Although it doesn’t have quite the same following as sports like football, soccer, baseball, or basketball, fencing is continually gaining popularity as a sport. According to the Candlewood Fencing Center official website, colleges as prestigious as Yale, Harvard, and Notre Dame all offer fencing classes.

Perhaps one reason why fencing is gaining more and more participants each year is because it is not a physically selective sport. You don’t need to have a certain build or a specific weight in order to enjoy and do well in fencing. Anybody can become a good fencer, no matter what their physique might be.

That’s not to say that fencing doesn’t require a great amount of training and, like any other sport, a small degree of talent. Many people who have only a passing familiarity with fencing are inclined to dismiss it as easy, requiring little to no skill. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fencing requires not only a great amount of physical training to build up stamina, speed, coordination, and agility; it is also a highly cerebral sport, and the majority of successful fencers need mental strength in order to read, predict, and counter their opponent’s strategy and to pull off the hundreds of complex movements.

Fencing is a sport that is more individual-oriented than many other popular sports. In fencing, the individual wins and loses all on his own, adding, I believe, an extra competitive edge to the sport that heightens the thrill of winning and adds a greater resolve during defeat.