SPEED TRAINING (PART 1)
What is speed and how can you improve it?
For the purpose of this article, when I refer to speed I’m talking about the ability to put your body parts into motion rapidly in response to a stimulus. Although speed is largely dependant on your physiological make up, there are ways in which you can train to enhance your natural quickness. Before we look at training methods to develop speed, let’s first look at what speed means to a fighter.
Response Time
When fighting in martial arts competition, your speed or response time relates to both offensive and defensive movements. During offensive movements you need to see an opening, and attack quickly before it is covered or moves out of range. During defensive movements you need to spot an incoming attack and react before it hits the target. Regardless of either offensive or defensive application, speed, or more specifically response time, consists of the following phases:
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>Selecting a suitable response to a given target
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- Perception
- Identification
- Response-Selection
- Action
We’ll illustrate these phases by using an example in which our opponent begins to throw a front kick to your mid-section. The perception phase of your response time is when you have to visually spot an incoming attack. You detect a shift in your opponent’s body weight and a change in their rhythm of movement. During the identification phase your brain will be attempting to recognise that the perceived movement of your opponent is an attack, and then recognise that the attack is a kick. The movement and direction of the kick will finally be identified as a front kick aimed at your abdomen. The following response-selection phase involves your brain sorting through the many possible responses available to such an attack, ranging from ‘beat them to the technique with an attack of my own’ to ‘prepare for impact, it’s to late to do anything else!’ During the action phase your selected response is triggered and signals from your brain fire through your nervous system to your muscles. Your body executes your chosen response, in this case a forearm parry followed by a side kick.
Now that we understand the components of response time we can look at training techniques that can improve performance at each of these phases.
Speed Training Exercises
The first three phases of the total response time can only really be developed through direct reaction to an external stimulus. The final action phase can be isolated and drilled in different ways to fine tune your body’s movement speed. This first article will concentrate on training methods that will help to develop your perception, identification and response-selection phases. Your action phase will naturally also be trained, but we will isolate it specifically in the second part of this article next month.
Before any specific speed training takes place, it’s important to have conducted a thorough active warm up. It will not only help to protect against injury, but will also improve your physical performance by activating your nervous system and muscles. After this warm up you should go straight into your speed training while you are still fresh at the beginning of your workout.
The initial three phases of response time are conducted entirely internally, simply relaying external stimulus (from any or all of the five senses, but primarily sight) to the brain which then processes this information and formulates a reaction. To drill this stage of the response time you’ll need a stimulus, and for that we will need a partner.
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>Identifying a target, responding with a round kick
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Attacking Response Drill
When attacking, the external stimulus would be to spot an opening in your opponent’s guard. During this drill your opponent will therefore offer and take away targets, forcing you to respond to the target while it’s available. This kind of drill lends itself to the use of ‘focus mitts’ or ‘Thai long mitts’. These targets can be quickly and easily shown or hidden while moving around simulating sparring. The mitts should be held with the face of the pad against your body when not active, and then the hand quickly placed into a target position for a period of time. When your partner feels that time is up, they rapidly retrieve the mitt back against their body, hiding the striking face – giving you clear signals.
This kind of drill can be employed in two different ways:
- specific target – defined response
- random target – varied response
Using the drill with a specific target and a defined response allows you to focus on developing your perception speed and action speed by effectively removing the need to identify the target position and distance (you know what it is going to be) or select a response (you have been given a technique to use). By using random targets you’ll have to then select an appropriate striking technique depending on the target position and distance. This is more realistic and places a far higher demand on your identification and response-selection phases. Alternating between you and your partner for 2-minute rounds will allow you to partially recuperate both mentally and physically before your next working drill, ensuring that you perform to your maximum speed possible. It will also serve to introduce a little competition between you and your partner when working the drills back to back!
Defending Response Drill
When defending, the external stimulus would be to spot an incoming attack movement as it begins. This exercise can be performed using focus mitts or Thai long mitts as before, or with you and your partner ‘padded up’ as a themed sparring drill.
As with the offensive drill, this exercise can be conducted in two ways:
- specific attack – defined response
- random attack – varied response
Again, by using a specific attack and a defined response you can focus on your perception and action phases. The middle phases, identification and response selection have been done for you. By using a random attack and a varied response you will involve all phases of the response time process, making the exercise realistic and far more difficult. Working for 2-minute rounds, and alternating roles with your partner, will again help you to concentrate on achieving full speed.
Session Timing Structure
Table 1 suggests a timing structure that can be used to work the training drills outlined above.
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>Table 1
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This timing structure can be looped over as many times as required. Working to a round structure not only provides boundaries for your training, but will also encourage your body to adapt to the intervals of competition (as discussed in previous articles).
Simple But Effective Drills
Both of these drills, although very simple, develop overall response time very effectively. Their greatest advantage is that they are functional exercises. That is they involve the specific martial arts movements. This considerably benefits your training in the identification and response selection phases because as you repeatedly observe the incoming techniques your brain will become accustomed to identifying them subconsciously.
A key requirement for speed of movement is for your actions to be well rehearsed. The natural coordination resulting from repetition will reduce the thought processes involved, considerably speeding up the response-selection phase. Actions that you don’t have to think about are the quickest!
Next month we will look at applying timer training to speed drills specifically designed to improve the final response time phase – action!
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