If you're looking for the skeleton of a practice session, this is what we do; adjust to taste.
1) Stretching & warming up
2) Individual footwork. done with sword in hand, in a guard position; moving it from guard to guard as you get more comfortable. The purpose, here, is to practice getting the footwork correct.
3) The footwork slides into practicing the major cuts, again, as individuals.
4) Footwork & distance drill in pairs or groups: One person leads, moving about, and the others attempt to maintain the same spatial relation to the leader. Again, the focus is really footwork and seeing it affect the distance.
These first 4 steps also serve to get your mind and body working together again, centering your attention on the training.
5) We then move into drills of various kinds. We usually try to learn one new technique per week, and try to go over anything we feel needs work. So we'll do drills on specific attacks or parries. This is one of the two biggest time blocks in the training, and exactly what the drills are varies a lot.
6) Sparring! Everybody's favorite part. <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> Sparring sometimes shifts briefly back into drill if we decide we don't understand some technique as well as we want. Stop, discuss, figure it out, drill it... and back to sparring. <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> Sparring is last because everybody's probably at their best at the beginning of it. You've rehearsed your footwork and your blade work, your mind is focused.... now it's time to put it to work.
In my experience - mostly from sport fencing, which is what I stole this regimen from - if you go straight to sparring, you wind up executing technique badly and thus sparring badly.
Once you're much better, it may be worthwhile trying the "sparring first" on occasion to see what bad habits appear, so they can be corrected. (I'm not that good yet. <img src="/forum/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" /> )
