TuhonBill
12-21-2008, 12:50 AM
Hi Folks,
I was asked the following question by a PTI member and I thought you might like to see it and my response.
Mark from CA wrote:
I would love to know ... do you naturally have that hand speed, or are there drills or exercise you do to build it up ? We're about the same size, but man you move quickly!
My response: Speed comes in two flavors, delivery speed and reaction speed. For delivery speed, several things help.
Here are some basic drills.
1. One hundred reps. Pick one simple technique and do 100 repetitions for your warm up. This little trick helps with speed during this drill-concentrate on making your return twice as fast as your delivery.
2. Work your core. The muscles of your abdomen and obliques are important to delivering and recovery from many strikes. Work lots of different twisting exercises into your ab routine.
3. Work combinations in close. Practice some simple 3 or 4 move combinations as close as possible to a wall without touching the wall.Tuhon Gaje used to have us do the first four diagonal strikes from 5 attacks with our noses almost touching the wall (alright, this still put the rest of me a lot farther from the wall than the other guys, but it was still a hard drill :-)
4. Footwork, Footwork, Footwork. Do 25 to 50 repetitions of one of the basic PT footwork moves each time you warm up.
5. One breath fighting. My Indonesian Penjak Silat instructor, (Eddie Jaffre) used to tell us that most real fights were won or lost in the first breath of the fight. Practice doing your combinations in one exhale. So a speed drill with a focus on breathing would look like this. Slow inhale to rest, fast exhale while you execute the combination. Repeat ten times.
Here are some drills for speed in reaction time.
1. Knife Taping. This is the king of reaction time drills. Once you have the basics down, move on to random attack sequences with fakes and third hand attacks by the attacker thrown in.
2. Here’s a simple one for solo baston. You both start with a mirror image drill using diagonal 1 & 2 strikes for multiple reps. Suddenly the leader will change to 3 & 4, which you have to follow, meeting the stick and making contact. Hold a plain right lead when doing the ones and twos, but go into sidestepping on the threes and fours. A slightly more advanced version of this is instead of mirroring the opponent when he changes to 3 & 4, you counter him with 2 & 1 (2 counters his 3 and 1 counters his 4). Use a sidestep during your counters. If you are wearing hockey gloves of sufficient thickness you can target the weapon hand with your counter hits, otherwise target the stick.
3. Here’s a variation of the above drill for double stick. You both do upper 8. One partner changes suddenly to lower 8. The other changes to the corresponding Contradas to counter.
Regards,
Tuhon Bill McGrath
I was asked the following question by a PTI member and I thought you might like to see it and my response.
Mark from CA wrote:
I would love to know ... do you naturally have that hand speed, or are there drills or exercise you do to build it up ? We're about the same size, but man you move quickly!
My response: Speed comes in two flavors, delivery speed and reaction speed. For delivery speed, several things help.
Here are some basic drills.
1. One hundred reps. Pick one simple technique and do 100 repetitions for your warm up. This little trick helps with speed during this drill-concentrate on making your return twice as fast as your delivery.
2. Work your core. The muscles of your abdomen and obliques are important to delivering and recovery from many strikes. Work lots of different twisting exercises into your ab routine.
3. Work combinations in close. Practice some simple 3 or 4 move combinations as close as possible to a wall without touching the wall.Tuhon Gaje used to have us do the first four diagonal strikes from 5 attacks with our noses almost touching the wall (alright, this still put the rest of me a lot farther from the wall than the other guys, but it was still a hard drill :-)
4. Footwork, Footwork, Footwork. Do 25 to 50 repetitions of one of the basic PT footwork moves each time you warm up.
5. One breath fighting. My Indonesian Penjak Silat instructor, (Eddie Jaffre) used to tell us that most real fights were won or lost in the first breath of the fight. Practice doing your combinations in one exhale. So a speed drill with a focus on breathing would look like this. Slow inhale to rest, fast exhale while you execute the combination. Repeat ten times.
Here are some drills for speed in reaction time.
1. Knife Taping. This is the king of reaction time drills. Once you have the basics down, move on to random attack sequences with fakes and third hand attacks by the attacker thrown in.
2. Here’s a simple one for solo baston. You both start with a mirror image drill using diagonal 1 & 2 strikes for multiple reps. Suddenly the leader will change to 3 & 4, which you have to follow, meeting the stick and making contact. Hold a plain right lead when doing the ones and twos, but go into sidestepping on the threes and fours. A slightly more advanced version of this is instead of mirroring the opponent when he changes to 3 & 4, you counter him with 2 & 1 (2 counters his 3 and 1 counters his 4). Use a sidestep during your counters. If you are wearing hockey gloves of sufficient thickness you can target the weapon hand with your counter hits, otherwise target the stick.
3. Here’s a variation of the above drill for double stick. You both do upper 8. One partner changes suddenly to lower 8. The other changes to the corresponding Contradas to counter.
Regards,
Tuhon Bill McGrath