On Martial Arts and Speed
Probably you will find martial arts particularly interesting at some
point of your life, and probably you want to have it. I went the same
process, and I found it is actually a very instructive subject. I'd
share my view on martial arts with you, and hope it will be helpful to
you.
First, martial arts originated in an era when people could be killed
for being bad at martial arts. If not keep this in mind, you might
learn lots of garbbage useful in that situation but not useful
nowadays. For example, lots of martial arts promotes a mystic
philosophy, which effectively threaten the enemy; such mystic
philosophy would sounds eccentric nowadays if interpreted literaly.
Now you practice martial arts for fun, for health, or for competition,
but not for live/death. The mindset is totally different. But there are
definitely lots of gems in martial arts we can learn and apply to every
domains of our life.
In my modest point of view, martial arts (and science) is build around
the simple concept of speed. There are many many details in martial
arts, but when it get serious, it is always about speed. Power of your
punch is determined by your mass and your speed; you can gain some
weight by tying sand bags to your wrist or use a weapon, but in general
the faster you are, that more powerful you are.
Another meaning of speed is how quickly can you get the right
tantics/strategy (intellectually), and how quickly can you carry it
out. If your opponent kick you on your leg, you can kick his/her leg
before his/her foot touch the ground, that would lie his/her down to
the ground. but how quickly can you think of it, and how quickly can
you do it? After s/he fall to the ground, s/he can grab your leg,
or roll over and kick using his/her other leg, how quickly can you
think of these can deal with it? That's what you need to practice
toward, not to feel your chi, or search for mystic feelings. Frankly
speaking, chi or mystic feelings are useful cues in practice, but it
could be misleading.
About punch power. You may wonder why some people has such powerful
punch, that they can break the stone, wood. That's actually because the
speed up their punch at the very last moment of punch. Such speed up is
partly because they transfer their force from their feet to keen to
wrist to shoulder and to fist. The goal is the speeding up at that last
moment.
Sometimes you may find emotional speed important, espetially when you
are emotionally unstable in a fight. You may see someone very calm and
serene, that's because they act very fast emotionally. Such that you
don't see their reactions.
Final words: I think you might agree with me that when reasoning
get fast enough, it become intuition. And when awareness get fast
enough, it become reasoning. The only different might just be speed.
When you see many different level of skills, no matter how obsessive
they looks, their final goal is probably to do something faster. (If
you have done computer programming, you probably notice that, the
faster your program is, the more things you can do in your
program.) So a cue of practice of martial arts, is to know what
kind of speed you need to improve, and improve it. You will get all
sorts of mystic and artsitc feelings during your efforts, but it won't
hurt to remind your self that speed is one of the simple truths.