The Illusion Of Speed

Getting old sucks. I look back at what I used to be able to do 20-25 years ago, and sigh – when my knees were good my throws were twice as explosive, and my striking faster, and more powerful etc. However, despite aging, my reaction and response times have improved, even though I know I’m not as physically quick as I once was. I had cause to explain this during a private lesson on Sunday, and I believe that explaining why you can get better with age, despite your physical attributes deteriorating, can help someone with all their “faculties intact” improve their fighting ability greatly.

As I entered my forties I began to realize I wasn’t as fast as I used to be; when somebody raised the pads for me to strike in a reaction drill, I didn’t get to the target as quickly as I used to. However, if I sparred with somebody or did randori (“Judo sparring”) I was just as quick – my natural response times were slowing down, but my actual response times weren’t i.e. in a drill I was slower but in an actual situation I wasn’t. This meant something was making up the difference/shortfall; I didn’t have real speed but I looked as if I did.

When you are young and you first learn how to block a punch, you see the strike coming in, and you block it. After you’ve seen enough punches come in (and probably connect, if you are of a certain generation), you start to understand the movements, which preempt the punch e.g. the dip of the shoulders, the pull back of the fist etc. and these start to stimulate/initiate your response; you don’t wait for the punch to be thrown, you react to the setup. As you become more experienced, you learn that a shift in weight, precedes the dip of the shoulder/the arm being pulled back etc. With a lot more experience, you start to recognize, how people set up these movements till you understand that a turn of the head signals an attack etc. After a while your response to an attack isn’t based on the attack itself but on the setup; you don’t have to be physically fast, your threat recognition skills identify the danger before it even exists.

Let’s say that martial arts training doubles/educates your physical reaction time. Now you react 0.2 Ms as opposed to 0.4 Ms. What advantage does this actually give you? In a real life encounter practically nothing. If somebody is slashing at you with a knife, throwing a punch etc. your “improved” reaction time will benefit you little; it won’t change your reaction time enough to make an adequate or proper response. To be effective martial arts and self-defense training, can’t aim to train an improvement in your physical response time, it has to train your threat recognition skills so that you identify danger at the earliest opportunity. This is why, that as you get older, as your physical skills diminish, you can still react to danger better than you were able to when in your twenties – even though that was a time when athleticism, and reaction time, was in your favor.

I learnt most of my door-craft of a guy who was in his fifties – when I first started working door with him, I was an arrogant 18-year old, who thought my prowess in the dojo, meant something in the real world. I believed my speed and power were what made me. I soon realized it was decisiveness, and the quick recognition of the way a situation was heading that made the difference. I believe that one of the great failings of reality based self-defense, is its emphasis on techniques, and the practice/mastery of them, instead of focusing on situations and the way they develop so that individuals learn to respond at the first sign of a threat, rather than learn what to do once the threat has been enacted; it is easier to stop a punch before it has been thrown than deal with it afterwards. There is a famous Mike Tyson quote where he states, “Everybody has a plan until they are punched in the face.” I couldn’t agree with him more; knowing the signs that signal a punch means that you can react before it’s been thrown etc.

In the next blog I will identify the warning signs that signify that someone is about to attack you and prescribe ways that you can deal with this. Don’t worry if your reaction times are slow, or slowing down, we will look at ways in which you can create the “illusion” of speed by responding to a physical pre-violence indicator rather than having to react to an attack itself etc. You don’t have to be athletically fast to deal with an attack, you just have to recognize it and be decisive before it’s begun.