Slow to Move Fast: On Speed in Training

There is something about difficult situations that brings out our creativity. And that is more or less what happened to me...

Just as I learned from my Bujinkan teachers in Japan and from my teacher in Israel, Sensei Danny Waxman, in our dojo too we work slowly when we train and learn. In fact, in many parts of the learning it is even "the slower, the better".

In one training session, a student who had studied for many years under another teacher challenged me on the question of speed. He really likes to work fast, thinks it is good and important, and did not understand why I emphasize training at low speed. His questions and the discussion that followed stirred me as well and pushed me to write this article.

I hope you enjoy it, and that it gives food for thought also to those who are not familiar with the Bujinkan approach and with the way we work in our dojo.

What do we learn, and why?

I think the first question every student, in any subject or field, should ask is: "What is the purpose of my learning? What am I actually learning?" The answer can help us find our way through the tangle of dilemmas and difficulties that may come up along the way.

At Dojo Caracal, as in the Bujinkan organization, we learn Budo (武道). In the narrow sense in which I use the word here, it means the martial way. In my view we learn much more than that, but I do not want to turn this article into something even longer and deeper.

So the basic question that everyone who learns and practices Budo should ask is: "What is the purpose of Budo?"

In his writings Hatsumi Sensei returns again and again to the link between the martial art and life itself. In Essence of Ninjutsu he describes Ninpo as a way that goes beyond the ability to defeat an opponent and touches on finding the right way to live. He even advises his students not to try to overcome the enemy, but to become people who are able to live. In the same context he brings very similar words of his teacher, Takamatsu Sensei, which I paraphrase here: "I am not telling you to defeat the enemy, but to be a person who is able to live."

To me this is an important principle: Budo is not a goal in itself. It is meant to serve life.

But in order to live, you first have to survive. And as my teacher, Daishihan (a senior Bujinkan teaching title) Danny Waxman, teaches me: "Sometimes I have to kill in order to survive."

And no, I have never killed anyone, and I do not know whether I would be able to do it if I had to. I also hope I will never have to face that test. But I am certainly ready to fight in order to survive and live.

What does "fighting" include?

Whole books could be written on this subject, but here I will try to keep it short.

In my view and understanding, fighting requires three basic things:

1. Maintaining one's physical and mental fitness.

2. The ability to hurt and cause damage to an attacker when necessary.

3. The greatest possible control over myself and over the attacker.

Of course, many more components and sub-components can be added: the ability to move, to change position, to strike hard and fast, and more. But to me these are secondary components that derive from these three.

And all of these components require, first and foremost, precision.

Precision shows in my position during the confrontation, in the choice of technique, in the way it is performed, in striking the right point and in the ability to respond to a changing situation.

And precision also requires inner calm.

This raises the question: is speed a goal in fighting?

My answer is clearly: no.

There are situations in which speed may be the right answer, and sometimes it is even necessary. But it is not the goal.

Precision, position and control before speed

It is important to make clear that different teachers have different understandings, different insights and different ways of working and teaching. In general one can say that "every teacher is shaped by the landscape of his life" (a play on a well-known line by the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, "Man is nothing but the image of his native landscape"), and his teachers are a significant part of that landscape.

I am no different.

I am influenced by all my teachers, above all by Danny Waxman and Hatsumi Sensei, and also by several other Japanese teachers whose work, personality and wisdom won my heart.

In my own work I especially emphasize four things:

1. Precision.

2. Position.

3. Inner work: Mushin (無心, "no mind"), Zanshin (残心, attention, presence and readiness that are kept before, during and after the action) and Fudoshin (不動心, "the immovable heart/mind").

4. Control.

The teachers who influenced me do not work out of a pursuit of speed, and from some of them I have explicitly heard reservations about working fast.

So why?

Danny has told me more than once that "working fast exposes you to the opponent and harms your stability".

But it seems to me that this explanation does not always get through to people who grew up with a different approach. So I want to recruit a fairly neutral sport to help explain it, one that is seen, and with a good deal of justice, as a field in which speed is enormously important: motorcycle riding.

What can we learn from riding a motorcycle?

I have been riding motorcycles for about as long as I can remember, mostly enduro and dual-sport.

I started with "trail riding", which is relatively slow by nature and let me learn, in a controlled way, the techniques I used later on.

Gradually, as I gained experience, I moved toward extreme off-road riding: very fast riding over all kinds of terrain at a high level of risk. And yes, I got addicted to the adrenaline and to some of the other sensations that this kind of riding brings with it.

To an outside observer it seems that in a speed race the winner is simply the fastest rider.

But that is not really so.

The fastest rider is the one who can be fast and still be precise, in control and mentally stable.

If you are very fast but lack precision, you will crash on the first bend of the track or in the first pothole off-road. And if your mind is distracted by a split second of hesitation or by some dilemma, you may find yourself scraping the ground with your nose.

And note: we are talking here about a field in which speed really is an essential part of the goal.

In fighting, my goal is completely different.

This understanding guides the way I work: precision, safety and control come before speed.

Speed is a result of skill, not a substitute for skill.

Whoever tries to be fast before knowing what they are doing is, to a large extent, practicing making their mistakes faster.

Speed in martial arts, agility and timing

This does not mean that speed has no place in martial arts. Sometimes speed is needed, so you also have to know how to act fast.

But we often mix up speed, agility and the right response.

A person can move very fast and still respond late, choose the wrong action or simply be in the wrong place.

On the other hand, a person who picked up early on what is happening, is in the right position and acts with the right timing can look almost slow and still get ahead of the opponent.

Agility is not only the ability to move fast. It is also the ability to perceive a change in the situation and quickly adapt one's movement to it.

That is why in fighting the ability to act at the right moment is no less important, and sometimes more important, than the ability to move fast. Position, distance, timing, early perception of what is happening and choosing the right response can greatly reduce the need for raw speed.

The goal is not to be faster than the opponent, but to need less speed to reach the right place in time.

In this sense, the speed that really matters is not necessarily measured by the speed of movement. Sometimes it comes from having seen earlier, understood earlier, being in the right place or simply not making an unnecessary movement.

So why train slowly?

Slow training in martial arts is not a goal in itself. Slowness is a tool.

It lets us see and feel the movement, identify mistakes and examine structure, distance, timing and balance without the pursuit of speed hiding them.

But slow training lets me notice more than what is happening in my own body and movement. It also lets me see the person in front of me better: a small shift in their balance, a change in tension or in the direction of movement, a distance that opens or closes, and also the moment when the action I planned no longer fits what is happening.

If I am busy only with "succeeding in the technique", I may stop seeing the person in front of me. I know in advance what they are supposed to do and what I am supposed to do in response, so it is easy to start responding to the drill instead of to reality.

In this sense, slowing down the training develops not only precision of execution but also the ability to perceive. It gives me time to recognize a change, understand what is happening and adapt my action to it.

This is very clear, for example, in Judo, with kuzushi: breaking the opponent's balance without unnecessary effort.

As ability improves, pace, power and uncertainty can be increased gradually without giving up the same principles.

The goal is not to be slow. The goal is to learn to see.

There are two more reasons for slow work, and they cannot be separated from the nature of our techniques.

The first is safety. The techniques of Budo Taijutsu were not built as sport techniques. The strikes, locks and throws are meant to cause real damage. Fast work that comes too early, before the student has gained control over themselves, will lead to injuries.

The second is control and preventing escalation. A significant part of Ninjutsu is preventing the confrontation from getting worse and getting the opponent to stop of their own accord. The way there is attentive, minimal movement, and that is learned through slow work.

Research on motor learning also points to the well-known trade-off between speed and accuracy. Acquiring a skill is not only about being able to perform an action faster, but about improving the relationship between the speed, accuracy and stability of the performance. Practice can reduce the variability between performances, make movement smoother and improve the speed-accuracy relationship.

The study by Shmuelof, Krakauer and Mazzoni, for example, found that after practice the speed-accuracy relationship improved, with the improvement in performance showing mainly as reduced variability between performances and increased smoothness of movement.

A 2023 review by Yadav and Duque presents the improvement of the speed-accuracy relationship as one of the measures used to describe the acquisition of a motor skill.

This does not mean that research "proves" we should always train slowly. It does not. The study by Itaguchi and Fukuzawa, which compared speed constraints with accuracy constraints in learning a movement, actually shows that the effect of training also depends on the type of constraint and on the task being learned.

For me, slow work is a teaching and training tool that lets the student build the things I am looking for: precision, position, control, attention and the ability to feel what is happening.

Once these are established, speed can come.

And what about randori?

There is no substitute for the experience of a training fight, randori.

Randori lets a person test themselves: how much of what was learned has really been absorbed into body and mind, and what has remained only at the level of intellectual understanding.

But in randori, too, the principles learned in training must be kept, without sliding into a "contest of strength and speed".

In my experience this happens easily. The ego steps in and suddenly, instead of learning, we are trying to win.

That is also the teacher's responsibility: randori should take place under supervision and should suit the purpose of the training and the level of the students.

Randori does not replace learning, and it is not a competition either.

It is a self-test. It lets us discover which things have already become part of us and which still need more work.

Finally

Working fast is not a bad thing.

Sometimes, especially in a real situation, fast action is required. So that, too, has to be practiced.

But as I see it, a student should first build a foundation of precision, position, control, timing and attention. If speed becomes the goal of training too early, it may hide mistakes instead of correcting them.

So why do we train slowly?

Not because being able to act fast is unimportant to us.

On the contrary.

We train slowly in order to learn not to rush.

There is a difference between the two.

Speed can come with training. But if structure, distance, timing, attention and the ability to read the situation are not there, all that speed will do is let us make mistakes faster.

And when these things are there, it sometimes turns out that we do not need to be all that fast at all.

Sources and further reading

Hatsumi, Masaaki. Essence of Ninjutsu: The Nine Traditions. Contemporary Books, 1988.

Yadav, Goldy & Julie Duque. Reflecting on what is 'skill' in human motor skill learning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17, 2023, Article 1117889.

Shmuelof, Lior, John W. Krakauer & Pietro Mazzoni. How is a motor skill learned? Change and invariance at the levels of task success and trajectory control. Journal of Neurophysiology, 108(2), 2012, pp. 578-594.

Itaguchi, Yoshihiro & Kazuyoshi Fukuzawa. Influence of Speed and Accuracy Constraints on Motor Learning for a Trajectory-Based Movement. Journal of Motor Behavior, 50(6), 2018, pp. 653-663.