Your parents are recording everything. Are you actually watching any of it?

Walk into any regional or national fencing tournament and look at the parent section behind the strips. You’ll see the same thing at every single one: a wall of phones held up, recording every touch. Parents at SYCs, RJCCs, NACs, they’re all doing it. Some of them have phone mounts clamped to chairs. Some are holding iPads at arm’s length for two hours straight. The dedication to capturing footage is honestly impressive.

Now here’s the problem. Most fencers never watch any of it.

Or if they do, it’s to grab a highlight touch, a nice fleche that landed clean, a circle-6 jump flick that even your coach would be proud of, and send it to a friend or post it somewhere. That’s fun, but it’s not productive. It’s the fencing equivalent of flipping to the back of a textbook to look at the pictures. The actual learning is in the pages you skipped.

Your parents are building a library of some of the most valuable training material you could ask for. Every bout recorded at a tournament is a chance to study yourself competing under real pressure, against real opponents, with real consequences. No practice bout will ever replicate that. And yet, the footage sits in a camera roll, buried under vacation photos and screenshots, never opened again.

This needs to change. If you’re serious about improving as a competitive fencer, reviewing your bout videos with intention is one of the highest-value things you can do between tournaments. But watching footage without a plan is almost as useless as not watching it at all. You need a system.

Why Most Fencers Get Nothing Out of Watching Their Bouts

The typical approach to bout review goes something like this: a fencer sits down, hits play, watches the whole thing straight through, and comes away with a vague feeling about how it went. Maybe they think “I fenced well in that one” or “that ref was terrible.” Then they close the video and move on.

That’s not a review. That’s entertainment.

The issue is that without structure, your brain defaults to emotional memory. You remember how the bout felt (frustrating, exciting, nervous) but you don’t actually extract useful information from what happened. You don’t identify patterns. You don’t catch the moment your tactical plan fell apart. You don’t notice that your opponent made the same preparation three times in a row and you never adjusted.

Emotional reactions also distort what you think you saw. A fencer who lost a close DE will watch the video convinced the other person got lucky, when in reality the opponent made a clear tactical shift in the second period that went completely unanswered. A fencer who won big might skip the review entirely because they assume everything went perfectly, missing the fact that their distance was off for half the bout and the opponent just wasn’t good enough to punish it.

Structure is the fix. You need a repeatable framework: a set of specific questions you answer every single time you sit down with a bout video. It forces you to think critically instead of passively. It gives you concrete takeaways instead of feelings.

Build a Bout Review Template

The most effective way to review footage is to have a written template of questions you answer for every bout you watch. Write the answers down. Not in your head. Actually write them. In a notebook, in a notes app, wherever. The act of putting it in writing forces you to be specific and honest.

Here’s a template that covers the areas most competitive fencers need to think about:

1. What was your emotional state going into the bout?

This is the starting point, and most fencers never think about it. Were you confident? Nervous? Flat? Angry from a previous bout? Distracted because you’d been sitting around for two hours between pools and DEs?

Your emotional state walking onto the strip has a massive influence on how you fence the first few touches, and those early touches often set the tone for the entire bout. If you can start identifying patterns here (“I always fence tight in my first DE after a long wait” or “I come out too aggressive when I’m frustrated from a bad pool”) you can start addressing those patterns in training and in your pre-bout routine.

2. Did you have a tactical plan going into the bout, and what was it?

Be specific. “Fence well” is not a plan. “Stay patient in the middle and draw their attack so I can take the parry” is a plan. “Push tempo early because this opponent doesn’t handle pressure well” is a plan.

If the honest answer is “no, I didn’t have a plan,” that’s important to write down too. One of the clearest separators between developing fencers and experienced competitors is whether they walk onto the strip with tactical intention or just react to whatever happens.

If you did have a plan, write down what it was before you watch the video. You want to capture what you thought you were going to do before the footage shows you what you actually did.

3. Watching the bout, were you able to follow through on your tactical plan?

Now you press play. And this is where things get interesting, because the gap between what you planned and what you executed is where the real learning happens.

Maybe your plan was to control distance and wait for the opponent to over-extend, but watching the video you can see that you were actually stepping forward and initiating nearly every action. Maybe you planned to mix up your attacks but the video shows you went to the same preparation-attack four times in a row.

This isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about building awareness. The fencer who can identify “I had a good plan but I couldn’t execute it under pressure” has a very different training goal than the fencer who “didn’t have a plan at all” or the fencer who “followed the plan but the plan didn’t work against this opponent.”

4. Was there a turning point, for you or for the opponent?

Almost every competitive bout has a moment where the momentum shifts. Sometimes it’s obvious: a fencer goes up 3-0 and then the other fencer rattles off five straight touches. Sometimes it’s subtle: one fencer starts taking half a step back on every exchange and the other fencer reads it and starts pushing.

Find that turning point. What was the score? What happened tactically? And just as importantly, what was the emotional shift? Did you get tight after giving up the lead? Did the opponent get visibly frustrated after a call went against them and then start rushing?

Turning points are where bouts are won and lost, and most fencers are completely unaware of them while they’re happening. Watching them on video trains you to recognize those moments in real time during future competitions.

5. Immediately after the bout ended, did you understand why you won or lost?

This one requires some honesty. Right after a win, most fencers feel great and assume they fenced well. Right after a loss, most fencers are frustrated and blame something external: the ref, the opponent’s style, bad luck on a simultaneous action.

Watch the video and compare it to what you believed at the time. Often, a fencer who thought they lost because of bad calls will see on video that the calls were actually correct and the real issue was something tactical they missed entirely. A fencer who thought they won because of great bladework might see that their opponent simply ran out of gas in the third period.

The goal here is to close the gap between emotional narrative and objective reality. The faster you can do that after a bout, the better you’ll get at processing competition results in a healthy, productive way.

6. What specific technical or tactical patterns do you notice?

Now go back through the video and look at the details. Some things to pay attention to:

Distance and footwork. Where are you relative to your opponent on most exchanges? Are you consistently too close, too far, or managing distance well? Watch your recovery after attacks. Are you getting stuck in the opponent’s distance?

Preparation and setup. Are you setting up your attacks with preparation, or are you launching from a standstill? Is your opponent reading your preparation because you’re doing the same thing every time?

Response to pressure. What do you do when the opponent starts pushing you? Do you hold your ground and take the parry? Do you retreat to the end of the strip? Do you panic and throw a counter-attack from too far away?

Between-touch behavior. What are you doing between touches? Are you resetting with purpose, or are you rushing from one touch to the next without listening to your coach or giving yourself a moment to think? Watch your body language. It tells you (and your opponent) more than you think.

Referee interactions. Are you adjusting your fencing based on how the referee is calling the action? If the ref is consistently giving the attack in preparation to your opponent on your press forward to attack, did you make any adjustments, or did you keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different call?

7. What is one thing you want to work on in your next practice?

End every review with a single, actionable takeaway. Not five things. One thing. If you try to fix everything at once, you fix nothing.

“I need to work on my recovery distance after my attack falls short” is actionable. “I need to fence better” is not. Pick the one thing that showed up most clearly in the video and bring it to your next lesson or practice session. Tell your coach what you saw. That conversation alone is worth more than most fencers get out of an entire tournament’s worth of footage.

How to Actually Watch the Video

A few practical notes on the review process itself.

Don’t watch it the same day. Emotions are too raw, especially after a loss. Give yourself at least a day before you sit down with the footage. You want enough distance to be objective but not so much that you’ve forgotten the context.

Watch it more than once. The first time through, just watch the full bout to get the overall picture and answer the first five questions from the template. Then go back through a second time focused on the tactical and technical details. You’ll catch things on the second watch that you completely missed the first time.

Use slow motion and pause. This isn’t a movie. Stop the video. Rewind. Watch a specific exchange three times in a row. The details that matter in fencing happen in fractions of a second. Normal speed isn’t enough to see them clearly.

Watch your opponent too. It’s natural to only watch yourself, but your opponent’s patterns are just as important. What did they do that worked? What preparation did they use before their attacks? If you’re likely to fence this person again (and in competitive fencing, you probably will), studying their tendencies is serious competitive preparation.

Making This a Habit

The fencers who get the most out of bout review are the ones who make it routine, not something they do once after a bad tournament and then forget about. After every competition, pick your two or three most important bouts: the close ones, the ones against tough opponents, the ones that didn’t go the way you expected, and run them through the template.

Over time, you’ll start building a record of your competitive patterns. You’ll notice themes: maybe you always fence poorly in your first bout after a long break, or maybe you consistently lose the tactical plot in the second period of DEs. Those patterns are invisible without consistent review. Once you see them, you can train to fix them.

Your parents are putting in the work to capture this footage for you. The least you can do is actually use it. The fencers who treat bout video as a serious development tool, not just a highlight reel, are the ones who improve fastest between tournaments. It’s one of the few things in competitive fencing where the effort-to-reward ratio is massively in your favor. All it takes is a template, some honesty, and the willingness to watch yourself critically.

At Precision Athletics, we emphasize the complete competitive development process, and that includes what happens between tournaments. We work with our students on tactical preparation, bout analysis, and the mental side of competition so that every tournament experience feeds directly into measurable improvement. If your fencer is looking for coaching that goes beyond just technique on the strip, contact us to learn about our intermediate and advanced programs.