I love the speed of our
combat. I love the space where my mind goes, where I can understand how we
move, where I know the relation of how fast a person can move, and the distance
they have to travel. For me this is the heart of combat. Getting in the zone,
and understanding the chaos of the world around me. Intuiting the things that
normally I don’t even recognize that I perceive, and achieving flow state.
For me, this is kind of
the elephant in the room on the topic of speed. That's because I have avoided,
blatantly, the topic of muscle memory. You might wonder why muscle memory is
the elephant in the room when you're talking about the speed of mind in fighting,
but let me explain.
If you ask someone you
consider to be one of the best fighters in the game, what, or how they think
while they are fighting, they might describe a certain level of tactics, like
creating openings, or being aware of stance, or positioning, but often they
will say that they don't really think. That they in fact just sort of let
themselves go, that their body knows what to do separate of the mind.
So then you find
yourself asking some questions like “How do I separate mind and body?!” or “How
do I let my body go on auto-pilot?” or maybe just “wtf?” Well that's the
problem, muscle memory is sort of this ominous concept, that public forums
don't really describe well. Your muscles don't remember things. It's kind of a
misnomer. Some would rather describe it as a memory for your muscles,
that is something I can get behind.
Everything you read on
muscle memory will emphasize on quality before quantity. They recommend to
start slow, and make sure your motions are correct, and that your body is
learning the correct motion, rather than some weird motion that isn't useful
for what you're doing. This is why muscle memory will come up most often in
sports like Golf, and arts like playing the guitar, more often than say,
football. This is also a problem in our sport, where the combat is not broken
down into a series of labeled moves, where we don’t have “rabbit punches” or
“snake stance”, we’re made up of a jumble of things that people have brought to
the game through the years via trial and error, or outside experience. With
some notable exceptions, of course, like the “arm block” for example.
So what can you do?
Fighting at half speed is a great way to practice your shots and blocks and
allow yourself to process what the other fighter's openings are, and allow them
to process and exploit your own. As good as it is for me, I hate this exercise.
It really is the way to go, plenty of martial arts have been practicing slowly
for thousands of years, learn the perfect step the right way, so that when you
need to take it quickly, you take it correctly. I get it. You probably do too.
But as I said, speed is my drug, and I would much rather be moving at some
quasi-imperceptible blur than moving at half speed.
Is there another way to
go about it? I'd like to think so, but it's more theory than time tested
practice, like fighting at half speed, so you'll have to give me a bit of
faith. I'm going to talk about pattern recognition. I like to think of a
good volley as a series of actions or behaviors. What I mean by a volley is a
series of parries and attacks that lead to a fight being more than just a
single strike and done.
I like to think of a
fighter's stance as foreshadowing to the strike that they are going to make.
Huh? Fighting is like a rainbow. What? Limited and infinite. Each stance can
vary from person to person, infinitely, but each stance also is within a
limited predictable spectrum of stances based on the idea that the human body
can only move in a semi-limited fashion. So just like the rainbow, which is a
representation of an infinite amount of colors, we can break down each color,
or stance, into a limited set of categories which are weak against specific
attacks, and lead to strikes from certain directions, and to certain openings
in your own stance.
When you enter into a
fight, you should look at your opponent and discern what their stance's
weaknesses are. Really look. What does the positioning of their feet tell you?
Do they lead with their weapon hand, or their off hand? Are they right handed
or left handed? Do they guard their head? Remember that stance. After the
fight, ask yourself, what was their opening swing? Where did it go? The
more often you do this, the faster the answers will come to you. The more
people you fight, the more you will be able to recognize the variations between
them.
Why is this important?
What you're doing, essentially, is setting up a stimulus for yourself, and your
actions are conditioned responses. Similar to Pavlov's dogs, where they began to
salivate at the sound of a bell, you want yourself to react to openings in your
opponent's guard, and block opponent's attacks based on the first instinct of
their appearance. You want Stance A, to tell you to attack B, and have their
block C lead you to attack D. And you want to recognize the difference between
fighter 1's stance A and fighter 2's stance A as easily as you can switch
between two different fonts.
Now you're probably
thinking to yourself something about predictability. “If I answer Stance A with
attack B every time, my opponents will notice.” Or something like that. You're
right, they will, two things. First of all; you're already predictable, you're
just worried about being -too- predictable. Secondly, the more patterns you
teach yourself, the more your stimuli will generalize, you'll find yourself
recognizing stance F in the middle of attack B, and changing attack B into
attack G on the fly.
If you think of your
opponent's action as a question, and your action as the answer, then you can
also look at it this way. If I ask you the question, “What is 2+2?” you will
probably answer “4”, right? That's because generally speaking, that's the
answer a person is looking for when you ask that question, however, 2+2 also =
5-1, and an infinite other answers equally as well, but 4 is the simplest, best
answer, and that is the one you should be looking for in a fight. This is why
crazy theatrical, spin moves usually don't work within our system, without some
crazy amount of deception going on, to give yourself the opening that you need
to pull it off. Just as with 2+2, with practice, and years of answering the
question, if you learn to recognize patterns, and ask yourself the right
questions, you'll see the answer you need to any question an opponent can ask.
Essentially, if you want
to be faster, you need to practice more. You need to work hard, and exercise,
and you need to think and strategise. The secret to speed, is practice. Go to
practice. Fight as many different people as you can.
I hope you enjoyed this mini-series as an introduction to speed in our game, and as always I hope to see you on the field,
Keith/Saegan
