In this article we will look at the aspect of Mental speed and it’s role in your overall speed development in your Jeet Kune Do training.

Mental Speed is how quickly your brain can interpret what you have perceived and send a message to your body to react.

Increasing mental speed is sometimes more difficult than any of the others, as well as being the most useful.  The ability to process the action in your head faster than your opponent is priceless.  This gives you the chance to control the action instead of simply reacting to it.

Building mental speed requires exercise of the muscles just as with any other activity.  The difference is that the muscle involved is your brain.  Your brain is no different from your biceps or abs, in that the more you work it, the stronger it gets.  The best advice I could give is that knowledge is power.  In your off time, read, write, and learn as much as you can.  Even if it is not martial arts related, any learning or brain stimulating activity will in turn help mental speed.  In your mind-expanding drills, you can read about and anywise the strategies of other methods of fighting.  This is not to borrow from them or to look for better ideas.  Rather, use this information to formulate a strategy for each of the different types of fighters you may encounter.

Physical training that will help mental speed should consist of drills that require choices and decisions.  The idea is to exercise the brain’s ability to send messages to your body.  You could have a partner put on a pair of focus mitts and move around, holding them up for you to strike.  The best training is if they hold them up randomly, at different angles, heights etc.  The more choices they give you, the harder you will have to work mentally.  As you become more advanced, have them throw attacks at you as well as holding the mitts up to be hit.  This will give you both defensive and offensive choices.  Obviously, the variables possible with this drill are endless.

The last thing to consider in improving mental speed is in the formation of your overall strategy.  Since mental speed is impacted so greatly by the number of choice reactions you have, it makes sense to cut down from the beginning.  Anyone with more than six months of experience in the martial arts knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat.  You could spend a lifetime discussing how many ways there are to counter a jab.  It is ridiculous to attempt to practice them all.  Find a couple that are simple, direct, and work well for you then practice them to death.  Every technique in your arsenal should be selected for its simplicity and effectiveness.  Do not overload yourself with flowery garbage that can only be used against a drunk, overweight, seventy year old with a wooden leg.  Chances are, he will not show up for a sparring session anytime soon.

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In this series in The Essence of Speed we will look at both Initiation and Performance Speed. This will leave the last article in this series to look at Alteration Speed.

Initiation Speed

After you have perceived the need to act and have mentally sent the signals to the proper muscles, it then comes down to how quickly you can physically initiate the motion.

Improvement requires a concentrated effort on a very small amount of physical motion.  Supplemental training, such as weights or calisthenics are great to strengthen the major muscle groups involved in the initiation.  When doing so, it is important to note that you should be working fast twitch fibers of the muscles rather than the slow.  You need quick, explosive power as opposed to raw strength.  This is acquired using fast explosive repetitions with light weights.  Another type of supplemental exercise that can be of benefit is isometrics.  More and more studies are showing that both fast and slow twitch muscle fibers are worked in an isometric contraction.

Other than supplemental exercises, the initiation itself should be isolated and practiced by itself.  There are a couple of ways to do this: First is to practice the initiation from a dead still position, concentrating on beginning in your stance with no pre-empting movement, then bursting into the technique.  Starting from a still position is more difficult than when the body is already in motion.  Therefore, it will add the ultimate resistance, working the muscles harder, as well as teaching the body to be non-telegraphic.  Finally, you should work the initiation while in motion.  Most of the time, when the technique will be utilized, you will already be moving.  You will need to practice it until it is possible to initiate with immaculate balance, free of excess energy.

Performance Speed

Now we have gotten to the type of speed that is most readily recognizable.  Performance Speed is the time it takes from initiation until the completion of an action.

To work on performance speed, the amounts of drills are infinite.  Striking paper and shadow boxing are both excellent drills that I practice frequently.  An effective speed exercise includes repetition, in order to train the neural impulses (muscle memory).  Additionally, they should be drills designed to eliminate tension, so that speed is the focus rather than power.

Performance speed exercises can be done either solo or with a partner.  The main idea is to teach the muscles to perform more efficiently through proper form, repetition, muscle endurance, and strength.  The best way to enhance performance speed is to practice the desired movement repeatedly, all the while, concentrating on moving faster each time.

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In conclusion on the series of  The Essence of Speed we will look at Alteration Speed.

Alteration speed is the measurement of how fast you can change a motion after it has already been committed to.  For instance, your adversary leaves their head uncovered, so you throw a straight punch for the opening.  Just before landing, they step to the side to evade it.  Where alteration speed comes in is how quickly you can change your straight punch into a backfist to catch them as they move.

Alteration speed refers to any type of deviation from the initial motion.  It can be changing from one attack to another, stopping a motion mid-stream, or switching from an attack to a defensive maneuver.

To improve alteration speed, it is important to work on all four of the previous types of speed.  Obviously, without perceptual speed, the need for alteration may not even be recognized.  Without mental speed, you may not be able to process and send the information to your body to make the alteration.  Without the remaining types, you can see that it may be difficult to change your motion at all.

To work alteration speed by itself, a few drills will help.  Shadow boxing, again, is highly recommended.  As you shadow box, work on starting a motion, stop it part of the way through and change to another.  You should imagine situations that would necessitate an immediate change of tactics.
With a partner, a very useful drill is to have them throw focus mitts up for you to hit, as you attempt to strike them, they can pull the mitts away or change the angle for a different strike.  This will force you to alter your path.

Speed when broken down, is quite a bit more complicated than it may seem.  There are hundreds of variables and hundreds of ways to improve.  As with almost anything else, breaking it down and emphasizing the components separately will assist improvement and enable you to monitor progress more closely.  Improving speed as a whole, just the awareness of the different types helps tremendously.

To achieve that blinding speed that leaves others in awe, plan your workouts to focus on speed alone.  Create your own drills to improve your individual weaknesses.  Above all, never assume that you were not built for speed.  True speed is only relative to your state of mind.

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