Note to reader: this article is very much a follow on from the blog entitled ‘SPARRING’ so I would recommend reading that first.
My teacher, Gurdev Nidar Singh, most influential teaching on me is:
Smooth is fast - meaning don’t sacrifice ‘smoothness’ for speed.
It’s something many other masters and martial traditions may also advocate. What I want to do here is breakdown why it is better to be smooth than fast.
In a previous post I wrote that agility is the attribute we optimise for in SV. As I then stated this is done even if at the cost of speed and power. Though it is not that any of us purposefully try not to hit hard, it’s more to do with the fundamental principles of movement in SV.
Everything has a starting point. It makes a difference whether you start with speed and power as your axioms and then try to become more smooth and fluid as opposed to starting with fluidity then building the rest. The habits formed by speed and power are different to those formed by agility. This then forms a base which is hard to shift and all else is then predicated on this.
The reason SV starts with making agility the principle quality is that a weapons art requires that you get to a tactical position from which there is no exchange of blows and instead a quick clean kill - chatka. So there is little requirement to power my way through an engagement in our thinking. Again more detailed reasoning is given in the SPARRING blog.
Agility and footwork are the king makers
Agility can simply be defined as the increasing ability to change direction with minimal effort. Moreover, it requires that one does not build such momentum in a single direction/movement so that too much time and energy is required to change.
Inertia is a key idea in martial arts terms. Inertia in simple terms is ‘how much effort it will take to change’. The aim is to avoid states of high inertia. Throwing your hardest, fastest most powerful punch, as if you were playing one of those arcade machines to win a prize, builds a lot of inertia. This is because all your momentum is directed in a single direction and all of your body mechanics and structure are committed to supporting this single venture.
In SV we are at pains to avoid such a state.
Entry and Exit are equal
Starting with a simple thrust (whether a punch or thrust of a weapon) to decrease inertia our aim is to make the energy flow (acceleration) forward equal to that backward. We liken this to a pendulum or an object freefalling. From a body mechanics point of view this means you cannot fire your muscles in a singular direction one after the other in order to do one stage of a movement followed by another.
Using muscular forces means you necessarily have to stop before you start between stages or phases of some overall movement. Instead what we want is to reduce this stress and flow through which allows for smooth transitions.
The key to this is to avoid firing muscle/tendon groups at the extremities of your limbs. For example pumping a punch by flexing at the elbow is a process requiring lots of contractions in rapid succession. Instead seek to minimise the flexing at the elbow and instead initiate the movement from the shoulder area. This, counter-intuitively, involves a relaxation to initiate a movement rather than a tensing (as in the muscular case).
The aim
Unfortunately at this point we meet the limit of what can be successfully described in written form (or indeed video I believe) in illustrating such a point. But hopefully this simple example gives an inkling to how these two methods are in many respects polar opposites of each other, and also why I emphasize the need to hone habits of mind and body in SV.
What I can describe is the aim and the end products. With a stick for example rather than being able to out maneuver somebody because you can move the stick faster, switch between movements/techniques faster, instead you can move slower but disguise the end and start of phases. In other words if you cannot see the end of one movement and the beginning of the next, and moreover, you can’t predict it then smooth is faster than fast. This is an important difference as even when things move very fast you can still acmilbatise to the timing of rapid movements and so form predictions and find patterns. But smooth, particularly nonlinear, movements are much harder to intuite.
Even if you are truly quick at what you do, quickness in the movement is quickness of a bullet once fired. But the trigger in the muscular case often requires some setup or structure to allow the firing to take place. So another one of Gurdev’s sayings is relevant:
You can’t be the bullet but you can beat the trigger
Relaxing into a movement rather than requiring a tension is also now advantageous as the trigger/initiation is minimised so that not only is any single movement more difficult to pick up but the change of movements also requires less energy/effort. So this gets us back to ideas of inertia again.
This way of moving and what it takes to have such body mechanics requires much practise as it is counter to much of what we now prize in terms of speed and power - and so generally requires some breaking of ego in a sense.
Trusting the principle
Even if a student grasps this concept, understands and accepts it wholeheartedly, instinct and natural tendencies still hold them back. Fear kicks in, and they resort to pushing hard, moving quick by pouncing in and out and most times locking up with another and needing to use lots of raw strength and power. And whilst this will serve many well, it won’t achieve much of what I have described.
For a student to do this they must make moving smoothly in an agile manner their second nature. To do so this takes a lot of purposeful practise and corrective instruction which is discussed in my blog post A Martial Education.
Special thanks to Ammo for this post in prodding me toward thinking about this topic in greater detail.