Can Sleep Affect How You Fence?

Sep 22

3 min read

Notes From the International Fencing Research Committee Conference (IFRC)

This summer, I signed up for the 2026 IFRC Knowledge Exchange Forum, a virtual conference focused on fencing research.

One of the first presentations I watched was called Sleep, Recovery, and Performance in Female Fencers: Unique Physiological and Psychological Considerations, presented by Danielle Kamis and Sudiptho Paul.

The presentation focused specifically on female fencers and included some factors that don't apply to me. But it also made me think more about something I've recently become interested in: how sleep and recovery might affect fencing performance.

Why Sleep Might Matter in Fencing

Fencing is fast.

Sometimes you have a fraction of a second to see what your opponent is doing and decide how to react.

The presentation discussed several areas that may be affected by insufficient sleep that seem especially relevant to fencing, including reaction time, decision-making, attention, emotional regulation and physical recovery.

That caught my attention.

When I think about my own tournaments, those are all things that can make a difference.

A slow reaction can mean losing a touch.

A bad decision can mean attacking at the wrong time.

Losing focus can change a bout.

And getting frustrated after losing several touches can sometimes make everything worse.

Tournaments Create Their Own Sleep Problems

Another interesting part of the presentation was the discussion about competition schedules.

Fencers sometimes compete early in the morning. Other times, DE rounds can continue late into the day. National competitions can involve multiple events over several days.

Then there is travel.

For the SJCC in Las Vegas, I flew about five hours after a busy week of school and fencing practice. I remember arriving tired and needing time to recover before competing.

That experience was one of the reasons I recently started paying more attention to recovery and tracking some of my data using WHOOP.

At the time, I mostly thought about whether I felt tired.

Now I'm wondering if there is a way to actually measure whether recovery affects how I perform.

The Night Before a Tournament

The presentation also discussed psychological stress and sleep.

This is another part that I could relate to.

Before an important tournament, it isn't always easy to completely forget about fencing and go to sleep. You can think about who you might fence, how you will do, or what result you want.

I've written before about how putting too much pressure on myself affected my fencing at a past Summer Nationals.

What I hadn't really thought about was the possibility of a cycle:

You worry about the competition.

You sleep worse.

Poor sleep may make it harder to manage stress and stay focused.

And then that can affect how you fence.

Another Variable?

Recently, I've been working on a project using fencing competition data.

One of the questions I've been exploring is whether we can predict fencing results.

The obvious place to start is ranking and seeding. A higher-ranked fencer should probably beat a lower-ranked fencer more often.

But upsets happen.

So what else matters?

Strength of opponent?

Something I Want to Test

Since I already use WHOOP, I may have an opportunity to experiment with this using my own data.

For future competitions, I could track things like sleep duration, recovery score and strain and compare them with my tournament performance.

I don't have enough data yet to know if there will be a pattern.

Maybe my recovery score will predict how I fence.

Maybe it won't.

But that's what I like about the question.

Instead of assuming that something matters, I can collect the data and see what happens.

And maybe, over time, I'll understand a little more about what happens between being ready to fence on paper—and actually being ready to fence that day.

References: https://the-ifrc.com/program