My friend and one-time colleague, Phil Carson, wrote a book this year. He asked me to read an early draft and give him some feedback. I wrote a review. He put it as the foreword to his book. It was an honour; and with his permission I’ve reproduced it below. You can buy his book from any reputable bookstore, or Amazon.
I first met Professor Professor Carson in the winter of 2012. He reminded me of James Bond. At least, the real life version: polite, erudite, intellectual, and a man who knows how to land a hit.
His latest book, “The Constraints-Led Fencing Coach”, is a masterwork of fencing pedagogy that inherits these characteristics from its creator. On the surface it seems simple: the key to coaching successful fencers comes from creating contexts of constraints – things that indirectly control what the fencer can do, and can’t do – that guide the student-fencer through an exploration of how to win.
Fencers are not robots. They do not download repertoires of moves, refine technique, then tie them together in algorithms to win a bout. The fencers with the finest technique, superlative physiology, complex combos, or broadest repertoires … they don’t always win. We who fence and coach have known this for a long time. Yet our programs for teaching fencing remain conceptually grounded in these ideas. Fundamental repertoires. Correct technique. Standard tactics. Overall strength and conditioning.
This paradox lies at the heart of this book. As Professor Carson asks in an early chapter: “Why does fencing coach education still rest on centuries-old ideas? On myth and path dependency? On action–reaction models borrowed from classical mechanics? On a philosophical separation of mind and body? Essentially, why were we still coaching as if athletes were machines to be programmed rather than as people learning to act in complex, uncertain environments?” Professor Carson lays this challenge out compellingly and comprehensively, using anecdotes and analogies and attributions to prior works from many fields to approach the topic.
I imagine that for many of us, fencers and coaches, these challenges would spark recognition. We’ve all known, or at least suspected, that there was something wrong, or at least disjointed, about the traditional pedagogy of fencing. But what to do about it? We’ve done okay so far: we teach our fencers like we’re creating “finely programmed machines”, or at least good pupils, and we throw them into bouts. Some of them will figure it out eventually, and grow into a complex fencer with the ever so elusive ‘combat sense’ – in Professor Carson’s terms, an “adaptive, self-organising organisms continuously evolving within their performance ecology”. We outsourced that part of the coaching responsibility to the competition circuit.
But what if we flipped it around? Start with the ecological approach, and work through the programmatic parts later, as needed?
Over the course of a dozen chapters, Professor Carson takes the reader through different aspects of this constraints-led approach in a encompassing tour of contemporary research and practice. He veers, almost dizzyingly, from academic psychologists to top-order coaches in different disciplines to the experiences of on-the-piste fencers; Ted Lasso makes a cameo appearance. There are practical frameworks for developing and adapting a coach’s current pedagogies to this approach, and specific methods and example games to get started from scratch.
Professor Carson has put a lot into this book. And, if you’re a long-standing fencing coach, a lot into this book that will hit hard in sensitive places. It’s easy to be taken aback at times; there were many occasions where I felt a reflexive rejection rise, followed by a few days of reflection residing in the back of my mind.
Classic hits include:
“The problem isn’t that technique is bad, it’s that it’s context blind?”
I can live with that.
“Sensazione. ‘Coaches, avoid long speeches,’ says one maestro. ‘Be the ideal version of their opponent’.”
Si, capisco – we’ve been doing it for decades.
“‘There is no footwork,’ insists another. ‘Only feeling for distance’.”
Hold up there, sport; let’s not throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water.
A whole chapter titled “The Tactical Wheel has Fallen Off”.
Has it now? Someone roll me the wheel so I can nail the man to it.
Controversial, this book is. But not wrong.
There is this disturbed dissonance between current coaching methods (and certifications) and what we know as actual fencers and coaches. We don’t win by executing the right routines; we perceive and adapt and outfight our equally adaptive opponent. Professor Carson lays out the case and methods for rebuilding the coaching approach from this basis: to start by exploring feeling, timing, rhythm, opportunity; to recognise that actions, tactics, and strategies are the same thing at different timescales; to link it all together through the cultivation of a fencer as a whole organism within the ecology of the sport, with the coach using constraints to create the context in which the fencer can grow.
I suspect that while constraints-led coaching is a new idea, it will prove to be a foundational idea in fencing coaching. But new ideas, however important, are fragile things that need a sheltered place to grow until they reach robust maturity. They rarely survive in dense and contested environments. It is perhaps no surprise that the ideas in this book would come from the edge of the real and fencing worlds, in Scotland, on the banks of the turbulent River Tay. I am confident it will now thrive and take root in far more accessible places; in my case, within easy reach on my bookshelf.
John Bradstock Chow
Author: “Make the Cut – Sabre Fencing for Adults”
March 2026