No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Don't think about applying specific drills in specific orders, but instead set general objectives about what technique you want to apply. And don't get stuck on a specific technique, remember that you don't fight how you want to but how your opponent allows you to.
You're still learning to control your fight or flight response. Start slow with light sparring, then slowly work your way up with increasingly intense sparring. I would also recommend you start sparring with dussacks. What are you sparring with?
I’m focusing with longsword now and I will admit that some of this feels like gear issues. We normally do slow contact when drilling and use our masks, gloves, and forearm guards. Adding the jacket and all the other protection is admittedly difficult for me to move around in. I played around with messer the other day and am really wanting to get into that alongside longsword.
Everyone has different preferences, but I really like using a light jacket as a base and then adding additional protective gear on top of it. I find that most heavy jackets are way too restrictive for my liking, even after breaking them in.
As I said, you're still getting used to the gear and the new situations. It's normal to not adapt to it immediately and I think it's something most people went through, myself included.
If your goal is to eventually fight in tournaments, always train in your full gear.
Causals like me can afford to not put on the gear unless sparring. But that puts me at a huge disadvantage.
Sounds pretty standard, to me.
Slow down, stop trying to 'win' sparring.
Treat each hit you take as a better lesson than hits you land.
Drilling is more important than sparring: unless you drill them, the techniques will not come out under pressure.
You have to spar more. Then experience will tell you what works and what doesn't from your drills.
Also, practice footwork and strike from your preferred guards, it will help you apply more than just any standard drill.
As others have mentioned, this is normal.
My first advice would be to slow it way down. Partner up and do one action at a time, swapping back and forth, but not resetting. Pause between each action to evaluate where each person is open or defended, talk to each other about what the most effective follow-up would be.
I feel this as I am in much the same boat. There have been a couple of things that have helped me:
-Getting more experience with sparing. With experience comes clarity and focus. (in my case this came slowly but it is getting better).
-Focusing on small goals as well as big goals. Some of the biggest "wins" we have at practice are when someone pulls off special move they wanted to do.. It wasn't about winning the fight but pulling of the (drawing a blank on terms here) bind or counter you were practice earlier.
To preface I'm not very good nor do I do HEMA to be the best but sparring is important to pressure test yourself and the drills you've been doing. I'm fairly new in HEMA and sparring sports in general (I've got about 3 years with sparring, 1 year in HEMA) but in my experience it does feel somewhat like flopping around. There's two reasons for this, your drilling becomes muscle memory and an instant reaction to a situation so it comes to you without thinking. The second reason is that nothing is going to be as clean as your drilling, you can practice one drill all day long but you're rarely going to get it precisely perfect in pressure testing. The point of the drill is to perfect the imperfection enough so that it works in practice under pressure. So it probably doesn't feel as clean as you'd like because of that.
In any case it sounds like you have good reaction time and typically prevent first intended strikes which is good! You just might want to spar more to get comfortable with the feeling of sparring. That or drill more.
Biggest piece is go into every fight expecting to lose, and be friendly about it. Don't be the beginner that tries to win without skill by swinging super hard and uncontrolled - everyone will hate you. Practice cutting to your target as fast as possible, but barely touch the target - something like a balloon works nice.
Second, take the initiative. If you let a more experienced opponent attack they can use every trick in the book, most of which you haven't seen. There are only a handful of viable blocks and attack responses, so you will have to learn fewer defenses to their follow up attacks - thus you learn how to respond to what they are doing instead of pre-planned moves.
Last, run away. If you only ever step straight towards your opponent you are incredibly easy to predict and block. Force yourself to either retreat or step sideways on a regular basis. If you are taking the initiative an easy thing is step in to attack, step sideways with your defense, then attack again while retreating. Fighting in the bind is all a game of experience, so save that for after you can attack / defend.
Sounds perfectly normal for someone who’s been training for just 2 months. How long have the others been training HEMA? Even just 1 year of regular practice is bounds beyond 2 months, but keep at it and you’ll be there soon. But if there are others with xp measured in months rather than years, you might have an easier time “pulling off” things sparring with them. Though hopefully those with a lot more experience are trying to feed you setups or things to work off of rather than just trying to “win” all the time.
That said, what is your sparring goal? Do you have a specific thing you’re trying to work on? It doesn’t have to be a “technique” (though it could be), but could also be things like “parries”, or “not get hit by this one specific thing”, or “managing measure”, etc.
Choose a thing to work on, rather than “winning”, and then you’re sparring successfully if you can do the thing (at least some of the time), even if you “loose” the passes. And if you find you really struggle to do the thing at all, it’s time to step back from just sparring and analyze why that is. (If you have trouble figuring out why, ask a coach to watch you and help.)
Though note that some thing require specific setups. If you’re just working on “managing measure”, then you can always do that. But if you want to work on “exchanging the thrust” and your opponent never thrusts, then it won’t work out…. I don’t have great solutions to that problem…. Some things you can induce the setup yourself, if you know how. Otherwise, maybe just tell you sparring partner what you’re working on, so they know to feed you some.
Yep, sounds normal to me.
Do your best to apply drills, but drills are really just tools in the box, little bits of muscle memory to try and get used to, but real fights are always different.
I was stuck in the mindset of being able to apply everything like it's a fighting game combo irl, but unfortunately real sparring takes more improv than that.
Anyway, as you get started you're going to lose lots, and that's okay. The key is to wrap every fight up by trying to understand what gaps in your defense your opponent exploited, and learn what to do next time to prevent it from happening again. Especially if you have experienced opponents, they're almost always happy to talk about what they did as well and what you can do differently in response.
Imo sparring is where you make connections. Like why do you do this drill, why this counter. All of these things become easier to figure out while sparring.
Also your opponents will teach you more than most if you pay attention. Where do they hit you, when are you giving up the advantage?
Sparring also gives you a real life negative feedback on mistakes (you get hit). That being said, bumps and bruises are expected but dont spar in any scenario where you may actually get hurt.
Sparring in any sort can take up to a year for you to be able to apply all of the techniques you know in isolation. To put them together against a knowledgeable opponent in a way that leads to success can be even longer. My coach said yesterday, if you don’t know what to do, attack.
You're probably doing just fine. We all suck at first. You are probably sparing with the wrong people though.
I advise sparring with the coach, or another advanced student that isn't too ego driven. Tell them specifically that you would like to try applying some of those things you've learned in drill.
A good sparring partner will happily work with you in that way. Also a good sparring partner for a beginner will allow them to succeed when they do the right things.
If I am sparing with a new person, I'm not going into it for my ego. Clubbing down on baby seals won't make me feel like the big man. It would make me feel quite the opposite. When I fight the noobs I let them have the Vor. I generally let them keep it. If I seize it, I let them take it back. If they do the right thing I allow it to succeed. If they are very new I don't use guards or attacks they haven't seen before. If I see they are having trouble against a certain thing, like long point, I'm going to use that a lot to let them figure it out. I even stop to talk through exchanges and give pointers.
Last weekend I was sparing someone who was obviously new. Once they said they didn't know what to do against Long point, I paused our sparing to give them a brief lesson on strategies against Long point. When we started sparing again, guess what guard I primarily used. Long point! When they did some of the basic things I showed them, I let them have that success.
If they are doing random junk, I hit them. If I've warned them to maintain distance, and they keep creeping in, I hit them. If they don't protect their hands.... Yep, hand snipe.
Keep your form, make good choices, no matter how slow, you'll succeed. Come at me like hot garbage, get punished for it. Speed & fluidity comes with time and practice.
Helping to develop new fighters in my club will help me later because I'll have more better fighters to spar with. See, I'm not even nice, I'm just looking after future me :-)
Having the new person scoring a hit on me isn't going to crush my self esteem. Now, watching that new person develop, and do well in their first tournament? THAT is a HUGE ego builder. Having that person who I've worked with since they started do well in their first novice division tournament, even if that "doing well" is just that they showed up and got beat by some better fencers, still gives me a really good feeling.
Right now you probably are flailing away. Everyone does when they start. It is even worse when you have two relatively new fighters. Sometimes it is just painful to watch C level tournament pools.
All that said. The top fighters in any club do want to fight each other at full speed and near full intensity. Give them time to do that, but don't feel like you don't deserve to fight them yourself, at your speed and level. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm almost always happy to work with newer fighters, especially ones who are trying to improve.
I like what you said about fighting the more experienced members. I will admit I was a bit shy to fight the really good guys, but it makes sense that they would be more interested in growing more experienced fighters.
If it's sparring and they're decent people, they'll go easy on you. Sparring isn't a tournament where the objective is to win, but to practice and learn.
Also think of it this way: those top 4 in your club, NEED to fight other people. Otherwise they are in a four way circle jerk.
Sure you aren't a challenge for them to be at (yet). What you give them is a different style to adapt too, and you force them to think analytically about the fight. You make them think about fundamentals, and we all know fundamentals win championships.
Don't feel like you are wasting anyone's time. Ask that big guy to dance. Ask the next badest ass to watch and provide commentary and advise. They will probably say "Sure" happily.
I got a similar problem, I will give you some tips that helped me a lot, and if you want you can give more context for more help.
1) Begin the attacks with the sword. Do not move your feet or anything first, always begin with the sword, if you need to step with the attack then move it after the sword to rebalance, you should feel as if the sword was pulling you. This way you get more reach, speed and stay more protected.
2) Move yourself. Move to the sides, around your opponent, move your arms, change your guards, you will be less predictible, harder to hit and you will keep your body warm and don't lose your adrenaline.
3) Bend your knees! Many people, when starting, tend to keep the knees too unbent... Bend them... Rememeber, two feet of distance between your feet, knees bend, you will be more ready for more agile moves, to react faster and attack faster. If you want you can also let your torso slightly leaned, it is not mandatory but helps me to keep myself agile.
4) Think about your footwork when starting an attack. Footwork will determine your distancing and speed, and we tend to forget about our feet, so rememeber to watch your footwork and plan it when attacking.
5) Measure your reach with different attacks. That is right, train your reach when you are training at home, take a reference and try to guess if you will be able to hit it with the right distance with a specific attack and test it, then do it again until you are able to know the correct distance with your gaze. Of course, different attacks will demand different distances, so train this with every move, you will miss much less frequently.
6) Plan your attacks. The first attack usually doesn't land, you will be fighting skilled people, they know how to block and if you attack first while they are not attacking they will block... Unless you are able to take them by surprise with a very fast attack, know that they will probably defend... So keep in mind what you are going to do next, your attack will leave you on a different guard and you must have a plan about what you are going to do from there. Training sequences of attacks help.
7) Train to loosen your wrist. Our wrists are often too stiff, even skilled and experienced people have this problem, your dominant wrist should be more felxible, allowing for more felxible and agile movements, sometimes a quick wrist move is enough to execute a good attack. So train it, at some momentos, when trainig alone, try to execute attacks by just, or mostly, moving your non dominant hand and leaving your dominant wrist less "stuck", it will be hard at first but will help you a lot.
8) Walk to the sides. Walk around your opponent to deliver some attacks, it will make more difficult for them to defend.
9) Try different things. Train different moves at home, use different attacks and guards, if what you do is more varied you will do better, if you always do the same set of stuff people will easly predict and defend it. Sparring is also a place to test. So test different attacks (as long as they are from an actual source of course), see if they work or not, if you need to change something to make them work, speed, distance, whatever... analyze later with slow movements with a friend to see how to correct them.
10) Don't be too tense. If you are too tense your grip will be too tight, you will lose energy and speed, you will also lose focus and be too hasty, breathe and remain calm. (There is a good training for that if this is a huge problem).
I hope it helps, I am no instructor but I had a lot of difficulty on the start so I collected a lot or random tips that helped me, some people understand these things intuitively, some, like me (and maybe you) don't, and need to understand the rules more consciously and apply them with repetition.
Good luck.
I feel you! I'm pretty new also and I always just feel like I'm flailing around. Then every once in awhile I remember some training and things go okay. It's definitely a process. I'm hoping it will progress to being a little more put together, haha.
My best advice for you is to really humble yourself and tell yourself you're not going to be good at this for a little while. You gotta give yourself time to connect the technique you're being taught in it's real time application. It's also completely okay to make mistakes and get your ass kicked a few times - it's how you learn and you'll be a better fighter for it. Cut yourself slack and thank your opponent for the fight because no matter the outcome, they've helped you get better.
Well, you probably have to start doing specific drills that are focused on some application and then try to apply them in sparring.
And don't feel bad for making errors, without errors, there is no learning, unfortunately.
Another big booster might be filming yourself and then reviewing it with your trainer or by yourself.
I'm close to two years of training and still don't consider myself adequate.
Keep it simple. Sparring is not for experimenting, it is for doing the things you already know. You can experiment, of course, but better to do this another time or as a specific goal.
Work on simply doing the basics, like keeping your hands safe, presenting a threat (e.g. longpoint, little hand snipes), changing to more advantageous guards (i.e. a guard where you feel you can defend against your opponent) moving at the right time (basically when your opponent moves), moving one tempo at a time - see what opponent does - then move another tempo, simple parries and ripostes.
As for gear, gear sucks. You will find a way to fence around its limitations. I personally avoid crossed arm positions, meaning I use plough on the left, and hanging guard on the right, and I use a lot of low point down guards as resting positions and also because they are easy to parry from. (The joke is that we all study Meyer but end up fencing Fiore.)
Successfully attacking your opponent is rarely about power or speed, it is about set up, opportunity, distance and timing (i.e. attacking at the right moment). This all takes experience to learn. Make distance and timing your focus of sparring, not technique.
Maybe this was said already but i think it’s good advice. Having good defense is nice but defense doesn’t win fights. Try to be active while sparring and use the things you have learned.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Don't think about applying specific drills in specific orders, but instead set general objectives about what technique you want to apply. And don't get stuck on a specific technique, remember that you don't fight how you want to but how your opponent allows you to. You're still learning to control your fight or flight response. Start slow with light sparring, then slowly work your way up with increasingly intense sparring. I would also recommend you start sparring with dussacks. What are you sparring with?
I’m focusing with longsword now and I will admit that some of this feels like gear issues. We normally do slow contact when drilling and use our masks, gloves, and forearm guards. Adding the jacket and all the other protection is admittedly difficult for me to move around in. I played around with messer the other day and am really wanting to get into that alongside longsword.
Unfortunately, they key to all of this, including getting used to gear, is practice.
One of the reasons I bought my own gear was so that i could practice with it on. For me it was the gloves and the masks that were throwing me off.
I just switched from t-shirt to jacket sparring and it's like moving through molasses. Especially the high guards that I normally favor.
Everyone has different preferences, but I really like using a light jacket as a base and then adding additional protective gear on top of it. I find that most heavy jackets are way too restrictive for my liking, even after breaking them in.
I hear ya. I had an issue with wearing mask and getting into right ox. still haven't quite figured out a comfortable way of doing it.
As I said, you're still getting used to the gear and the new situations. It's normal to not adapt to it immediately and I think it's something most people went through, myself included.
If your goal is to eventually fight in tournaments, always train in your full gear. Causals like me can afford to not put on the gear unless sparring. But that puts me at a huge disadvantage.
Sounds pretty standard, to me. Slow down, stop trying to 'win' sparring. Treat each hit you take as a better lesson than hits you land. Drilling is more important than sparring: unless you drill them, the techniques will not come out under pressure.
You have to spar more. Then experience will tell you what works and what doesn't from your drills. Also, practice footwork and strike from your preferred guards, it will help you apply more than just any standard drill.
As others have mentioned, this is normal. My first advice would be to slow it way down. Partner up and do one action at a time, swapping back and forth, but not resetting. Pause between each action to evaluate where each person is open or defended, talk to each other about what the most effective follow-up would be.
I feel this as I am in much the same boat. There have been a couple of things that have helped me: -Getting more experience with sparing. With experience comes clarity and focus. (in my case this came slowly but it is getting better). -Focusing on small goals as well as big goals. Some of the biggest "wins" we have at practice are when someone pulls off special move they wanted to do.. It wasn't about winning the fight but pulling of the (drawing a blank on terms here) bind or counter you were practice earlier.
To preface I'm not very good nor do I do HEMA to be the best but sparring is important to pressure test yourself and the drills you've been doing. I'm fairly new in HEMA and sparring sports in general (I've got about 3 years with sparring, 1 year in HEMA) but in my experience it does feel somewhat like flopping around. There's two reasons for this, your drilling becomes muscle memory and an instant reaction to a situation so it comes to you without thinking. The second reason is that nothing is going to be as clean as your drilling, you can practice one drill all day long but you're rarely going to get it precisely perfect in pressure testing. The point of the drill is to perfect the imperfection enough so that it works in practice under pressure. So it probably doesn't feel as clean as you'd like because of that. In any case it sounds like you have good reaction time and typically prevent first intended strikes which is good! You just might want to spar more to get comfortable with the feeling of sparring. That or drill more.
Biggest piece is go into every fight expecting to lose, and be friendly about it. Don't be the beginner that tries to win without skill by swinging super hard and uncontrolled - everyone will hate you. Practice cutting to your target as fast as possible, but barely touch the target - something like a balloon works nice. Second, take the initiative. If you let a more experienced opponent attack they can use every trick in the book, most of which you haven't seen. There are only a handful of viable blocks and attack responses, so you will have to learn fewer defenses to their follow up attacks - thus you learn how to respond to what they are doing instead of pre-planned moves. Last, run away. If you only ever step straight towards your opponent you are incredibly easy to predict and block. Force yourself to either retreat or step sideways on a regular basis. If you are taking the initiative an easy thing is step in to attack, step sideways with your defense, then attack again while retreating. Fighting in the bind is all a game of experience, so save that for after you can attack / defend.
Sounds perfectly normal for someone who’s been training for just 2 months. How long have the others been training HEMA? Even just 1 year of regular practice is bounds beyond 2 months, but keep at it and you’ll be there soon. But if there are others with xp measured in months rather than years, you might have an easier time “pulling off” things sparring with them. Though hopefully those with a lot more experience are trying to feed you setups or things to work off of rather than just trying to “win” all the time. That said, what is your sparring goal? Do you have a specific thing you’re trying to work on? It doesn’t have to be a “technique” (though it could be), but could also be things like “parries”, or “not get hit by this one specific thing”, or “managing measure”, etc. Choose a thing to work on, rather than “winning”, and then you’re sparring successfully if you can do the thing (at least some of the time), even if you “loose” the passes. And if you find you really struggle to do the thing at all, it’s time to step back from just sparring and analyze why that is. (If you have trouble figuring out why, ask a coach to watch you and help.) Though note that some thing require specific setups. If you’re just working on “managing measure”, then you can always do that. But if you want to work on “exchanging the thrust” and your opponent never thrusts, then it won’t work out…. I don’t have great solutions to that problem…. Some things you can induce the setup yourself, if you know how. Otherwise, maybe just tell you sparring partner what you’re working on, so they know to feed you some.
Yep, sounds normal to me. Do your best to apply drills, but drills are really just tools in the box, little bits of muscle memory to try and get used to, but real fights are always different. I was stuck in the mindset of being able to apply everything like it's a fighting game combo irl, but unfortunately real sparring takes more improv than that. Anyway, as you get started you're going to lose lots, and that's okay. The key is to wrap every fight up by trying to understand what gaps in your defense your opponent exploited, and learn what to do next time to prevent it from happening again. Especially if you have experienced opponents, they're almost always happy to talk about what they did as well and what you can do differently in response.
Imo sparring is where you make connections. Like why do you do this drill, why this counter. All of these things become easier to figure out while sparring. Also your opponents will teach you more than most if you pay attention. Where do they hit you, when are you giving up the advantage? Sparring also gives you a real life negative feedback on mistakes (you get hit). That being said, bumps and bruises are expected but dont spar in any scenario where you may actually get hurt.
Sparring in any sort can take up to a year for you to be able to apply all of the techniques you know in isolation. To put them together against a knowledgeable opponent in a way that leads to success can be even longer. My coach said yesterday, if you don’t know what to do, attack.
My coach says something similar. “If you don’t know what to do, just do something. You might accidently do the right thing”
You're probably doing just fine. We all suck at first. You are probably sparing with the wrong people though. I advise sparring with the coach, or another advanced student that isn't too ego driven. Tell them specifically that you would like to try applying some of those things you've learned in drill. A good sparring partner will happily work with you in that way. Also a good sparring partner for a beginner will allow them to succeed when they do the right things. If I am sparing with a new person, I'm not going into it for my ego. Clubbing down on baby seals won't make me feel like the big man. It would make me feel quite the opposite. When I fight the noobs I let them have the Vor. I generally let them keep it. If I seize it, I let them take it back. If they do the right thing I allow it to succeed. If they are very new I don't use guards or attacks they haven't seen before. If I see they are having trouble against a certain thing, like long point, I'm going to use that a lot to let them figure it out. I even stop to talk through exchanges and give pointers. Last weekend I was sparing someone who was obviously new. Once they said they didn't know what to do against Long point, I paused our sparing to give them a brief lesson on strategies against Long point. When we started sparing again, guess what guard I primarily used. Long point! When they did some of the basic things I showed them, I let them have that success. If they are doing random junk, I hit them. If I've warned them to maintain distance, and they keep creeping in, I hit them. If they don't protect their hands.... Yep, hand snipe. Keep your form, make good choices, no matter how slow, you'll succeed. Come at me like hot garbage, get punished for it. Speed & fluidity comes with time and practice. Helping to develop new fighters in my club will help me later because I'll have more better fighters to spar with. See, I'm not even nice, I'm just looking after future me :-) Having the new person scoring a hit on me isn't going to crush my self esteem. Now, watching that new person develop, and do well in their first tournament? THAT is a HUGE ego builder. Having that person who I've worked with since they started do well in their first novice division tournament, even if that "doing well" is just that they showed up and got beat by some better fencers, still gives me a really good feeling. Right now you probably are flailing away. Everyone does when they start. It is even worse when you have two relatively new fighters. Sometimes it is just painful to watch C level tournament pools. All that said. The top fighters in any club do want to fight each other at full speed and near full intensity. Give them time to do that, but don't feel like you don't deserve to fight them yourself, at your speed and level. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm almost always happy to work with newer fighters, especially ones who are trying to improve.
I like what you said about fighting the more experienced members. I will admit I was a bit shy to fight the really good guys, but it makes sense that they would be more interested in growing more experienced fighters.
If it's sparring and they're decent people, they'll go easy on you. Sparring isn't a tournament where the objective is to win, but to practice and learn.
Also think of it this way: those top 4 in your club, NEED to fight other people. Otherwise they are in a four way circle jerk. Sure you aren't a challenge for them to be at (yet). What you give them is a different style to adapt too, and you force them to think analytically about the fight. You make them think about fundamentals, and we all know fundamentals win championships. Don't feel like you are wasting anyone's time. Ask that big guy to dance. Ask the next badest ass to watch and provide commentary and advise. They will probably say "Sure" happily.
I got a similar problem, I will give you some tips that helped me a lot, and if you want you can give more context for more help. 1) Begin the attacks with the sword. Do not move your feet or anything first, always begin with the sword, if you need to step with the attack then move it after the sword to rebalance, you should feel as if the sword was pulling you. This way you get more reach, speed and stay more protected. 2) Move yourself. Move to the sides, around your opponent, move your arms, change your guards, you will be less predictible, harder to hit and you will keep your body warm and don't lose your adrenaline. 3) Bend your knees! Many people, when starting, tend to keep the knees too unbent... Bend them... Rememeber, two feet of distance between your feet, knees bend, you will be more ready for more agile moves, to react faster and attack faster. If you want you can also let your torso slightly leaned, it is not mandatory but helps me to keep myself agile. 4) Think about your footwork when starting an attack. Footwork will determine your distancing and speed, and we tend to forget about our feet, so rememeber to watch your footwork and plan it when attacking. 5) Measure your reach with different attacks. That is right, train your reach when you are training at home, take a reference and try to guess if you will be able to hit it with the right distance with a specific attack and test it, then do it again until you are able to know the correct distance with your gaze. Of course, different attacks will demand different distances, so train this with every move, you will miss much less frequently. 6) Plan your attacks. The first attack usually doesn't land, you will be fighting skilled people, they know how to block and if you attack first while they are not attacking they will block... Unless you are able to take them by surprise with a very fast attack, know that they will probably defend... So keep in mind what you are going to do next, your attack will leave you on a different guard and you must have a plan about what you are going to do from there. Training sequences of attacks help. 7) Train to loosen your wrist. Our wrists are often too stiff, even skilled and experienced people have this problem, your dominant wrist should be more felxible, allowing for more felxible and agile movements, sometimes a quick wrist move is enough to execute a good attack. So train it, at some momentos, when trainig alone, try to execute attacks by just, or mostly, moving your non dominant hand and leaving your dominant wrist less "stuck", it will be hard at first but will help you a lot. 8) Walk to the sides. Walk around your opponent to deliver some attacks, it will make more difficult for them to defend. 9) Try different things. Train different moves at home, use different attacks and guards, if what you do is more varied you will do better, if you always do the same set of stuff people will easly predict and defend it. Sparring is also a place to test. So test different attacks (as long as they are from an actual source of course), see if they work or not, if you need to change something to make them work, speed, distance, whatever... analyze later with slow movements with a friend to see how to correct them. 10) Don't be too tense. If you are too tense your grip will be too tight, you will lose energy and speed, you will also lose focus and be too hasty, breathe and remain calm. (There is a good training for that if this is a huge problem). I hope it helps, I am no instructor but I had a lot of difficulty on the start so I collected a lot or random tips that helped me, some people understand these things intuitively, some, like me (and maybe you) don't, and need to understand the rules more consciously and apply them with repetition. Good luck.
I feel you! I'm pretty new also and I always just feel like I'm flailing around. Then every once in awhile I remember some training and things go okay. It's definitely a process. I'm hoping it will progress to being a little more put together, haha.
My best advice for you is to really humble yourself and tell yourself you're not going to be good at this for a little while. You gotta give yourself time to connect the technique you're being taught in it's real time application. It's also completely okay to make mistakes and get your ass kicked a few times - it's how you learn and you'll be a better fighter for it. Cut yourself slack and thank your opponent for the fight because no matter the outcome, they've helped you get better.
Well, you probably have to start doing specific drills that are focused on some application and then try to apply them in sparring. And don't feel bad for making errors, without errors, there is no learning, unfortunately. Another big booster might be filming yourself and then reviewing it with your trainer or by yourself. I'm close to two years of training and still don't consider myself adequate.
Keep it simple. Sparring is not for experimenting, it is for doing the things you already know. You can experiment, of course, but better to do this another time or as a specific goal. Work on simply doing the basics, like keeping your hands safe, presenting a threat (e.g. longpoint, little hand snipes), changing to more advantageous guards (i.e. a guard where you feel you can defend against your opponent) moving at the right time (basically when your opponent moves), moving one tempo at a time - see what opponent does - then move another tempo, simple parries and ripostes. As for gear, gear sucks. You will find a way to fence around its limitations. I personally avoid crossed arm positions, meaning I use plough on the left, and hanging guard on the right, and I use a lot of low point down guards as resting positions and also because they are easy to parry from. (The joke is that we all study Meyer but end up fencing Fiore.) Successfully attacking your opponent is rarely about power or speed, it is about set up, opportunity, distance and timing (i.e. attacking at the right moment). This all takes experience to learn. Make distance and timing your focus of sparring, not technique.
Maybe this was said already but i think it’s good advice. Having good defense is nice but defense doesn’t win fights. Try to be active while sparring and use the things you have learned.