Slow sparring

[Tony Dismukes]

The Secret Fight Training Method – SLOW SPARRING

I'm a big fan of the type of training advocated in this article.

Some caveats:

You need training partners who understand realistic body dynamics, so they don't try things which don't work at speed (changing the path of a punch mid-flight, etc).

You need training partners who will actually match your speed and not keep speeding up in an attempt to "win".

You need partners who understand the purpose of the training and don't treat it like a competition.

 

[GiYu - Todd]

Good article. Thanks for sharing.

I'm a fan of slow freestyle to safely develop the ability to see attacks and respond in a controlled manner. It makes it so a mistake doesn't hurt and you can learn from it, rather than becoming afraid of it. As you get better, you can pick up the pace accordingly.

 

[Danny T]

The Secret Fight Training Method – SLOW SPARRING

Huge advocate for such. Practitioners have time to see what is developing and can make good decisions as to how to respond. When making a mistake again they have the time to see the mistake and why it is a mistake.

It is a excellent piece of the training pie.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

You need training partners who will actually match your speed and not keep speeding up in an attempt to "win".

I have different opinion on this "slow training" subject. I prefer my training partner can constantly challenge my speed. Instead of to call it "win or lose", I prefer to call it "my success rate" which can be high in one day and low in another day.

One assumption here is if you can move slow, one day you will be able to move fast. I find that's not the case in the real world. Not everybody can reach to 9.27 seconds for 100 meters speed. You have to train how to move fast otherwise you will never be able to move fast.

I like to train in "fast speed" as if my shirt is catching on fire. I prefer to move fast with only 75% correctness than to move slow with 100% correctness. Of course the best situation is if I can move fast with 100% correctness.

In training, I like to ask my opponent to attack with 100% speed and 100% power. I then try to react to it. In every 15 tries, I may succeed 8 times and fail 7 times. If my successful rate can be 75% or higher, I'll feel good about it.

In training, if my opponent attacks me with slow speed, even if my successful rate is 100%, I'll still feel it's not real and I may just develop a false confidence in myself.

The best product is not a product that has 0 defect and expensive. The best product is a product that has the least amount of defects (still have some defect) but affordable.

In the following clip, this is the normal training speed. The teacher will not slow down the training speed for beginners. Even during the beginner training stage, The teacher still wanted his students to develop the feeling that "their eye balls would fly out off their eye sockets".

 

[Danny T]

One assumption here is if you can move slow, one day you will be able to move fast. I find that's not the case in the real world. Not everybody can reach to 9.27 seconds for 100 meters speed. You have to train how to move fast otherwise you will never be able to move fast.

There is nothing in the article stating or alluding such.
He even states:
"Slow sparring is not the same as high speed sparring. It’s not the same as a real fight, it’s not as mentally and physically exhausting like a real fight. But nonetheless, slow sparring still remains an incredibly useful training method for developing fighters EVEN THOUGH it is a step further away from a realistic fight simulation."
And...
"Slow sparring is not meant to replace full-speed high intensity sparring. It is meant to properly develop you to that point. It’s kind of the same as with any skill. You work your way up to things by practicing at a slower speed and lower intensity."

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

work your way up.

There are different ways to "work your way up".

1. start with slow speed with correctness. You then increase speed and maintain your correctness.
2. start with fast speed with partial-correctness. You then maintain your fast speed and improve your correctness.

IMO, 2 > 1.

It doesn't matter which approach that you may take, in 10 years, you may get the same result with fast speed and correct technique. The difference is you may get different result in the initial 3 years. After 3 years, if you take the

- 1st approach, you will have 100% good technique with not quite good speed.
- 2nd approach, you will have good speed with not quite good technique.

There is a good reason that all tests such as TOEFL, SAT, GRE, IQ, .... all require to finish within certain amount of testing time. Before I did my formal TOEFL test, I had taken more than 100 old TOEFL tests at home. When I took those old tests at home, I forced myself to finish those tests all within the same amount of testing time. My testing score could be much higher if I could add more testing time into it. But that will not be my true testing score.

IMO, the difference between a scholar and a MA guy is:

- When a scholar takes his 10 questions test within 2 hours testing time, he can start from question 1, question 2, ... If he has problem with question 4, he can skip it, go to question 5, and then question 6, ... After he has finished question 10, he can then come back to question 4.
- When a MA guy tries to deal with a knife that stabbed toward his chest, he has only 1/4 second to deal with it. If he fails, he will die.

Because the nature of MA, the "speed training" is important. Too many people start with "slow training" and end with "slow training". All their lives, they have never even started their "fast training". They may say that the reason they are still training slow is because they are not perfect yet. The question are:

- How perfect is perfect?
- When will you switch your "slow training" into "fast training"?

 

[Danny T]

There is a good reason that all tests such as TOEFL, SAT, GRE, IQ, .... all require to finish within certain amount of testing time. Before I did my formal TOEFL test, I had taken more than 100 old TOEFL tests at home. When I took those old tests at home, I forced myself to finish those tests all within the same amount of testing time. My testing score could be much higher if I could add more testing time into it. But that will not be my true testing score.

IMO, the difference between a scholar and a MA guy is:

- When a scholar takes his 10 questions test within 2 hours testing time, he can start from question 1, question 2, ... If he has problem with question 4, he can skip it, go to question 5, and then question 6, ... After he has finished question 10, he can then come back to question 4.
- When a MA guy tries to deal with a knife that stabbed toward his chest, he has only 1/4 second to deal with it. If he fails, he will die.

Because the nature of MA, the "speed training" is important. Too many people start with "slow training" and end with "slow training". All their lives, they have never even started their "fast training".

Did you learned or gain knowledge of all the material you did the TOEFL, SAT, GRE, IQ... testing on in 2 hours of time? Or, did you learn it and review it over a period of years?

We aren't talking about testing in a certain amount of time.
We are talking about learning the material. Then practicing slowly with an ever increasing speed and pressure until it can be performed at full speed with heavy pressure.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

Did you learned or gain knowledge of all the material you did the TOEFL, SAT, GRE, IQ... testing on in 2 hours of time? Or, did you learn it and review it over a period of years?

We aren't talking about testing in a certain amount of time.
We are talking about learning the material. Then practicing slowly with an ever increasing speed and pressure until it can be performed at full speed with heavy pressure.

IMO, the MA learning process is different from the scholar learning process. In school, you may only have mid term exam and final exam. You don't need to test yourself daily. You may only have to take GRE once in your life time.

In MA, the training and testing are side by side. I like to spar/wrestle 15 rounds daily, record the result, if I train slow in the morning and test fast in the afternoon, I will have difficult time to adjust it.

My teacher expected me to learn a new technique in the morning and then use that technique in sparring/wrestling that same afternoon. I didn't have 3 months (or even 3 days) to allow me to train slow.

 

[oftheherd1]

Reading Tony Dismukes' original post, I am reminded of how some Tang Soo Do students we shared a practice gym with, sometimes studied. They would perform identical movements from opposite directions, in slow motion. They got to see how they were doing in conjunction with their partner's method. They learned technique in the 'forms' they were doing, and a lot of balance and strength as well.

I don't think that is exactly what Mr. Dismukes is talking about, but I think there is similarity, and it was apparently a part of Tang Soo Do, at least in that area in Korea.

 

[Tez3]

I have different opinion on this "slow training" subject. I prefer my training partner can constantly challenge my speed. Instead of to call it "win or lose", I prefer to call it "my success rate" which can be high in one day and low in another day.

One assumption here is if you can move slow, one day you will be able to move fast. I find that's not the case in the real world. Not everybody can reach to 9.27 seconds for 100 meters speed. You have to train how to move fast otherwise you will never be able to move fast.

I like to train in "fast speed" as if my shirt is catching on fire. I prefer to move fast with only 75% correctness than to move slow with 100% correctness. Of course the best situation is if I can move fast with 100% correctness.

In training, I like to ask my opponent to attack with 100% speed and 100% power. I then try to react to it. In every 15 tries, I may succeed 8 times and fail 7 times. If my successful rate can be 75% or higher, I'll feel good about it.

In training, if my opponent attacks me with slow speed, even if my successful rate is 100%, I'll still feel it's not real and I may just develop a false confidence in myself.

The best product is not a product that has 0 defect and expensive. The best product is a product that has the least amount of defects (still have some defect) but affordable.

In the following clip, this is the normal training speed. The teacher will not slow down the training speed for beginners. Even during the beginner training stage, The teacher still wanted his students to develop the feeling that "their eye balls would fly out off their eye sockets".

As you say though it is your preference to work fast, that doesn't mean you are correct or that everyone else is wrong. Different training methods suit different people, the trick is for find the ones that work for you, you found yours, congratulations but please don't assume that other methods aren't efficient for learning, nor should you assume things about the training that aren't there as you've already been told.
I like 'slow sparring' it's the way I learn best, and once having learnt it thoroughly and understood it I can do it at speed and with precision.
'Eyes balls flying out of sockets' makes for blind students, they only learning the surface of a technique. Learning to react isn't learning how to properly fight.

 

[Tony Dismukes]

There are different ways to "work your way up".

1. start with slow speed with correctness. You then increase speed and maintain your correctness.
2. start with fast speed with partial-correctness. You then maintain your fast speed and improve your correctness.

IMO, 2 > 1.

It doesn't matter which approach that you may take, in 10 years, you may get the same result with fast speed and correct technique. The difference is you may get different result in the initial 3 years. After 3 years, if you take the

- 1st approach, you will have 100% good technique with not quite good speed.
- 2nd approach, you will have good speed with not quite good technique.

There is a good reason that all tests such as TOEFL, SAT, GRE, IQ, .... all require to finish within certain amount of testing time. Before I did my formal TOEFL test, I had taken more than 100 old TOEFL tests at home. When I took those old tests at home, I forced myself to finish those tests all within the same amount of testing time. My testing score could be much higher if I could add more testing time into it. But that will not be my true testing score.

IMO, the difference between a scholar and a MA guy is:

- When a scholar takes his 10 questions test within 2 hours testing time, he can start from question 1, question 2, ... If he has problem with question 4, he can skip it, go to question 5, and then question 6, ... After he has finished question 10, he can then come back to question 4.
- When a MA guy tries to deal with a knife that stabbed toward his chest, he has only 1/4 second to deal with it. If he fails, he will die.

Because the nature of MA, the "speed training" is important. Too many people start with "slow training" and end with "slow training". All their lives, they have never even started their "fast training". They may say that the reason they are still training slow is because they are not perfect yet. The question are:

- How perfect is perfect?
- When will you switch your "slow training" into "fast training"?

As stated in the article, slow training and fast training are both important - one is not a substitute for the other.

There are advocates and legitimate arguments for both approaches (fast first vs slow first). I'll make a few comments based on my own observations...

With striking arts, if you train with realistic range and contact and you throw new students into full speed sparring immediately:

Only students who already have a certain degree of toughness and natural talent will stick with it. In other words, you're weeding out the students who most need to learn self-defense ability.

The students who do stick with it will take a lot of unnecessary micro-concussions (or full blown concussions) before they develop a solid defense. That's not good for long-term brain health.

Most practitioners (beginner or advanced) will be hesitant to try tactics or techniques they aren't yet solid on in a full-speed, full-contact environment, because they don't want to get pounded when they fail. This can lead to students always sticking to their "A" game and not learning new skills.

Based on this, my answer to your question "When will you switch your 'slow training' into 'fast training'?" for striking arts would be: have students stick to slow sparring until they develop good defensive habits, then add in progressively faster sparring. However, even once you've added fast sparring to your regimen, slow sparring still has great value and should be part of the training rotation.

Grappling arts are a bit different, because you don't have such a risk of concussions. In my experience you can tell beginners to slow down in grappling sparring, but they almost never do. They don't know how, really. That's not a huge problem, but if they never learn to slow down they tend to always rely on their physical attributes and never develop technical nuance and sensitivity. In BJJ, it's usually the upper belts who spend more time rolling slow.

 

[GiYu - Todd]

Often less-skilled students use speed and/or strength to accomplish something even though then have poor form. Technically this works (accomplishes something like the technique), but it's different than trying to teach the correct form of a given martial art (which often shouldn't require significant strength if done correctly) in the first place. Rushing things tends to build bad habits.
Training at a reduced speed/power lets the student learn how the technique is intended. Speed and power can be added as skills improve, rather than having to untrain bad habits in the future after they've become ingrained.

 

[Buka]

I love slow sparring, I love fast hard sparring.

You know what else slow sparring can be used for? Endurance. (no, not that way)
If you're running a long sparring session with limited areas for sparring, or limited instructors to supervise sparring, you have two guys using the ring or whatever area they're using. When they're done, instead of letting them rest while the next guys spar - set them up, with each other or others, and have them slow spar. They use it as a rest period all the while getting the benefits mentioned. If they're in the dojo for two hours that night, a lot of what is usually just recuperative time, now becomes something else, it becomes training time.

 

[jks9199]

Any sort of partner training must have a bit of a flaw built into it, no? (Credit to Rory Miller for putting that realization into words.) Otherwise, we run out of training partners pretty quick, though the local ER docs probably appreciate the business. (Unless, of course, what we train is worthless for functional use.) Each training method also has strengths.

Slow exercises (Rory's One-Step, slow sparring) have the benefit of allowing you time to get it right, to recognize and respond. They slow down the OODA Loop so that we have to puzzle it out. They also are "reversible" -- if something doesn't quite work right, we can go back, reset, and try another approach. But, they are slow -- and they have the potential of no ingraining a certain sense of urgency in the action. And they suck for some things, because some moves rely on speed and momentum that just aren't there when you're going slow. (Grappling/wrestling slowly has other problems, too...)

There's also a benefit to that lack of urgency. That urgency is stress -- and we learn pretty damn fast under stress. But... that's a two edged sword, too. Because we can learn bad practices that are hard to unlearn, because we learned them under stress, they worked well enough... and our neurology wants to lock onto something that it knows worked -- even if not for the best -- under stress when a similar situation pops up.

Fast exercise certainly can impart that urgency! But they don't give you time to get everything just right. They don't let you reset very easily... and they stand a really good chance of some degree of injury. They can scare someone right out of the training hall. Injuries take time to heal.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that you have to choose your flaw for your training each time, and balance them across the totality of the training. You may use slow training one day, to develop the pieces and find the optimal responses, then use full speed training for reflex training another. You might go light contact sometimes, to keep going longer -- and heavy contact to build that toughness. Pads let you practice full power delivery that even the best armor is hard to do on a training partner -- but pads ain't people, and pads don't hit back. And so on, ad infinitum...

 

[Buka]

The Secret Fight Training Method – SLOW SPARRING

I'm a big fan of the type of training advocated in this article.

Some caveats:

You need training partners who understand realistic body dynamics, so they don't try things which don't work at speed (changing the path of a punch mid-flight, etc).

You need training partners who will actually match your speed and not keep speeding up in an attempt to "win".

You need partners who understand the purpose of the training and don't treat it like a competition.

Tony, do you ever do slow grappling?

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

please don't assume that other methods aren't efficient for learning,

I have different opinion on this "slow training" subject. I prefer my training partner can constantly challenge my speed. ...

As I have stated in the 1st sentence of my 1st post in this thread, "I have different opinion on this slow training subject". Tony stated his opinion and I stated mine. There is no right and wrong but for comparison. If we all agree on all subjects, there won't be any discussion.

 

[Tony Dismukes]

Tony, do you ever do slow grappling?

All the time.

It's not so easy to work takedowns slowly, unless you have a significant skill advantage. Once you're on the ground, however, it becomes much more viable.

It's pretty normal for me to be rolling with lower belts and be puttering along at my lackadaisical old man speed while the young guy I'm with is trying to go 60 miles per hour. I don't try to match their speed or effort. If they want to go faster, more power to them. Usually it doesn't help them that much.

When I'm rolling with other black belts it's not uncommon for both of us to go relatively slow because we're trying to focus on technique. If I'm going with a younger black or brown belt who really wants to be competitive they can sometimes get an advantage by going faster. I'm reasonably fast for a 51 year old with a desk job, but a 28 year old competitive athlete will have a definite edge there.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

It's not so easy to work takedowns slowly, ...

From the safety stand point of view, the slow speed "take down" such as single leg, double legs, ... may work. But the slow speed "throw" such as hip throw, shoulder show, leg lift throw, ... that require full body rotation can be very dangerous.

If you try to perform a slow hip throw, your opponent's head will hit straight down to the ground. To throw your opponent "1/2 way" or "1/2 speed" is a guarantee way to cause serious injury. You don't give your opponent enough speed and force to allow his body to complete his "full body rotation".

 

[Tez3]

If you try to perform a slow hip throw, your opponent's head will hit straight down to the ground.

No, we do them slow and as we can breakfall we don't land on our heads. If people are doing takedowns on those who can't breakfall, you need to be teaching them how to fall. It's all about control anyway. It's not necessarily safer doing it fast it can bequite the opposite in fact.

 

[drop bear]

Most practitioners (beginner or advanced) will be hesitant to try tactics or techniques they aren't yet solid on in a full-speed, full-contact environment, because they don't want to get pounded when they fail. This can lead to students always sticking to their "A" game and not learning new skills.

There is an element of a slow speed sparring needed in fast sparring. In that you have to be fearless throwing techniques. Invest in loss.