the lower back. Engaging lower back muscles and tightening them is an essential part of keeping your balance and successfully performing fencing maneuvers.
Fencing is a great sport for boosting your body’s health and fitness through mentally demanding yet fun exercise. Here's our quick introduction to the health and fitness benefits of fencing exercise. The health benefits of fencing include both physical and mental gains.
The most direct health benefit of fencing is the exercise component of the sport. Each fencing session is a full-body workout and challenges muscles ranging from those in the feet and lower legs all the way up to the neck, shoulders and arms. Fencing places a number of physical fitness demands on its participants. The sport develops fitness, agility, speed, strength, coordination, balance and timing. Physical ability is just as important is having a strong mental edge. It involves the analysis of strategy, tactics and psychological control, as well as mental awareness, coordination, strength, balance, dexterity and aerobic fitness. The amazing tactical complexity of modern fencing has earned the sport of fencing the nickname "Physical Chess with speed of light".
The art of fencing requires quick responsive movements to counter attacks from an opponent and to place the opponent on the defensive. It emphasizes agility, alertness, and endurance. Fencing is a great cardiovascular exercise, using several sets of muscles at a demanding intensity level over an extended period of time.
With its complex physical maneuvers, fencing helps develop muscle strength, flexibility, and coordination. The positions and movements in fencing must be precise to be powerful. And in order to perfect that precision, the body must become flexible and strong. In fencing, as in a martial art, power and precision go hand in hand.
Research has shown that a mind regularly challenged is less prone to degenerative diseases of the brain like Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Fencing has a number of health and fitness benefits to improve your body’s performance. These can include:
- Improves flexibility.
- Increases reflexes (famously there is the story that Polish fighter pilots stationed in Britain during WWII insisted on fencing as a method of maintaining their reflexes at a high level).
- Boosts mental strength and concentration.
- Increases the nimbleness of feet and hands.
- Fencing can provide a fun way to stay fit or get in shape
- Improves speed, agility, flexibility and reflexes
- Enhances integrity, sportsmanship and the desire to excel
- Brings opportunities for competition in sports
- Offers a dynamic circle of peers and mentors
- Leads to scholarships, Olympic and international opportunities
- Increases focus and concentration
- Hones strategic thinking and decision making skills
- The sport is that it can be continued life-long.
Coordination
The art of fencing is built on coordination in actions like attack, parry, riposte, counter-riposte, counter-attack that focus on sword movements and footwork. Unlike sports such as running, cycling or rowing, fencing requires you to move your body in a multitude of ways. Arms and legs have to work together in a harmonious fashion as you attack, defend and counter attack. Although there are common positions that you will adopt during a fencing match, many of the other movements you will perform during a fight will be purely reactive. Developing good coordination will make your movements smoother and less clumsy.
Mental Agility
Fencing has also been called physical chess due to the logic and strategy tactics behind the movements. Fencing enhances your analytical and strategic capabilities by emphasizing a cool and calculating manner before passion and improvisation. You must rely on split-second physical and psychological observations of your opponent's skills and fencing personality, whether passive or aggressive, to advance their own skills and positions. Fencing is a workout for the mind, requiring split second thinking to outwit your opponent.
· helps relieve stress and be a great way to let off steam and frustration,
· helps develop powers of observation and understanding of strategy,
· helps develop judgement and deduction skills so as to anticipate your opponent’s actions,
· helps develop problem solving skills.
It was discovered that fencing can enhance mathematical performance and improves perception of geometric shapes. The analytical and abstract concepts of fencing heighten mathematical skills.
Anaerobic Fitness
Fencing is an explosive start/stop sport where periods of high intensity activity are interspersed by periods of recovery. Fencing will develop your ability to perform activity independent of oxygen consumption. As your anaerobic fitness improves, you will find that you can work harder and for longer before lactic acid builds up in your muscles and forces you to slow down or stop. Lactic acid causes the burning sensation you experience in your muscles when working anaerobically. With training, your body produces less lactic acid and also is better able to clear the lactic acid out more quickly upon cessation of activity.
Aerobic Fitness
Aerobic fitness describes the ability of your body to take in, transport and use oxygen and is linked to cardiorespiratory health. Although fencing is predominately an anaerobic sport, your heart and lungs will get a good workout as you recover between the intense periods of activity and your body deals with the lactic acid that has built up within your muscles. As an aerobic exercise, fencing supports heart and mental health by increasing oxygen in the blood and releasing endorphins that promote a positive sense of well-being. Oxygen increases in the blood also heighten circulation, boost the immune system and enhance the body's ability to remove pollutants such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid.
Aerobic exercise is continuous movement that involves the larger muscles in your body, including your hips, legs, abdomen and arms. Looking something like a cross between boxing and dancing, fencing requires nearly constant lower body motion coinciding with defensive and offensive upper body moves. In response, your heart beats faster, your breathing quickens and your body burns calories for fuel.
Aerobic exercise provided by fencing can be beneficial to the body’s heart health, endurance, and lung capacity and reduce the risk of heart disease. Practicing fencing can help to regulate cholesterol levels, improve circulation and also decreases your risk of developing coronary artery disease by increasing your good cholesterol levels and decreasing your low-density lipoprotein, or bad cholesterol.
As with all aerobic exercise, as well, fencing burns calories, helping participants to lose weight and maintain their ideal weight. Fencing also helps tone and defines the body.An hour’s active fencing burns over 400 calories and a competitive nine minute bout can use up as much energy as a 1.5 km run! This type of exercise can also be effective at lessening the risk of developing osteoporosis. Getting about half an hour of this aerobic exercise a day can help to fully realize the health benefits of fencing.
Cardiovascular Response
As your respiratory rate increases and deepens during fencing, the oxygen levels in your blood rise. When your heart rate increases, your small blood vessels, or capillaries, widen. As they widen, they carry more oxygen-rich blood to your muscles and remove waste products, such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Working your heart out regularly makes it stronger and stronger hearts pump blood more efficiently.
Flexibility
The physical health benefits of fencing also include increased flexibility. Fencing requires the use of a wide range of motion to respond and deflect opposing attacks. The core, arms, and legs all develop a good deal of flexibility in regular fencers. Fencing is a sport of lunging. It takes good lower body flexibility to make longer lunges and to lunge lower. The deeper you can lunge and the farther you can stretch, the more able you will be to hit your opponent but stay out of his reach. Deep lunges will improve the flexibility in your thighs, hips and glutes as well as your upper back, lower back and shoulders as you reach forward to try and tag your opponent. Because the lunging motion is used in most attacks, mobility and flexibility in the hips is important.
Strength and Endurance
Fencing involves constant footwork. To exhibit skill in the sport, it's necessary to be able to move quickly, demonstrate lightness on your feet and be flexible with movements. Fencing bouts involve many attacks and counterattacks. You need good muscular endurance to avoid becoming fatigued during a match. A fencing match will consist forward and backward movement in the on guard position will be finished with and recoveries, so lower body muscular endurance is critical. Because your sword arm will be constantly moving while bearing the weight of the weapon (sabre and foil 500g, epee 750g), upper body endurance is also vital. These movements will increase your leg strength and endurance.
The fencer must develop strong calf muscles able to take the brunt of any sudden, quick and explosive leg movements..
The core and stomach muscles are largely responsible for balance, posture and stability, all of which are vital in fencing. A weak core means that a fencer won't be able to keep his balance and will have trouble executing movements properly. In contrast, a fencer with a lot of experience has definition in the core, abdominal and midsection area from numerous balance and stabilization exercises as well as hours in combat.
Every time a fencer lunges forward, backward or to the side, he/she works his/her thigh and quadriceps muscles. Even weight distribution in a lunge helps fencers stay upright and become more effective at their sport. In addition to lunges, fencers challenge their quad muscles whenever they dart in any direction or perform a split-step movement to center their weight and gravity.
Shoulders are one of the primary muscles that fencers use in training and combat. Fencers exercise and tones shoulders when darting forward to thrust or pulling backward to avoid an attack. Common training exercises for fencers also include martial arts movements and shadow boxing, punching and sparring, which also work the shoulders and upper back.
Bouncing is an integral part of fencing and requires fencers to brace the lower back to maintain balance and move effectively forward and backward along the fencing strip. Often fencers stay on the balls of their feet when bouncing and to brace the lower back. Engaging lower back muscles and tightening them is an essential part of keeping your balance and successfully performing fencing maneuvers.
