Speed kills. When you drive, that is what they say. In the martial arts, it can kill progress.
When I first started Bujinkan, I befriended someone senior to me and he had me over at his house to watch some videos. Back in the 80s, you could watch all the videos on the Bujinkan available in one afternoon.
He put one on by a guy named Robert Bussey and asked me to notice things. Even though it was VHS and not DVD, we could slow the tape and see some details. He pointed out that when we slowed the sections of Bussey doing things at full speed, his motions were choppy and his muscles worked against each other. When Bussey was demonstrating at slow speed, there was none of the twitches and wasted movements that he showed when he was trying to do things for real. When we watched tapes of Japanese shihan doing things at speed, there also was none of the wasted movement in what they did.
“This is what happens when you train fast. You ingrain these types of things in you without knowing it,” he said.
I took the lesson to heart. I also had it repeated to me by people I respect and with quite obvious skill over the decades since.
Some make fun of slow training. But Rory Miller made an important comment when he pointed out that no one who trains slow has ever fought slow when things hit the fan. The key thing people say they have problems with is dealing with attacks at speed. Well, when working with someone else you can have them attack at speed and get you used to that easily. Not all training has to be slow of course. But when you are working out on your own, no one is attacking you, so why train at speed? And if you want to deal with attacks at speed, in my experience working with some traditional weapons in paired partner exercises is about the best you can do. Swords and sticks coming at your head have an advantage over fists in the speed at which they travel, so you get used to working with things coming at you fine enough.
There are two advantages to slow training, preventing errors and training in flow.
One of my Japanese teachers put it best. When you move fast, it is easy to fool yourself into thinking that you did everything fine. When you slow things down, you are better able to see extra movements you don’t need to make, mistakes and other things. That allows you to eliminate them. As one person said, smooth is fast. To get smooth, you need to get rid of extra movements. To find those extra movements, you need to go slow. So slow training leads to fast action.
Or, as I like to say, martial arts are kind of like sex. If you aren’t doing it well, speeding up won’t make it any better.
Another teacher pointed out that if we really wanted to get good, instead of fast training, we needed to get deep in our stances. This slowed down what we could do, but amplified what we could tell about our movements. In real combat we would naturally rise a bit and make our movements smaller, so we should train lower than we hope to fight at. The low stances also built up the legs.
The second advantage of training slow is less know, and is developing flow. If you look at the masters in Japan, they move seamlessly from one technique to another. Look at amateurs and you will note that they are rather like newbies to driving learning to use the brake. They speed along at full throttle, only to come to a complete stop before starting up again.
If you train faster than you can flow into the next move, then you are training yourself to stop and start. You are drilling into yourself the habit of breaking the momentum and giving the enemy a chance to pick up your next motion.
I am not saying you can pick up flow easily even by slow training. It takes countless hours building the habit of flowing from one move to another without any gaps. Some people reject slow training for that reason, preferring to be speedy in a short period of time by means of fast training. But that leads to short term gains, long term pain as they habits they build destroys their ability to get to the very highest level. If you had to fight for your life next month, I can understand taking the quick route in favor of long term gains. This goes for sports where people in their 40s are often considered over the hill. But I hope to still be around in a few decades and train with that in mind.
When you train, especially alone, do not go faster than your ability to move into the next move without any stopping to consider what is going on next. If you aren’t flowing in your practice, you are going too fast. You must spend thousands of hours doing this to get to a point where you can really pull it off. But if you look at the calm effortlessness of true masters, this is what you will see behind their movements.
The choice is simple, do you take the express elevator to the fifth floor and stay there, or do you take the slower one all the way to the top floor?