Episode 509 - Speed Development Program
In this episode, Jeremy talks about the newest addition to whistlekick's training programs, the Speed Development Program
Speed Development Program - Episode 509
Speed is an important part of martial arts and it works for physical training too. However, there are close to zero materials for speed training in the martial arts that are available in the market today. In this episode, Jeremy talks about the importance of speed training, what are the advantages, and more importantly, how this program was put together. If you are ready to be faster not only your feet but on every movement, listen to learn more about the Speed Development Program!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Welcome! You are listening to whistlekick martial arts radio episode 509. Today, were talking about developing martial arts speed and the new whistlekick speed development program. My name is Jeremy Lesniak your host on the show, founder of whistlekick where everything we do is in support of the traditional martial arts. If you want to know more about what we do, you can go to whistlekick.com. That’s our online home it’s the place to find our store with our speed development program, our strength and conditioning program, and all the other stuff that we make and provide. And if you use the code PODCAST15, that’ll save you 15% off every single thing over there. Now this show martial arts radio, gets its own website and that is whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. If you head over there, you’ll find every single episode we have ever done and transcripts and all kinds of stuff, we released two episodes every single week. And our goal with this show is to connect educate and entertain the traditional martial artist throughout the world. And if I might say so myself based on the last few days email, we’re doing a pretty good job. If you want to show your appreciation for what we do, you can do quite a few things. You can make a purchase like the program were going to talk about today and just as an aside, no were not just talking about the program, I’m going to give you some real actionable information regardless of whether you buy the program. I think hopefully you all know me well enough by now, I’m not only here to sell you stuff. You can also share an episode, this, may be a different one, you can follow us on social media we’re @whistlekick every single place you can imagine, you could tell a friend about what we’re doing, maybe pick up one of our books at Amazon, leave a review or support the Patreon. Patreon.com PATREON.com/whistlekick that’s a place where we post exclusive content and if you participate, if you sponsor us with as little as two dollars a month, were going to give you more content. Curious about upcoming episodes? It’s the only place we talk about it looking for additional audio and video? Well, we post stuff over there exclusive stuff that only goes to Patreon and as we get more Patreon contributors, we are ramping up what we’re doing over there. We’re not gonna pullback we do elsewhere, but we will do more as you all chip in more. Because let’s face the economics have to work.Like I said the top today were talking about speed. Speed is critical in martial arts. There is nothing that isn’t improved with the capacity to go faster, not saying everything has to be faster but as you develop your speed, you’re gaining the ability to perform movements faster. If you know anything about to Superfoot, Bill Wallace who graced us here on episode 14 I think it was, he is fond of talking about speed as a critical important of power that the faster you go, the less strength you need to apply to knock somebody down or out or whatever you’re trying to do. Speed makes everything easier. Speed is the essence of war according to Sun Tzu. Hopefully I don’t have to convince you of the importance of speed. If I do, you probably already stopped listening to this episode. But you might be saying; Jeremy I’m already pretty fast! Well, maybe you are, but this is one aspect of martial arts that most of the classes, the instructors that I’ve observed, get horribly wrong. It ignores the science, it ignores the way the body operates. Here’s an example; we know that the central nervous system drives the body, it’s the powerhouse. It’s what determines how fast how strong how coordinated its what handles so many things within our body. And it’s really good at adapting if you give it the right stimulus. If you listen to our episode on the strength and conditioning program, you heard me talk about the importance of repair versus adaptation. If I do enough repetitions of a movement with some sort of resistance that say push-ups, if I do the right number of push-ups my body get stronger. If I don’t do enough, no adaptation happens. But if I do too many no adaptation happens because the bodies and put all that energy into repair, recovery, healing because evolutionarily speaking it’s more important to survive than to adapt. They’re not always the exact same thing and we see that with speed training.Let’s imagine you’re going to do a bunch of movements of a certain technique. Let’s say your instructor asks you as a part of the class to do a hundred front kicks as fast as you can. That’s a pretty common occurrence, maybe not hundred but a sequence, a number maybe it’s 10. I don’t know about you but I and most people can do 2-3, maybe 5 really, really fast and then they start to get slower and the longer the time we consider, the slower they’re going to get. So, if we do a few, maybe we’ll be faster. If we do the right number, were definitely going to get faster, if we do too many were not going to get faster. Now, it’s not for the same reason as we when we’re talking about resistance. But in this case, were not getting faster because if we take a look at the average speed of those techniques, it’s actually below what were capable of doing. See, in order to get the central nervous system to respond and to adapt to the stimulus we give it, we have to challenge it and that requires giving it only enough stimulus and the right kind of stimulus for it to say oh, what I am used to is not good enough, I have to learn to get better and it will. Now I knew this conceptually going in because it’s not that different concept from strength, but there were a lot of difficulties in developing this program and I’m going to share with you what I learned and how I had to learn it so that even if you have no interest in ever buying a program from whistlekick and you want to go off and do your own thing you can stand on my shoulders and you can learn some things, and no I’m not going to give away everything, but I’ll give you quite a bit.When you take a look at speed, there is a certain time domain. You can be really really fast for somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds and if you take a look at fights, if you take a look at point sparring, any kind of combat situation, if you take a look at sprinting, you take a look at any sports endeavor, you’ll see that there’s a line and a lot of things at that 15-20 second mark. You show me a point sparring match were people go full out for 20 seconds, they don’t. Watch a boxing match, they engage and then the breakaway, they engage the breakaway. And there’s a lot of importance placed on conditioning, your ability to come back as much as you can. I’ve heard some people say conditioning wins fights and I would not completely agree but I think it is a critical component. Now we’re not talking about conditioning here but we have the same issues around speed. We can’t do two seconds of technique and expect the body to change. We also can’t do 30 seconds and expect the body to change. We need the right amount and depending on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, that seems to be somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds based on both my research and my experimentation. Because yeah, I did all the stuff in this program. Of course, it was really tough, to develop a framework for a speed development program for different martial artists of different styles at different levels, utilizing different techniques, because yes you get the plug in your own technique on this and not be there to supervise, that’s really hard. How do we break this down in such a way that self-directed. Well, that was a challenge and the way we accomplish that is by making it as simple as possible. You go through this program which is 90 days long and you’re doing a single technique through the entire time. The workouts we have, the order that they’re in there, they’re short. It doesn’t take more than five maybe 10 minutes from the time you warm up and probably review a video and track your progress and do all of that. Because again, were looking for that sweet spot. It’s not two or three reps, it’s not 100 reps, you have to manage that really carefully. As I was digging in, there is very little research on getting faster as an athlete with the exception of running. Lots of research out there on sprinting, track, people who Sprint as part of basketball or soccer football, it’s all out there but that’s it. So, what did I have to do? I had to dig in. I had to do my own research, I did read scientific papers I had to pull out not only the findings but look into the physiology. How does all of this work so that we could develop something that made sense, that didn’t leave people in a puddle on the floor so they couldn’t go on to the rest of their day. Because if you’ve done Sprint repeats, anybody out there of a run 800m sprints, pretty much done for the rest the day. It’s exhausting. So, we had to make sure that what we built would work and worked for everyone and also took into account their lives and oh wait, their martial arts training because were trying to help you get better so you can go faster at whatever it is you’re doing. And it works and I think we did a really good job on that.Why does it work? It works because it’s based on science. The science that we dug into works really well. We looked at the extension the contraction of the movement, we looked at accuracy, we looked at response time, we looked at all the different things that go into you executing the technique at the right time and the right scenario. It’s not 90 days of reaction drills, don’t worry. It’s a lot more than that but reaction is an important part of getting faster because there’s no scenario out there, where you need to execute a technique with speed it is not based on a response to something going on, it’s always a reaction. You know why else this works because it’s simple. Far too often, any program out there you buy it’s complicated it’s based on in all these fancy movements and claims that it’s gonna do something and maybe it does. But you know why it does something? It does something as its new and the body, the central nervous system, adapts to novel stimulus. But eventually that fades. Simple tried-and-true principles that come out of strength and conditioning, Sprint research, martial arts training, that’s what we’ve applied here, it’s simple but it’s not easy and it works because there is tons of history behind this. Is how the body adapts, it’s by doing simple tasks that stretch your capability a little bit every day. If you’re familiar with the two-minute martial arts program that we run, shout out to Justin who does a phenomenal job with that, there’s a reason that we put that program out every single day because it meant to get you to do work every single day just a little bit.When we compare this to the strength and conditioning program, it was a heck of a lot harder. It was really challenging for me to do this, it took a long time. It was harder because and have much to refer to. See with the strength and conditioning program, I was able to look at workouts that I’ve done and programs that I’ve purchased for my own personal development and start to apply martial arts principles and you know, look to what our goals were there but there was nothing that I could find that I could reference for this. And I don’t just mean a martial arts I mean anywhere. I’m sure there are people out there who have speed development programs for other sports but I’m fairly certain this is the first one for martial arts. Do you want a couple examples of what some of these drills look like so you can take them play with them yourself? Maybe teach them? By all means I’ll give you a couple right now, as examples of what’s in here and maybe you will interest you and you’ll want to take a step and check out the full program.Here is actually the first couple. We’re used to training a technique in its entirety from rest to extension to retraction. But what happens when we break that up? Imagine a back fist, you start from your ready position and you extend it slowly and then you retract it as fast as you can. And then you shake that off and then you do it again. You extend it nice and slow and you retract as fast as you can. Do half a dozen of those maybe 10 and tell me that you’re not starting to feel some fatigue. You can also do the same thing in reverse. You extend as quickly as possible and then you leave it and bring back, extend as quickly as possible leave it and then bring back nice and slow. Obviously, you’re not looking to develop bad habits there by only doing half of the movement and the program takes this into account, it’s not all this there are plenty drills that utilize the entire out and back of the technique, the extension and retraction, the eccentric and con centric portions of the movement, but sometimes breaking things down into their simplest parts can have a pretty strong impact. Here’s another one most of us know that excess tension in our muscles slows us down, so what about training techniques with is a little tension as possible, use as few muscles as you need to to extend that technique until just before the point of impact. Let’s am doing a back this and it’s nice and loose my hands even open a little bit I extended out as quickly as I can at the last possible second, I tighten up that hand. I’m certainly not the first person to come up with this drill or the first drill or any of the drills. I’m not claiming any originality with these drills. What I am claiming is that the way we’ve arranged them and the progress, the science, the length of time you’re doing, them the order, that’s unique and that adds up some pretty cool stuff.I hope you’ll check it out at whistlekick.com and if you’re interested here’s what’s coming down the pipe. These programs honestly, they’ve been a heck of a lot of fun for me to do and I’ve got a roadmap of dozens of them that I want to get to and it’s gonna take a long time I’ll probably never finish them all just because as I do one, I come up with ideas for others. As an example, now that we have the speed program to go with the strength and conditioning program, I’m fully expecting people are gonna ask me; but Jeremy how do I combine them? I wanted to get stronger and faster. Well, were working on hybrid where if you’ve purchased both programs, were going to give you ways that you can combine them in sort of a subprogram for free and we’re gonna do a lot of that as we go forward. If you buy the different parts, think of them like building materials. You buy strength and you buy speed and you buy some of these others and we’re gonna show you how to combine them so you can work on the things that are most important to you as a martial artist. As we do that work, as we upgrade these programs the prices will continue to go up. They’re as low as they will ever be right now and that’s part of my commitment to making sure you get as much value out of these as you can. As we improve things, you will maintain lifetime access to them which means the people that support us earliest get the best value. That’s important, it’s a lifetime access. Are there more programs coming? You betcha. In fact, the thing driving me to finish the promotion on the speed develop program, is the next one that I’m working on. Because I told myself you can’t start it you finish letting anybody know about this one. So, head to whistlekick.com, check out the speed development program, check out the strength and conditioning program if you haven’t checked that one out. Don’t forget, you got a discount code PODCAST15 save 15% off, saves you a few bucks. Show me better written programs for anybody, let alone martial arts at the prices that were offering. These are awesome programs and they’re being really well received.If you want to check out more maybe see the transcript for this episode, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, check out this, every episode we’ve ever done, we’ve got videos, we’ve got links we’ve got social media and if you haven’t checked out we recently did a major overhaul on the episode list, where you get additional columns. We’ve always had episode number, guest, or topic and a link but now you’ve got links to their website, their social media, their style, their location, we’ve done a lot of work on that and it makes that paid really useful. In fact, I was using it today for something completely different. Had nothing to do with me being a wanting to connect with a guest, I just needed that information, it was right there. Super handy. Of course, if you are willing to support the work they were doing you can purchase the speed development program or you could do one of many, many other things, I mentioned them at the top you know what they are. I appreciate the support for those of you who are contributing to the Patreon, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Remember if you see somebody out there rocking a whistlekick hat or shirt or a belt or whatever say hi and introduce yourself. Talk about the show, talk about something, make a new friend, make a new training partner. We’ll have a chance to change the world here through martial arts. That our goal, that is what we’re trying to do in you’re a part of that. So, thank you for those efforts. If you want to email me for any reason Jeremy@whistlekick.com. Until next time, train hard, smile, and have a great day!