The Cowboy Gunslinger and Speed Punching

Speed and quickness are generally important in martial arts in terms of movement and striking; footwork and speed punching/kicking training drills are common place. Attempts to address punching speed at the initiation of a strike are less common. Steve Morris tackles this area in a number of ways, one of which involves reading cues and beating the incoming punch. I don’t want to say it’s impossible but I’ve not managed to beat him to the punch, he always puts his punch in the gap between initiation and finish.

Morris is very good at reading cues and acting on them, this definitely contributes to his speed. Another contribution maybe the inherent speed of reacting to environmental cues. One of the blokes who trains with us put me onto some recent research from the University of Birmingham (UB), who were testing for speed differences between self initiated actions and reactions to events in the environment.

This research was motivated by renowned Danish physicist and Nobel laureate, Niels Bohr, who had an obsession with western films. He wanted to know why the bloke who pulled the gun first always lost. He tested this with toy ‘cap’ guns but in the study at UB they used pressure pads. The results show that reacting to the opponent produced quicker reaction times in comparison to when a subject initiated the action.

So what!

Well this finding shows that human beings are able to react to environmental stimulus more quickly than if they plan the action. This quicker reaction is at the cost of greater error but that’s normal. When speed is desirable the faster you perform the less accurate an action will be. Of course in a gunfight, speed is of the essence when drawing your six shooter, but you only have to be accurate enough to get the gun into a shooting position. Precision accuracy is not critical at this point.

The study itself is a nice piece of work which controls for social aspects (the findings remained when the opponent was a computer), type of movement (quicker movements were still present when the buttons were arranged differently) and when there were no movement cues (computers don‘t produce any). The difference in speed while small (20ms) equated to 10% which is useful in a life or death situation.

For the cowboy gunslinger to take out the bad guy 20 paces away, he’ll need a fast drawing action and good aim, but so long as he is operating purely reactively rather than from a deliberate intention to draw the gun, he can take advantage of the phenomena described in the study.

The authors suggest that different neural pathways govern these two types of movement initiation. That is reactive actions take a different neural route in the brain than intentionally driven actions, with their research shows that these are faster for reactive actions. It is possible that under pressure less conscious involvement is desirable, better to react instincively.

These findings have implications for martial arts, certainly self defence. If you are threatened the freeze flight or fight response will kick in and you become hyper activated. Then you may adopt either a reactive or intentional style of movement, i.e. an ‘observe and strike’ vs. “I’m gonna hit him” mode. Alternatively, you may be naturally predisposed toward one or the other mode. The study suggests that one has a 10% reaction time advantage over the other. A follow up post will take a further look at these implications for speed punching.

Short Range Power – the Phantom Punch

On May 25th, 1965, in Lewiston, Maine,  Muhammad Ali  beat Sonny Liston for the second time. Again there was controversy, this time it was related to the ‘phantom punch’. Ali finished the fight, in the first round, with a short chopping straight right, which knocked Liston down for somewhere between 12 and 17 seconds, while the referee flapped around losing control as Ali stood over Liston shaking his fist. The ref was informed of time Liston had spent on the mat and stopped the fight, declaring Ali winner by knockout.

The straight right that tagged Liston was known as the ‘phantom punch’ as many missed it completely, others said it didn’t land at all. Many believed the fight was fixed, for a variety of reasons, one of which was that many believed the punch was not hard enough to knock Liston out. In slow-motion, it’s clear the short right hit Liston plum on the jaw as he is regaining balance from a lunging jab, he had trouble landing punches in both fights. The clip clearly shows a jarring, shaking of Liston’s head which appears to be sufficient to knock him out.

Steve Morris explains that a knockout occurs when the reticular activating system, responsible for controlling consciousness is disrupted.

The disruption of the reticular activating system occurs through the violent rotation of the brain on the brainstem. In most cases, this rotation is very obvious, whether it occurs through twisting, moving side to side or through the head being violently snapped back

The slow-motion clip indicates a rotation of Liston’s head, the ambiguity concerning the efficacy of the phantom punch is to do with the assumption that a bigger punch is required to cause a knockout. Big punchers tend to throw the kitchen sink at their opponents, Tyson, Marciano and others of that ilk certainly did. But if the opponent is off balance when hit, less force is required to rotate the head, and so cause a knockout.

In 1965 there were still those that believed Ali was unable to punch hard, he was retreating when he threw it and given the short range of the phantom punch it’s easy to understand how people didn’t believe their own eyes. Ali himself claimed the punch, which he called the anchor punch, was too quick for the eye to see.

A short punch on the retreat does not have the obvious power of a Tyson blockbuster, but the phantom punch was not the only time Ali was able to knockdown or knockout an opponent while going backwards. The highlight clip shows a few examples, while Anderson Silva did something very similar to Forest Griffin recently. I suppose people find it difficult to believe that it’s possible to generate power while going backwards, let alone short range power.

Speed 2 – Timing, part two

Syncopation

Part one used a highlight clip of Roy Jones Jnr’s exceptional timing as a kind of definition of what timing in fighting is.

At Primal, Morris develops methods for learning the timing skill RJJ exhibits in the clip, which has several components.  This post will describe one drill which helps develop timing, that is the ability to see the opponents’ strikes/kicks/shoots etc coming and get your response in before it arrives. In essence it’s a drill to learn cues by attending to them with peripheral vision. As such a person should avoid staring at the shoulder during a jab feed, with central vision, or tunneling as Steve calls it. Rather the trick is to look at the eyes/face and to let the peripheral vision, which is set up to respond to movement, do its job.

Firstly, it’s important to note that the drill is NOT a fight. It’s easy to get drawn into a bit of competitive ‘argy bargy’, but the idea is to strip the fight down to a level where all anxiety of being hit is removed so that both participants can get to grips with learning the cues preceding their opponents strikes. That is, in order to be able to beat your opponent to the punch, you have to see his/her shot coming. To facilitate this ability, your training partner is required to feed you a cue, on Sunday we started off with a jab, which is thrown in a biomechanically correct manner but the strike is not finished, Steve described it as hitting skin deep. The drill should be considered a flow drill.

The feeder provides a jab which can be exaggerated to ensure that the cue is obvious. The receiver then works off the jab, evading, covering, covering and striking, making angles etc. , the idea is to experiment to see what you can work into the ‘interval of time’, it can be anything. Because the drill is ‘slow’ it’s easy to become floppy or sloppy as the receiver, it’s essential that you do not. You need to stay alert and sharp, and reflect this in your responses to the feed. It’s quite a subtle thing, but brings the drill alive.

The feeder can then start experimenting with how the jab is fed, and use other feeds to develop the drill, including kicks. Any kind of strike can be fed, so that the cue preceding it can be learned, as long as the basic rules are applied; slow exaggerated feed, skin deep power, correct biomechanics, alert responses, flowing action, peripheral vision. It’s a method that begins to give the participants an appreciation of the interval of time.

The drill can then progress across all the ranges of the fight, so that hand fighting, clinching, throws etc. can all be included. As the range closes the cues become rather more kinaesthetic than visual, but the premise is consistent. It is up to the fighters to go through their repertoire of their abilities so that nothing is excluded. For the sake of continuity of the flow drill, rather than performing a throw every time it’s useful to do a ‘touch drill’ within the main drill and only complete the throw occasionally. That means that the position for the throw or takedown is assumed and the required body part is ‘captured’ or simply touched as appropriate, it saves getting up all the time.

Once a chance to have a go at the various distances has been achieved, the whole thing is put back together, so the feeder feeds anything and the receiver responds as appropriate. At this stage it is then possible to increase the volume somewhat to begin testing the cue responses under a little more pressure. This part must still be regulated as it should not become a fight thereby preventing any anxiety of being hit and/or tunnel vision creeping in. Steve gets us to do this in short duration bursts, something along the lines of; flow-flow-flow-volume up, flow-flow-flow-volume up, etc.

It’s a great drill which brings results.

Syncopation

Speed 2 – Timing, part one

At the beginning of the Speed 1 post, I alluded to the illusion of speed, brought to mind by a post on Marks Training. One  attribute that great fighters have, or used to have, is excellent timing, which makes a fighter extremely fast, or at least appear so. Certainly, if your opponent has superior timing he/she is on you in a flash and you end up on the receiving end.

Roy Jones Jnr was/is a great boxer, and his timing was/is great. Being a bit of a showman he’d mess around a lot but his timing, combined with his natural speed, not only got him out of trouble but tended to put the other bloke in a spot of bother. Here’s a highlight clip which illustrates this nicely.

When watching this sort of clip its easy to get caught up in the fighters speed or his larking around. But if you watch closely, you will notice that he always seems to know when to hit and has time to do so. He even uses the dancing/showmanship to put the other fighter off guard and lure him in. Moreover, he uses the silly movements as a plyometric action to load the shot that follows.

He times his actions off the other fighters movements, or jumps in between his opponents movements and then overwhelms them with his strikes, or strikes and moves out (Steve Morris refers to this as syncopation; inserting a beat between two beats). Jones doesn’t stop either, so that he is always somewhere his opponent can’t hit him, or at least can’t get to hit him enough to cause any real damage.

Jones was/is very good at inserting his movements into the interval of time of his opponents, whatever that movement maybe, he uses the whole repertoire. He syncopates on the other fighters actions with whatever movement or strike he desires.

The clip clearly illustrates exceptional timing on the part of RJJnr, or put another way, it illustrates the insertion his efforts into the interval of time between the strikes of his opponent. The second part of this post will attempt to describe a Morris Method drill designed to develop timing and exploitation of the interval of time.

Speed 1 – pushing, pulling and the big bang!

A recent post over on Marks Training called illusion of speed has got me thinking. It’s all very well saying that to become quicker you need to create an illusion of speed by blocking and striking simultaneously or whatever it may be. That provides us with an example of what to do but not how to achieve it. If you train in Karate’s Ippon Kumite you may soon be blocking and striking simultaneously in response to an Oi Suki, lunge punch attack. This is great but the timing is not representative of a real fight. The point is the ‘what’ is achieved but because the methodology used to achieve it is flawed the outcome is also flawed.

To be fair to the blog cited, the author does elaborate on the ‘how’ of achieving speed development elsewhere. He describes some methods of improving speed and provides a drill called “red line” which has worked well for him. Personally, I’ve never been fast, that is until I started training with Steve Morris, who has managed to improve my speed immensely. While I’m not exactly Usain Bolt or anything, at 42 I am now quicker than I have ever been, both in technique and on my feet. It may sound ridiculous but there you have it.

The first thing that got me moving quicker was pulling punches instead of pushing them. Now this doesn’t mean stopping them before hitting the target, rather it refers to concentrating on the pulling action of the returning limb rather than the actual striking limb. Well at least that’s a way of noticing the difference. It’s such a simple thing, but if you have a tendency of pushing out your strikes to the target by simply replacing the pushing action with a pulling action, punch speed increases. If you rep out your fastest strikes for a few seconds and then change the emphasis you’ll see the difference, try it. The improvement is instant! It also better allows the throwing of the body when whipping in a punch.

It may take a little while to ingrain the pulling action but you will feel and see the difference. Another way to improve speed is to work on explosive movement. By definition explosive is fast! Morris gets you to access the startle reflex as a way of understanding what explosive/fast is. That may sound daft but I believe part of the problem I had was, not truly knowing what quick actually was. The image that stuck with me was of the deer grazing in the wood as the hunter approaches. He makes a noise which startles the deer, which jumps and runs off in one explosive action.

When demonstrating this Morris will get you to ‘jump’ as if a big bang has gone off, then you simply adapt the movement, as the deer does. Again this is simple. You can even say BANG, which helps, but it really has to be

rather than a mumbled half-hearted effort of a bang! The verbalisation leads and reinforces the action but thats another story.