Olympic fencing's pretty hyperspecialized. Especially foil and saber. It's what you get when you take training for dueling weapons (mainly smallswords and Hungarian dueling sabers) and pile on a couple hundred years of refinements that make scoring or other aspects of sport practice easier or safer, or were originally intended as teaching tools (i.e. the right-of-way rules), but also take it further away from its roots: by now this includes everything from the shape of the piste to the scoring rules to the details of the uniforms. A lot of martial arts go this way eventually: kendo post-WWII is probably the closest parallel, but you can also see it happening with judo and Tae Kwon Do.
Some aspects and schools of thought are more baroque than others, of course. I'm an epeeist, and my main teacher was into the classical side of the sport, so my approach to it was a little more martial-artsy than average. And even at its most elegantly refined it'll still teach you a lot about timing and distance.
(Reaction time isn't as important as you'd think, incidentally; being able to read other people's body language will get you farther. There was a seventy-year-old man in my old club who was by far the best fencer there.)
Reaction time isn't as important as you'd think, incidentally; being able to read other people's body language will get you farther.
Then the nonfluent body language is probably explained by people trying to move in ways that are hard to read.
One useful little concept that a friend and I have is that of the antiskill. Like a normal skill, an antiskill gives you both the ability and the affordance to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. The difference between a skill and an antiskill is that a skill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are positive on net, while an antiskill gives you the ability and affordance to do things that are negative on net.
For instance, my friend believes that dancing is often an antiskill, because it gives you an affordance to dance rather than have interesting conversations while at parties, and he considers having interesting conversations to be much more valuable than dancing-- therefore, knowing how to dance serves primarily to enable choices that are bad on net.
I disagree with the specific point in this case, but I nevertheless think it's a good example because it illustrates another key principle of skills and antiskills-- whether something is a skill or an antiskill is context-dependent. If dancing will largely prevent you from having interesting conversations, it may well be an antiskill-- but if you go to a lot of nightclubs where loud music makes conversation difficult, knowing how to dance seems very useful indeed!
Another example is the skill of knowing how to fix computers. In many respects this is very useful, and can indeed lead to a profitable career in IT. But-- as I'm sure many of you may have experienced-- having your friends and family know that you know how to fix computers can be very negative on net!
Overall, I find the skill/antiskill framework quite useful when it comes to navigating what sorts of skills, abilities, and knowledge I should acquire. Before choosing my next priority, I often pause to think:
Using this framework has enabled me to discern strengths and weaknesses that I had previously not considered, and in some cases those strengths and weaknesses have proven decisive to my planning.