An aspect of the strength and fitness training that is often forgotten by fencers, is core-stability training. This training focuses on the abdominal and dorsal muscles and it forms the basis for a good balance. During the preparation for the upcoming season, we have been working on these muscles, but we recommend to our fencers to perform these exercises in their own time, to maintain or even advance their core-stability strength.
The warming-up consists of two parts. First you should go for a run of approximately 5 km. If you have no or just a little experience with running, I recommend to slowly build your run. You could do that with this exercise routine. If you have a little more running experience, but have never taken a run of 5 km, you could use this exercise routine to build your running distance. After the warming-up run of 5 km, a set of exercises is used to increase your heart rate, before starting with the main part of the training. You can find this in the table below.
| # repetitions | Exercise | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | Jumping Jacks | |
| 40 | Mountain climbers | |
| 30 | Sit-ups | Keep your shoulders of the ground and don't come all the way up. This ensures that you keep your muscles under tension. |
| 20 | Burpees | |
| 10 | Squats | Make sure your knees stay behind your toes and keep your back straight. |
The circuit that I show in the table below, must be executed for a number of times. I have added ways to decrease or increase the difficulty level of some of these exercises, so that you can all find your own exercise level. To build up your exercise routine, I recommend to start with 5 repetitions of the circuit, with 20 seconds of exercise and 10 seconds of rest. After each full set you should rest for 2 minutes, before starting the next round. The execution can again be found at the bottom of this post.
| # | Exercise | Easier | More difficult |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Push-ups | On hands en knees | |
| 2 | Sit-ups | ||
| 3 | High plank, low plank change | Stay in high plank | |
| 4 | Russian twists | ||
| 5 | Sideways plank left | Moving your hips up and down or bringing your right arm and leg up | |
| 6 | Superman | Keep your arms closer to your body | Extend your arm further. |
| 7 | Sideways plank right | Moving your hips up and down or bringing your leftarm and leg up |
To build your exercise routine further, after 3 weeks of exercising twice per week, you can increase the exercise time to 30 seconds and keep the rest at 10 seconds. Bring the number of rounds down to 4 in this case. After another 3 weeks, the exercise time can be increased to 45 seconds with 15 seconds rest. The number of rounds should then be decreased to 3. If you only do these exercises once a week, I recommend to keep with the initial times.
To finish the training one final set of exercises is presented, but before starting this I recommend 5 minutes of active rest. Have a relaxed 5 minute run, before starting the next set of exercises. Only perform this set once and use an exercise time of 30 seconds, without any rest between the exercises. After this set of exercises, you are finished with the training.
| # | Exercise |
|---|---|
| 1 | High plank |
| 2 | Low plank |
| 3 | Sideways plank left |
| 4 | Sideways plank right |
| 5 | Low plank |
| 6 | High plank |
I have made a summary of the execution of all exercises in the form of instructional Youtube video’s.
