There are four categories to classify attacks under.
Three of these are very conventional- lanes, body side, and attack angles. The fourth, degrees of motion, is the thing we ignore.
Lanes:
- About what targets are open to attack.
- If your sword is held in your right hand, to it's right, is the outside lane, left is inside.
- If Florentine, then inside lane is between the two swords, outside lane is, well, outside
- If two handed, forward hand determines, but it matters less
- Breaks down/is less useful when:
- vs hand and a half(forward hand determines lanes, until you let go)
- Attacking, while simultaneously crossing from one lane to the other, tends to be super awkward, more so when the lane boundary is held far out, rather than near.
Target location:
- This is: does the shot target the left side, or right side of the opponent.
- If you are targeting the left side, with a dominant right setup, that's offside shot. And vice-versa.
- If you also cross from one lane to the other while doing so, it's a 'cross'.
- Additionally, you have a 'what body part', vertically were you targeting.
- High,
- Hip,
- Leg.
Attack angles:
- Relative to the expected defense, how does the shot come in?
- Perpendicular
- Easiest to block, easiest to do.
- Parallel
- Almost all 'tricky shots'
- Outside lane- Noob slaying foo(monkey arms).
- Good form should make it so you have few to none of these shots open.
- Inside lane- headshot city
- Stab positioning
- Pocket around shields
- Wrap
- Hit with backside of blade. Requires a roll.
Degrees of Freedom:
The fundamental way to describe the motion of a system. We normally ignore it. The arm has 7:
- Shoulder-
- pitch
- yaw
- roll
- Elbow
- pitch
- Hand + Elbow
- Roll
- Hand
- pitch
- yaw
Thoughts on these things classifications:
Lanes are an extremely useful abstraction for me, in the moment. I can control the enemy, and offer myself in the appropriate ways with them.Target location, not so much. When I want to hit a point, I want to hit a point- I don't care where that point happens to be. I don't typically get out 'moves' to target that location. I'd rather develop a set of principles, that allow me to go from where I'm at, to hit where I'd like, as fluidly as possible.
Currently, knowledge of this type is implicitly transmitted, as a set of 'special cases': ie 'moves- here's how to do a hip scoop'. And if you learn all the moves, odds are, your body will get the idea, and act according to those principles, in unknown situations.
I'd rather puzzle out the underlying abstractions, and be sure the moves I make up on the fly are sound. The other option is to limit the space of possibilities, and make sure you get back to your known space asap. I guess that's cool too.
Attack angles- Super critical. Love using it in the moment. Mostly when targeting shots. How do I have to come in, to hit that thing? If I attack it with a wrap, it's open, chop it's not. Most parallel shots are either specialist trick shots(stab setup, pocket shot), or shouldn't be open for people with good guards(monkey arms).
Degrees of freedom- Finally, this is where I got bogged down, trying to describe shots last time. People don't intuitively have these sorted. Most newbs, have a hard time, just using one, even if you hold/restrain the others to help them out. The more experienced a fighter you are, the more you tend to have isolated the muscles involved in each degree of freedom.
Also, because we don't use these concepts, shots are hard to teach. Using this language would make describing shot mechanics simple, and precise, once you got used to it. I'm going to start internally thinking through what each joint is best at, and why.
