#daily lil rant
Combat sports, whether full contact or not, are skill sports. That is to say that skill generally has a greater impact on results than athleticism.
That’s debatable. Even before we discuss them as alternatives, athleticism isn’t a single discrete attribute, and neither is skill. Hell, strength is a skill, as StrongFirst folks love to say.
Athleticism might include absolute strength, explosivity, muscular endurance… and those are just different kinds of strength. Then we can talk about cardio-vascular endurance, and things like having a Jon Jones or Michael Phelps type “perfect freakish build for your sport”. Some kinds of athleticism are relatively fixed attributes, like reach, while others are much more open to improvement by training.
Skill, too, can come in many kinds, from tactical acumen to technical perfection to mindset. Most of these are trainable, even if an individual will retain strong habits or preferences.
Nevertheless, I’d say that combat sports, especially non-full contact ones like HEMA, are skill sports as skill levels have more of an impact than athletic levels. This isn’t to say that skill always beats athleticism, but skill difference is more important to the result than athleticism differences between competitors.
Athletic supremacy can certainly make up for skill deficiency. What is less discussed is that athleticism’s impact on performance isn’t just a matter of binaries (as the Heavy Hands folks say, you’re either faster than them, or slower, quantifying it doesn’t add much) but of adequacy.
Matches go on for fixed times or numbers of exchanges. It isn’t necessary to be able to outlast the opponent as long as you can fence that many exchanges. If you’re going to gas on exchange 15 and he’s going to gas on exchange 11, but the match is best of 10 exchanges - does it matter? Well, it may be that you can push your pace higher if you aim to also gas on exchange 11 and so win more of those 10 exchanges, but the point is that with sufficient endurance you won’t simply lose by exhaustion like you would if you only had 7 rounds in the tank.
Similarly, it doesn’t significantly affect your fencing if you can do the full splits or not, but it will affect it if you don’t have the flexibility to make a normal lunge and recovery.
It’s nice to be more athletic than your opponent, but it’s necessary to meet this minimal level of athleticism. And the sad truth is that (at least in the HEMA scene here) a great many people don’t.
What to do about it? Coming soon in Part 2.
