One of my training brothers shared this article and made some comments about it. I went over to the site and after reading the article, I could only agree with his statements. I’ll get to that at the end here, but first, go read the article. It’s not that long.
There are a couple of minor issues I see here and a fundamental problem. Let’s start with the issues.
- Slow practice is no secret. In fact, it’s a fundamental training methodology, both inside and outside of martial arts. In pretty much every sport or activity, you learn a new skill or technique slowly to get basic competence in it. Once you have that, you add speed, power and other aspects. Typically, when you want to correct errors, you slow it down again to figure out what’s wrong. Once you do, you go faster again. Granted, only a limited amount of martial arts make it a big part of their training, but this has been known for a long time. I really don’t see the secret here.
- Slow isn’t always possible. I’m going to take an extreme example to make this point: take a look at this kick. How exactly can you practice this slowly? I don’t see how you can pull that off. I’m no karate expert, but I’ve seen more than one jumping technique in their forms. I’ve also seen them do many less extreme movements that require some form of dynamic balance, which makes it impossible to do them (correctly) at anything other than speed. For instance, try to do this type of footwork at a slow pace and still bounce.
- There’s also “too slow”. In the article, the author suggests taking 2 minutes to perform one front kick. In my experience, that’s way too slow to train the kick correctly. At that pace, you’re mainly working the stabilizer muscles, which has a lot of value. But there are better ways to train those for 2 minutes than to insist on performing that front kick at the same time. More about that in a bit.
- Not all TCMAs are the same. This is a minor quibble, but it needs to be addressed because it is factually incorrect. The author writes: “Slowness is vital in TCMA (Traditional Chinese Martial Arts), the historical progenitor of Karate.” I’m not going to touch the “progenitor” part, but as for TCMAs, that’s simply not true. There are hundreds of different styles and only in a handful (those that are considered “internal”) is slow practice a vital part of the training.
All in all, these points aren’t all that important to the main issue. Primarily because we can argue about them and there are all sorts of conditions that apply. So I’m not going to belabor the point. I am going to address the fundamental problem with the assumption that slow training is going to “Improve Your Karate Like Crazy.” [Read more…]