It is a delight to me to point out to coaches that one of the best books for fencing isn't a book about fencing at all, but a book about tennis written more than fifty years ago
Gallwey's postulate in The Inner Game of Tennis is very simple: when trying to perform at our highest levels, our own mind is the biggest drag on our performance. We carry on an inner dialogue between our ego-driven mind and our intuitive mind about our results on the court. The ego brain (which Gallwey calls "Self 1") is constantly interfering with the actions we already know how to perform (controlled by our intuition, or "Self 2") in an attempt to pass judgment and correct us. The teaching of the Inner Game of Tennis is an attempt to quiet the ego voice in your head to allow you to perform more intuitively—you'll often hear of someone fencing "out of their head"—in an ideal performance state of detachment and observation.
The example I've heard most often about the conflict between the ego brain and the intuitive brain is that babies—when learning to walk—don't judge themselves on their performance. They try to stand and take a step and they fall down. The baby doesn't immediately think to itself: "Walking is really difficult. I'm not that good at it. I am going to stick to crawling." That's "ego brain" behavior: passing judgment and making decisions before all the information is in. The wonderful thing about a baby is it is too young to have developed an ego, so it's the baby's intuitive brain that is working front and center in the process of learning to walk. The intuitive baby brain says: "Hmmm. I fell down. Maybe I leaned too far forward with my big head. I'll try something different and try to walk again." Eventually, of course, the baby learns to walk and the process becomes natural.
What Gallwey is espousing in The Inner Game is what is now known as the practice of "mindfulness". Back in 1972, this was a very new concept, and this idea of "effortless effort" lead to the popularity of the book. Since the publication of The Inner Game there has been a lot more exploration of how the brain works, and Gallwey's ideas has been explored in more detail in other best sellers about intuition and thought, the most well known being Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (which is an excellent book).
If you are a teacher of fencing, The Inner Game gives examples of an approach to teaching that doesn't rely on a lot of verbal instruction from the coach. The Inner Game approach is a more intuitive way to teach. The Inner Game asks your students to be mindful of what their bodies are doing and what the results are when hey perfonm an action, while comparing the result to the goal. Gallwey wants your students (and you) to see mistakes in a detached, non-ego way, and to encourage students to move in a natural way to perform the actions they want. Gallwey doesn't advocate the constant chatter some coaches have in lessons in which they constantly correct and criticize their students. He urges coaches to give the student a chance to find the natural rhythm that they posses in learning to use their bodies.This leads to a faster learning curve as the student spends less time fretting over past performances and looking with interest on their next performance of an action, building positive associations and engrams in their body as opposed to negative ones.
Gallwey reminds all of us that our students are not their mistakes. I feel that the ideas in this book were a pre-cursor to the "Growth Mindset" advocated by Carol Dweck, which has also found popularity among sports psychologists, and is well worth a read as part of your education as a fencing coach.
There are a few downsides to this book, the chief one being that Gallwey spends a lot of time repeating the same message about trusting your intuition when executing actions and detachment from mistakes. When I re-read this book I find myself automatically skipping over the constant repetition. The first time reader is going to find these sections unusually "preachy" and perhaps a tad irritating. The book also steers a bit towards mysticism and a bit of psychobabble at times. I attribute this to the era in which it was written (the 1970's) and the lack of general understanding about ideal performance states in sport. I suspect that if this book had been written more recently, the language would be considerably tightened up and the book would be much shorter.
Another fault of The Inner Game it is long on personal anecdotes about the author himself. I would have like to have heard more about his students (of which there is some discussion) as well as how his approach overcome much more difficult situations with students who had more challenges than simply being "a beginner". Some case history of his teaching methods would have been interesting.
A second observation is that while the book addresses more than just tennis in its philosophy, it IS about tennis and there are some long sections about tennis actions (such as the serve) that might not resonate with fencers. However, while the serve doesn't have an corresponding action in fencing, the description of how Gallwey looks at the serve and how it is corrected can be valuable as an example of how the Inner Game method works.
In short, The Inner Game of Tennis might be a bit dated after all these years, but I think it has a valuable role in any coache's library as a simple model of Human Behavior and the learning process (with its many pitfalls). It's a book I re-read every few years, and constantly reminds me that sometimes trying hard IS the problem.
Copyright © 2022 by Allen Evans. This article may be reproduced freely, as long as it remains unmodified and his copyright notice is included.