Another important aspect of power training for fencers are the muscles in the legs. For this reason I will discuss additional training for the legs in this blog post. During the preparation for the coming season these exercises have been used, so everyone that participated will recognize parts of the training routine.
The warming-up consists of two parts. First you should go for a run of approximately 5 km. This blog post also discusses how you can build this up. 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 |
|---|---|
| 50 | Jumping Jacks |
| 40 | Mountain climbers |
| 30 | Push-ups |
| 20 | Jumping lunges |
| 10 | Burpees |
After your second rest, you should run 3 sets of suicides. Create a track for this with cones or other clearly visible points. Set up the track with 6 lengths of 2 meter, like you can find in the salle. Start at cone 1 and sprint to cone 2 and sprint back again. Then sprint to cone 3 and back to 1 again. Do this for all cones and try to write down your time. Remember that you’ll do this three times, so don’t blow out your steam in the first go. Take a 2 minute break between rounds.
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 | Skater | Make it less wide | Make it wider; During standstill jump up on one leg |
| 2 | Jumping lunges | Make it less deep | Make it deeper |
| 3 | Jumping squat | No jump | Tuck jump squat |
| 4 | Wall sit | Sit higher | Sit lower; back loose from the wall |
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. This set consists of only two exercises that you execute twice in consecutive order. For the first exercise you make 15 box jumps and the second exercise is 15 fencing power lunges, where you place your back foot against the wall and than make an explosive fencing lunge. Execute this first with your right foot in front and the second time with your left foot in front.
I have made a summary of the execution of all exercises in the form of instructional Youtube video’s.
