I’ve long been fascinated by people who deliver flawless performances requiring complicated skills and that are executed with seeming effortlessness. I’m thinking of people like John Baptiste whose hands wander almost absent-mindedly over the piano keys and unleash the most beautiful, improvised music. Or Danny MacAskill riding his mountain bike with such amazing grace and balance that surely he must be some sort of two-wheeled cyborg, escaped from a DARPA lab. Don’t get me wrong. Hussain Bolt runs crazy fast and is fun to watch. But to my untrained eye it seems that the number of motions that he has had to master to achieve a perfect performance is far fewer than say someone performing a Wushu routine. I’ve always wondered: How many times does one have to repeat such motions not just until one gets them right, but until one never gets them wrong?
I’ve been thinking about this question a great deal over the last several months as I’ve been practicing my first dan speed drills. At my dojang, speed drills provide an opportunity to practice a combination of both speed and technique. They are similar to patterns (kata) in that they consist of a prescribed sequence of moves, but the motion is linear, as opposed to rotating through the compass points, and they are performed as fast as one can and as such, tend to be very anaerobic. Like patterns and other skills, students must demonstrate a certain proficiency in each belt rank’s speed drill in order to be promoted to the next rank.
Stating that we must perform a speed drill “as fast as possible” isn’t quite right. The real goal is to perform it as fast as possible with good technique. Years ago, and for a couple of years, I trained for and participated in a handful of sprint triathlons. Completing a triathlon had always been on my bucket list and in the process of training for the swimming portion, I was very fortunate to come across Terry Laughlin’s blog and his ‘Total Immersion’ approach to swimming. One of the concepts that I learned from his body of work was to never practice struggle or bad technique. He advocated (past tense － sadly, he passed in 2017) that one should develop “gears” for swimming. As implied by the term, one should swim faster in a high gear than a low gear and because of the effort involved, one cannot swim as long in a high gear as in a low gear. But the critical feature of gears is that as the effort/gear increases, the swim technique remains the same. Your body position, catch, pull, arm recovery, etc, should look the same in low gear as it does in high gear. It is decidedly not ok to swim faster only to have your technique become ragged and then fall apart. The proper approach is to try to increase your stroke-per-minute rate and see how long you can continue at that rate before you begin to feel your technique fall apart.
This is the mindset with which I approach my speed drill practice. In class, I’m willing to consistently be “that old guy who always finishes his speed drill last” if it means that my technique is still good. I know that if I continue to push, but maintain good technique, then speed will follow. At least, that’s my hope, and it worked for my swim practice.
Which brings me around again to flawless performances. All of our first dan speed drills have, in their middle, the same set of moves; rear inward punch, rear leg swing kick landing in a side stance, spinning side kick. It’s that rear-leg-swing-kick-into-a-spinning-side-kick that is my bane. That’s the piece that keeps me from finishing the drill at the same time as everyone else.
From the outside, it doesn’t seem like a rear-leg swing kick followed by a style-appropriate spinning side kick should be that hard. But I’m here to tell you that there’s a whole lot going on there. Landing the swing kick in a side stance is the first challenge. First, the kick must be under control the entire time. You can’t just “fire and forget”. You have to recognize that connecting with some imagined target is only the first part of the technique. (And kicking the air is never like kicking a target.) The technique isn’t actually finished until you’ve landed the kicking leg, in this case leaving you in a side stance. But of course you’re not looking down to know exactly where to place that kicking foot so as to be in a good side stance. Instead, you have to feel where the landing should be. To help with that, I placed a length of blue tape on the floor and have kicked over and over and over, trying to develop a sense for a perfect foot placement.
But even if you land in the perfect side stance, you’re at best only half-way through the tricky bits.
I prefer to perform my spinning side kick with a simultaneous twist on the balls of my feet, rather than twisting on my front foot while simultaneously chambering my rear, kicking leg. I feel like this kick is so linear that it’s better to twist and set up for translating all my energy into a forward motion. But this requires a good deal of balance during the twist. When I first started practicing this technique, I had a hard time not falling over. And that was starting from a side stance, not landing a previous kick in a side stance and then immediately moving into the twist for the spinning side kick.
The last tricky bit, and we’re in the home stretch now, is to launch the kick and then, as you rechamber the kicking leg, pivot slightly on your planted foot and land in a good front stance.
The rest of the drill is cake.
So I practice that sequence; swing kick, land, spin, side kick, land. Swing kick, land, spin, side kick, land. Over and over and over. I take notice of where I felt unbalanced or how my side stance wasn’t quite right and work to correct it on the next repetition. Sometimes I try to speed up just a little and maybe I’ll perform a couple of acceptable reps, but then I wobble a bit and convince myself that it’s too soon to go faster. How long until I consistently get it right? How many reps until I never get it wrong? The pursuit slowly transforms into a Quest.
After days and repetitions, the tape begins to wear near the place where my foot lands in the side stance. After more days and more repetitions, the tape has finally worn through and where there was a single piece there are now two. I replace the pieces and keep going.
Is this goal even achievable? Given my age, I know I can’t practice like this for hours without over-stressing a hip flexor or a knee which could take days of reduced activity before things feel right again. Maybe it’s just too late for an old guy like me and my wobbly, slow execution of this drill is as good as it gets.
But what’s the alternative? Give up? Accept faster but bad (perhaps embarrassingly so) technique? It feels like there’s a choice to be made here about something bigger than just learning to perform a drill well. It’s a choice between believing that I could always be a little better, and believing that I’m as good as I’ll ever be. It’s a choice to never stop reaching. To never stop learning. To never stop trying.
It’s time to go replace another piece of tape.
Pil sung.
