When we watch Martial Arts in the movies, everyone seems so fast and this gives us the idea that we should be fast as well. What you don’t see often is the years of training that those people did to become that fast. In that training, you would have seen them practicing those moves slowly. It can be painful and tedious to go slow enough to get the moves just right, but every longtime practitioner of Martial Arts will tell you “If you can’t do it slow, then you can’t do it fast.” This phrase or some version of this phrase has been repeated by Martial Arts instructors for thousands of years and it will continue to be repeated because everyone (including the instructors who say this), will keep getting caught making mistakes in their moves when they go too fast. If you want to grow quickly in the Martial Arts or really anything, the secret is slow it down. Okay great, I’m going slow, but now it feels too slow. How do I know if I’m going the right speed? 

You may think that this question is too complex to answer, but apparently there is an answer to this question. The correct answer is you should be going at a speed where you make a mistake 15.87% of the time. While that does sound oddly specific, it came from a group of researchers that conducted a study and found what they call “The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning” (Wilson, R.C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M. et al.). The study explains that if you want to get better at skill quickly, you should be doing that task at a speed and challenge level where you are successful about 85% of the time.

Upon hearing this study, I’ve been using it in my own training and also watching my students to help them optimize their training. What I have noticed is that everyone’s tendency, including my own, is to go fast too quickly. What has seemed to help is what my Instructor calls the Learning Paces:

Learning Pace can be used ANY TIME. It should be used whenever you learn something new and need to practice or whenever you need to fix something about a move you already have.

Athletic pace can be used MOST of the time. It should be used after you have learned a move and are doing the move well. Increase the speed that you are doing a move that you are doing well and it will get into your memory. You will have to do something at least 100 times at Learning Pace before you are able to do it at Athletic Pace. When you are doing a drill or sparring with someone you should be using Athletic Pace at the most until Sensei says you are ready to do more.

Combat pace can be used only SOME of the time. It should be used after you have practiced the move a lot at Athletic Pace and have the control to move fast but NOT hit hard. You will have to do something at least 1000 times at Learning and Athletic Paces before you will be able to do it at Combat Pace. This is the pace that you should use for actual combat, if you go too fast you will either make a mistake or hurt yourself by hyperextending a joint

Full pace should only be used to test your limits. Sometimes I will hit a board or heavy bag as hard and as fast as I can, but as Bruce Lee famously said “Boards don’t hit back.” The dangers of going Full Speed and Power is that if you miss, you put yourself at risk of being counter-attacked or injuring yourself because you hit too hard. So real fighting should be done at Combat Pace and wait for your chance to catch your opponent off guard, your 75% will be enough to end the fight, you don’t need to go harder.

Bringing this back to the 85% rule, when my students and I remember to start in Learning Pace when practicing a move we make it possible to apply the 85% rule. When we forget and we start too fast, it is impossible to do the 85% rule. Your instructor can’t be responsible for catching every one of your mistakes, you have to start to catch your own mistakes. A drill I often give my students is to give a quick lesson on a move and then I have students practice that move some number of times, but I remind them that if they make a mistake, they should stop and repeat the move slower without a mistake. My students know about the 85% rule so I tell them that they should catch a mistake and repeat the move about 1 out of every 6 times (83.33% success rate). Let’s say I had them repeat the move 15 times, that means, they should have caught a mistake and had to repeat the move about 3 times. What ends up happening is students rush through the 15 times so that they can “be done”. When I watch them I see the students repeat the move maybe once, sometimes zero times. One of two things is happening if you are making less mistakes than 15%. Either you are going so slowly that you are not challenging yourself enough to make mistakes 15% of the time, or you are going so quickly that you aren’t noticing that you are making errors (probably more than 15% of the time).

Like I said before, most people’s tendency is to go too fast, so if you are not catching your own mistakes 15% of the time (about 1 out of 6 attempts) you are probably going too fast. In order to find the right speed yourself, you need to start by going too slow (Learning Pace) and find the fastest speed you can go and still make zero errors. You can have your instructor watch you to see if you are making any mistakes (that they care about at this moment in your training) so you know what a “perfect” version of that move looks like. Even though your move will not be “perfect” it will be as good as your instructor expects you to be at your level. Once you can do it “perfect”, go a little faster. If you still don’t notice any mistakes, go faster still. If you start to make mistakes about once every 6 times you do the move, stop increasing your speed, you have found the magical optimal 85% rule! Practice at this speed until you make less mistakes, then increase speed again until you find the optimal zone again.

Martial Arts has quite a bit of mysticism surrounding it. Many people who haven’t done Martial Arts tend to see some of the amazing things that Martial Artists can do and think that there was some secret or trick to doing it. No secret, no trick, just practice. My younger students will sometimes say “Whoa, how did you do that?” I always respond with some form of “Practice”. Maybe this is an American thing, but it feels like people are always trying to learn that magic trick or cheat that let’s them achieve their goal faster than anyone else. Like with most things, there isn’t actually a cheat to get better. The 85% Rule is the closest thing we have to a cheat, it gives us the optimal speed that we should be practicing our moves if we want to learn our moves as fast as possible. If you look at your Belt worrying about getting the next stripe or color, you will miss the lesson your instructor is trying to teach. If you keep your eyes on your training, the next time you look at your belt you’ll find it has changed. 

Dojo Source offers something for everyone, even if you have trained Martial Arts already, we can increase your skills in the Fighting Ranges where you have less experience. If you want to try a free class, sign up by going here: www.dojosource.fit/free-trial. 

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