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.