Drills for teaching range analysis

Question

One of the things that I spent a lot of time in rapier drilling on were range drills. The essence of a rapier range drill is that there are three fundamental ranges that you frequently find yourself at:

1. Lethal Range: Close enough to hit by moving your arm.
2. Critical Range: Close enough to hit by shifting your center of gravity (e.g., in a lunge).
3. Out of range: Anything beyond what can be reasonably reached by a lunge.

There are some nuances in this (e.g., you can also be "under the point" and someone who is out of range can get into range in a hurry, albeit at some cost), but essentially this rough breakdown appears frequently both when unarmed and dealing with weapons.

When teaching students, one thing I've seen is that there is a tendency to naturally drift either too close or too far away (depending on the student and the circumstances) and that judging range is not something that comes naturally.

So I am wondering, what are effective ways to teach range analysis, so that you can both know what will work from a given range, and know what you need to look for at a given range?

Answer 1

Since footwork more or less determines reach, drills related to that will give good guidance. Further, while analysis works well during training, is too slow at speed. People jerk away or move too slowly because they react to artifacts of the mind. Such a drill has to address that.

There's a fun drill where you only use footwork to step and evade incoming attack. You're not allowed to use your hands to block. With a twist. You let the attacking weapon shave as close to the body as you can. In the case of empty-hand, that means allowing contact and letting it slide past. (Precursor to sticky training).

There is a space about an half-an-inch to about an inch off the skin where people naturally jerk away from someone. Movement with hostile intent within that range tend to create this very strange sensation. People usually go mindless when something enters that range, and knee-jerk reacts to it. The attack has not yet made contact, yet people will react to it as if they were in pain. The point of this drill is to trigger this particular feeling, and instead of jerking away, to go with it and move with the feet.

You're not really trying to suppress this feeling. You're training to not react blindly to the feeling when it comes, and instead, stay present and let your training come out.

I've found people who have done this particular drill often enough will square off at pretty much exactly just outside the critical range (where you shift weight), and have good intuitive sensitivity on where boundaries of personal space are.

Answer 2

With empty-hand, I usually do the following exercises to get people used to distancing differences. I simplify it and do just "one" range - which should map pretty well to your situation.

The student stands still, and I do the striking.

Every strike is preceded with a question like "Can I hit you from here?". Variations on the question will become obvious as you read through the list.

1. Natural stance, facing each other.
   • About one (human) foot within reach for a kick with either leg
   • About one (human) foot outside of reach for a kick with either leg
   • About one inch outside of range.
2. Fighting stance (one leg closer to the student than the other).
   • Repeat the three earlier distance experiments with both legs
3. Now, add a step, and repeat the earlier distance experiments.
4. And now, a sliding step, and repeat the earlier distance experiments.

This is repeated a few times in its entirety. I usually only do this once per session (or every few sessions), though you could probably fill an entire session or seminar with such exercises.

Once the student is familiar with this exercise, I just bring back one of those at some time, to teach the student to learn to gauge distance at will. The strike itself, over time, becomes unnecessary. In essence, this is just a one-sided one-step striking drill.

I'm sure you could apply this drill to the rapier, and bring in your own variations. I never got around to playing with stepping around the student, having the student in a stance/guard and seeing if it was possible to get to openings from there and how - and whether that was a beneficial exercise or not. Usually, we take this knowledge and apply it in sparring and other free-form exercises.