Health and Exercise

I don’t care how much muscle the other guy has, if you have speed, then you are going to win. If he throws a punch, you are fast enough to block or step out of the way. If you throw a punch, it is faster than his block.

Do you understand how important speed is? Yet, the sad fact is that nobody ever teaches speed. Nobody ever teaches you the specialized techniques or drills that result in your becoming able to move your body faster and faster.

To be honest, to took me nearly seven years of dedicated discipline and practice in a couple of different disciplines to become fast in the martial arts. That’s almost seven years of forms and techniques and freestyle and bruises and work and exhaustion and lot of dues. And I knew there had to be a better way to get to where I was going.

I first became cognizant of the speed available through martial arts through the first move of the form Botsai. That is the move where you do a three blocks quick, and the body protests because you are trying to make it do large movements to handle simple movements. And that concept, doing much to handle little is one of the keys to becoming faster.

Simply, if you absolutely and positively have to do something…then, with practice, you become able to do so. In Bot Sai somebody is firing three simply attacks at me, and I have to respond with three large circles of the arms, complete with hip twisting and stance changing. I have to do it, and, because I have to do it, I am able to do it.

So to get faster through the older training methods, you have to set up a problem to be solved, then train your body over a period of time. There are like methods in other martial arts. And there are some arts which opt for simple movements, but then they lose out on the twisting of the hips and the resulting generation of power.

But I did realize something crucial in this matter of speed through my experience and observations in the traditional arts, and that something is commonly termed visualization. Assume a posture, be there and only there, and forget about being anywhere else. When you have forgotten the posture you are in enough, be in another position, and don’t have any thought or effort in between the two postures.

The idea here is to take out the ideas of weight and movement that is inherent in the way you move your body. Be here…then be there, and don’t have anything in between. It’s a zen approach to the practice of the martial arts, and it still takes some work, but by backing up your Karate sweat with a bit of mental attention and intention, it is possible to speed up your hands in months instead of years.

Al Case has studied martial arts for over forty plus+ years. You can find out about Mastering Speed and other theories he has developed over the years by picking up a free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.