[00:00:00] training in your body to be in that moment and entering that flow state, developing the strength, developing the technique. It all comes together into this big ball we call speed.
And if you’re fast. And someone throws a strike, everything slows down. The faster you are, the slower everything moves. Someone can throw a punch that before used to move like lightning, and I will now be able to see it if I’m at that level of speed. It’s just how, I don’t know why this is the case, but the faster you move, the faster things you’re able to see.
You just get used to living at that fast pace. I can see something moving really fast out of the corner of my eye and I can react to it. I’ll see a punch coming at me and sometimes it moves in slow motion and I can get out of the way. So increasing your speed can also increase your reaction time, can allow you to become calm in the moment, and combining these things together becomes the most dangerous.
If you’re strong, if you’re fast, and you can apply those in [00:01:00] timing and striking at the right time, You’re unstoppable.
welcome back everybody to another episode of The Unlimited You. I’m Master Victor. We’re here talking about speed today, the kingdom of speed and how speed is one of the most important things that you can train and develop in your martial arts journey. Now, [00:02:00] strength is really important. Accuracy is really important.
We’ve talked about this and how timing is really important. But if you’re fast, if you’re exceptionally fast. It there’s, it’s really hard to strike you. It’s really hard to get away from you. So I prize developing my speed on top of everything else, but I really focus on the speed of the strike. Now, developing speed, it takes time, it takes hard work, and you have to build it with your strength, with your accuracy, otherwise you’re just going to be flailing strikes out there. Now, developing speed with good form and good precision is really important. You can’t just become fast and sloppy, nah, that’s not really, that’s not the way to go. The best application of speed. When we were building speed, a lot of people, when they start training, they’ll want to throw in a hundred percent of their power right away. What ends up happening is you compromise your form and you throw in more power. You end up, you know, maybe rather than just throwing a good punch, you reach out there [00:03:00] really far and then somebody can grab your arm and pull you forward. Right? So you compromise your body position and the self defense aspect of it. Whatever discipline you’re training and our foundational stance is really important. So when we’re developing speed, we actually start off slow and this may be a little contradictory, but it’s really important to build the technique as we’re building speed. So if I’m building, if we’re going to be working on, let’s say your reverse punch, I’m going to tell you.
To send it out, maybe 90 percent of the way, and then the last little bit, you’ll turn it out. If we’re sending it from the hip, you’ll send it straight up, upside down. The last second, you’re going to do that twist and locking it out. And learning the technique first and then making it smooth. Once you can do it smooth without stopping there and then pushing it forward.
Once you can get the full smooth punch, we can increase the speed. So first you want to do it slow, make it smooth. And once you got a smooth, you can slowly start [00:04:00] dialing up the speed. Now what’s important is, is if you start feeling sloppy is if your accuracy, your body position, your foundation, maybe your hands start going down.
Keep it at that speed or maybe even dial it back down a little bit and make sure that you have good form because if you get sloppy as you get fast, it’s kind of pointless. So you want to develop good, accurate, disciplined, technical speed, not just raw speed. there’s people out there who have just the raw ability, who have developed speed in other disciplines that will be able to transition into, let’s say a martial arts discipline and be fast right away, but they may not have that technique.
So it’s important to develop the technique so you don’t compromise yourself. Now, speed and strength, they relate very well together. You need to have muscle in order to move fast. You need to have strong muscle. If you look at the world’s fastest sprinters, their legs are huge versus the people who run marathons.
Their legs are a little bit skinnier. Their, muscles have been Conditioned [00:05:00] for endurance versus those sprinters, their muscles have been conditioned for that really quick burst of energy, letting it all out. And they’re so incredibly fast. It doesn’t even make sense. Now you can build speed and endurance. But they’re a little conflicting in how your muscles exercise. And this is kind of like really why I like the way that we train. Like you’ll get people who are really big and bulky. They’re not flexible and they’re not fast. Then you’ll get some people who are skinny, scrawny can run 5, 000 miles, but they may not be able to.
You know, do a full pull up, you know, um, just as an example and in martial arts, we train calisthenics and what calisthenics does is allows you to use your body weight and control it while you’re doing exercises. And this builds control, this builds speed and mobility. So in our speed, we are working on what’s called fast twitch muscle fibers.
We’re working on getting that muscle to fire really [00:06:00] fast. And in order to do that, you have to constantly train your muscles to fire faster and faster and faster. So if you want to work on your speed and let’s say you’re like pushing 50% You’re probably not really going to get faster in order for you to get faster.
You need to push a hundred percent of your speed. And once you get there, your muscles are going to be like, Oh, he’s trying to use this type of motion and exploding faster and faster. Over time, it takes time. You have to be patient with yourself over time. You’ll start to feel yourself getting faster and faster.
You’ll be able to put in less effort and hit that top speed that you used to be at. And you can be like, Oh, I still got way more speed left in me. And that takes a lot of time to train. Now, let’s say you’ve built your technique, done it slow, gotten it smooth, and then you turn up the speed and you’ve gotten it fast.
And you’ve kind of hit this block, this kind of plateau, and you’re not able to get faster. There [00:07:00] are certain training methods that I personally like to use to increase my speed. Now resistance is going to be one of the, I guess the biggest benefits to increasing your speed. I like to go into the pool.
Now I like to do my taekwondo punches in the pool, throwing maybe a hundred punches. Now I pull back as fast as I can and I send that punch out as fast as I can. And that resistance, that added resistance underwater is going to make it harder for you to throw that, punch. So then when you get out of the water, That resistance isn’t going to be there, but your muscles are used to it.
They’re used to firing against that heavier, you know, water all around you. So when you go to the air, it’s going to be easier. You’re going to be faster. Most likely, if you are watching this, you’re a fan of, like, anime or just martial arts in general. Let’s say you haven’t seen Dragon Ball Z or even Naruto, they use weights in their training.
They’ll put in ankle weights, you know, wrist weights, [00:08:00] weighted vests, and you can get all kinds of weighted things. to help add, more resistance to your movement. Now, when you get to a certain place of speed, having something on your wrist, like my watch, if I punch full speed, it’ll move and it will actually hit right here on my hand.
So when I punch, I usually, and when I train, I like to take my watch off or I like to have something on me. That’s a very soft because it’s going to move and it’s going to hit you. And that’s one of the hardships of using.
It’s going to be on this one spot and you’re going to be throwing that and moving it, and it’s going to jam down into your foot or jam down into your hand. And that can be uncomfortable. It can be downright painful. You might get bruises. This is why I like going into the water. The water is just full on all around you.
You’re getting that additional resistance and you’re still [00:09:00] able to maintain that technique without compromising your Really? It’s not painful underwater. It’s just harder and you’ll feel better. that sense of like exhaustion way earlier. Let’s say you throw 150 punches on land. You go into water, you throw 50 punches.
You’re going to feel just as tired as long as you’re putting in that effort. Another way that you can build speed. Let’s say that you’re working on explosive motion, right? You’re trying to become a faster sprinter. Maybe you’re trying to work on bringing your knee up, resistance bands, going uphill.
Sprinting uphill is one of the most. beneficial ways to your sprinting speed because you have additional resistance in that hill and you’re exploding the muscles trying to go up that hill so then when you go to flat ground, that resistance isn’t there. You can go a lot faster. And these principles, we take them and apply them to our training.
So, let’s say you’re, you’ve done like 50 kicks and [00:10:00] now your muscles are tired. I’m gonna ask you to do fast, good form kicks Once you’re tired, once your legs are dead, once your muscles are exhausted, and we’re going to build the endurance, we’re going to build the speed of it. And we’re going to teach your mind to say, Hey, we are at the limit of our muscles, but we can still push it a little bit.
And that’s really important when you’re training for speed is not to just stop when you feel like, Oh yeah, this is good is to keep going because that little extra bit of push is going to give you that much more. Okay. I guess return in your training. Like let’s say you’re training for strength. If you do five sets of six or three sets of six, four sets of six, five sets of six, and it’s pretty light and you can go to a higher weight and you don’t, you’re not going to be getting the same benefit as if like, let’s say you do.
Three sets of six and it’s a really heavy weight. And then that fourth set, you can only get three and you go to failure, going to failure and building [00:11:00] strength and speed is critical. You’re going to make so much more gains when you reach that failure point. So when the muscles are screaming at you, when you want to give up, that’s when you need to push.
That’s when you need to take the extra step forward. To go even faster and you’re going to know that you can do that and it’s going to give you the confidence is going to reinforce the brain pattern saying, Hey, I remember this feeling. This sucks, but I’m okay. I’m alive. I can breathe. I can move and I can actually push even harder.
And it’s going to give you the sense of calmness on the inside. That’s like, Hey, I’m doing the good work. I’m seeing the results. And then it’s really important, especially when you’re building speed to do it correctly. And when you are pushing your limits of strength, of speed with good form, it can be safe when you don’t start, when you don’t build your muscles.
Correctly. Let’s say like, you’ve been working out the front of your legs. You’ve been neglecting the back. And let’s say you have compromised your [00:12:00] form. You can actually become more prone to injury. And this is where the slow training, developing good technique and all around good muscles. as in balance, right?
We don’t want to have a strong quad than our hamstring. We want to have even both in the front and the back, just as your chest, as your lats in both the push and the pull, it’s going to keep us healthier in a better form. So that way, when we do push, when we do exert ourselves, the muscles that we’re using, when they get tired, you’re not going to be relying on a secondary stabilization muscle.
To push you further because a lot of the time is when we’re really pushing ourselves and you’re not, you don’t have good form or you push too far past your limit and you don’t know where to stop. That’s where injury comes in. So training speed, it can be dangerous. But under good supervision, it can be very safe and beneficial.
And this takes knowing yourself. It takes you being [00:13:00] pushed to that limit to see how far you can go, how far your muscles can go to then understand, okay, I can hit that spot over and over again, but you don’t want to train speed. I don’t think it’s a good idea, in my opinion. And this is because you are exerting a lot of energy in your muscles.
You are pushing your muscles to the limit. And you need to be able to recuperate just your immune system. It needs a little bit of time to recharge. I only train speed maximum two to three days a week. Ideally, I try to really keep it at a two day max. I’ll go to the pool, I’ll do my high knees, my butt kicks, my front kicks and my punches.
I do all of that in the pool. That’s how I get faster kicks. When you get used to throwing a full speed front kick underwater and then you come out of the water, you’re like, Oh, I didn’t know I could be that fast. But you have to constantly do it and you’ll see amazing increases. Also high intensity [00:14:00] interval training can be extremely beneficial in developing your speed.
So this is going to build your cardiovascular system and optimize your body’s ability to take in that oxygen from the air. Put it through your lungs, pass it through your heart and put it into your blood system. That’s going to help you last longer. And that endurance is going to help you push harder during that time.
You want to give up during that time. You want to quit. You’re going to have more energy. So high intensity interval trainings, things like squat, jump tucks. Spider burpees up downs are exceptional in developing the body’s ability. We’re like, when you jump up and you bring your knees, you tuck them in and you land in a squatted position.
You’re. Working that explosive muscle and being able to jump, bring the knees up and land softly. That fast twitch muscle fiber is getting developed during those exercises. When you’re doing plyometrics, like pushup, clap, land, jumping on one foot as high as you can. Those are [00:15:00] working on those same types of muscles.
Those fast twitch muscle fibers and getting you to really fire them really fast. And that is critical for developing speed. So, to kind of cover a little bit of what you need in order to develop speed, is first you need technique. You need to have technique as a foundation before you step into the world of speed.
If you don’t have technique, don’t go fast. Go slow. Go slow, develop that technique, and make it smooth. Once it’s smooth, Then dial up the speed on land until you, you can push your a hundred percent speed with that good technique. Once you get to being, to pushing, you want to work on plyometrics. Clap pushups, explosive squats, squat, jump, tucks, burpees, spider burpees, and if you don’t know what spider burpee is, when you jump, you just jump and bring your knees up and you land in a squatted position like a squat, jump, tuck, up, downs, exceptional for [00:16:00] this, getting into those high intensity interval trainings will get you past that initial plateau.
Then adding resistance. Maybe you want to do squat, jump, tucks with some weights on your calves. Maybe you, have a weighted vest you want to put on that’s going to weigh your body down and it’s going to make you feel slower overall. Maybe not your limbs, but your general body. If you attach the weights to your, the end of your limbs, it’s going to be harder to throw that punch.
It’s going to be harder to throw that hook punch, to throw that front kick, attaching the weight to the end of the limb. Now, I personally don’t like to do that one. There’s a lot of trainers who do. you can also add resistance with bands and parachutes. That’s also very popular. I really like the whole band idea, especially putting a band around your waist, tying it to something behind you and trying to sprint or trying to kick with that band attached.
Maybe I attach a band to my arm and I’m throwing a [00:17:00] punch that added resistance is going to increase my speed and then going into the pool. The pool’s my favorite. You’re in the water. I mean, who doesn’t like going in the water? Maybe some people do. but you’re in the water, you’re getting cooled off.
You’re exerting in immense amount of energy and you get tired really fast in the water if you’re working on, HIIT style training and. I’m a big advocate for training in the water because it reduces the impact on your joints when I jump, when I strike, it has a lot less impact on my knees. I can train at a higher intensity without doing that potential damage to my body.
It’s a lot safer training in the water and you get that benefit. I’d say, especially if you’re injured and you want to train, go in the water, walk a little bit, walk forwards, walk backwards. Maybe you can start running underwater. Maybe you can do walking front kicks underwater. Step, punch underwater. That becomes really important in [00:18:00] developing the speed.
Now, I’ve seen the difference in not training underwater and training underwater. And every time I train in the water and I come back on land, everything feels effortless. it just comes out easier. I can strike things faster. It’s not as taxing on my body. And that’s because I’ve put myself through a higher intensity training with more resistance so that when I come into this normal world, I Everything’s more relaxed. that’s another big key of speed and being relaxed. If you’re tense, if you’re squeezing all of your muscles and you go to throw a punch, all of this is tight. I’m not going to be able to launch that punch out with my full force. I’m not even going to get my full power behind it. Because I can’t send out the speed of my punch.
And your speed does correlate to how much power you can direct into your strike. So the faster your strike, the more powerful it is. [00:19:00] Now, your muscles dictate how much force you can, that’s mass, how much force you can deliver through your strike. So the bigger you are, and the faster you are, the more power you can deliver through each punch, each kick.
But we really have to focus on being relaxed. You cannot be fast if you’re tight, if you’re super tight. You have to be relaxed. And then the strike comes out of nowhere, and it’s right back here. But you have to be relaxed. The more relaxed you are, the easier those muscle fibers will fire all the way straight and pull back and getting used to throwing that strike in a relaxed format and at the very last second, squeezing at the moment of impact and then pulling it back.
Relaxed. That is going to increase your speed significantly more so than if you do all these other things. If I do all these other trainings, if I go in the water, if I’m doing hit style training, if I’m putting bands on myself and I’m still like, huh, squeezing [00:20:00] everything and not relaxing my body, probably not going to gain speed, you’ll see a significant increase in your speed by relaxing everything.
You also use less energy. So your endurance is going to increase. You’ll be able to. Go faster, use less energy, last longer. And then the person you’re sparring or whoever you’re defending yourself against, they’re going to be like, Oh, and in 30 seconds, they’re going to be down on the ground. And you’re going to be looking at them like, what’s up?
So being relaxed allows you to last longer. It allows you to be faster, allows those muscles to. Fire off faster and being relaxed also reduces your chance of telegraphing. So sometimes when you punch, people will do a slight motion before that punch comes out, right? And you’ll see it. It’s like you telling me that you’re going to punch me.
Of course, I’m going to move out of the way. But if you can be relaxed, your hands in the right spot, not a know where it just goes out and [00:21:00] comes back in. That’s how you’re going to deliver a fast, surprising strike.
And another part of speed that a lot of people, I guess they don’t really train it.
It’s repetition and you have to train speed over and over [00:22:00] and over again, you can’t just become fast. and let it go. You have to constantly build that speed just like strength. If you build strength and you take like a month break and you come back, you’ll probably find you’re a little bit weaker.
Same with your speed. If you’ve trained that speed and you take a big long break, you’re probably going to find you got a little bit slower. Now it’s a lot easier once you’ve developed that speed to come back to developing that high, the fast twitch muscle fiber. But it takes time and it takes consistency.
Somebody who puts in a hundred percent effort and is consistent with their training is going to outpace the person who is naturally faster. Who’s not putting in as much effort and who’s not consistent with their training. I’ve seen some very gifted, talented martial artists at a young age who just kind of, they got too good too early.
And they thought they were the best when they obviously weren’t. And then their training started to go down and [00:23:00] decline. They became slower. And then these people who were a lot slower than them, they kept training. They kept training. They kept training. All of a sudden they got faster than them. And then that person was like, what, how did they get faster than me?
Well, they were training. They kept up. they were consistent, plied themselves. They showed up and showing up for this type of training. And it is difficult, is extremely important. If you don’t do it, you’re not going to develop speed. If you stop doing it, you’re going to get slower. If you keep doing it, you’re consistently going to build speed.
And that’s very critical.
And it comes back faster than I think. And training in your body to be in that moment and entering that flow state, right? And we just talked about this a few episodes ago, entering that flow state, developing the strength, developing the technique. It all comes together into this big ball we call speed.
And if you’re fast. And someone throws a strike, everything slows down. The faster you are, the slower everything moves. Someone can throw a punch that before used to move like lightning, [00:24:00] and I will now be able to see it if I’m at that level of speed. It’s just how, I don’t know why this is the case, but the faster you move, the faster things you’re able to see.
You just get used to living at that fast pace. I can see something moving really fast out of the corner of my eye and I can react to it. I’ll see a punch coming at me and sometimes it moves in slow motion and I can get out of the way. So increasing your speed can also increase your reaction time, can allow you to become calm in the moment, and combining these things together becomes the most dangerous.
If you’re strong, if you’re fast, and you can apply those in timing and striking at the right time, You’re unstoppable. And now speed, the speed force, flash, Superman, all those people who are extremely fast, they had the benefit of being able to never be hit. They saw a strike coming. They were able to move out of the way.
They [00:25:00] could hit somebody two, three, four, 500 times before they even got hit. And that, that is, that’s critical. That’s why we say that speed is King in a lot of ways. And if you think about, speed and mass, Together, the more mass you have and the faster it goes. The more damage is going to cause at the point of impact.
So speed is dangerous at the sudden stopping point. When you hit something and it stops, that force goes through the object and the more mass you have behind the thing that’s moving, the more force is going to go into. that target, the spot you’re impacting. So this is where the people who are big and bulky or heavy, if they are fast, they are exceptionally dangerous because their strikes are going to just be devastating versus somebody who’s small.
And exceptionally fast, they may be able to cause damage, but that mass isn’t there. And mass is really important in self defense. This is [00:26:00] why you have weight classes in MMA, in boxing, in wrestling. Because weight is a significant advantage in self defense. And being light and fast is good, but you go up against somebody who’s huge and they grab you, that can be a problem.
Or you go up against somebody who’s huge and they’re also fast. That’s scary. So in our training, we’re building muscle. We’re putting on a little bit of mass, lean muscle mass, not chubby fat so that we can be able to move well, that muscle is going to allow us to move faster. And if we have weight, that’s.
Kind of dead weight, which is what fat is. It’s not being used for anything. It’s just storing energy. Then what’s going to happen is we’re going to have to carry more weight without having the muscle behind it to drive that power. And that’s really critical. So the bigger you are, the faster you are, the more damage you can cause. that’s so important to state that you have like rail [00:27:00] guns being developed in the military that can fire a. Iron rod from space and do the same level of damage that a giant nuclear weapon can cause because of the speed that it can be delivered at. So think about that. The stronger and faster you strike, the more force you’re going to put through your limbs.
So you also have to reinforce your limbs. You have to get used to punching at that speed. Used to hitting something without the knuckles. Without the wrist buckling. Without your shin buckling. So as you develop speed, you have to develop the endurance of the body. In striking hard things. So we strike wood.
With the shins. With the forearms. With the palms. The knuckles with the inlet of the foot. We are striking hard things to develop the endurance in the, strength in our bodies to withstand the impact, getting hit in the stomach repeatedly and learning to take impact is also [00:28:00] critical and more mass you have, the harder of bone and the bone density becomes really important in delivering that strike, the more power and damage you can deliver.
through each technique that you do. So when you’re developing speed, don’t forget to also develop your body because you, when you throw that fast track, you’re going to be delivering more power. Even if you didn’t get stronger, that speed increases the amount of force being delivered through your target.
So it becomes critical to develop your limbs. The strength in each joint to withstand that impact. And when you’re learning speed, give, be patient with yourself. It takes time. It’s just like strength. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a few months for you to develop the speed. And once you do, you’re like, Oh, I’m fast now, but there’s levels to this.
You may think you’re fast, there’s somebody faster. I may think I’m fast, but there’s I know there’s a lot more [00:29:00] people faster than me. I know, and that’s just the truth of it. And if you’re the fastest at punching, maybe there’s somebody faster at kicking. Maybe there’s somebody faster at footwork.
Right? So there’s different places that you need to develop your speed. It’s not just your punching, it’s not just your kicking, but it’s your footwork. Your footwork is so critical if you can get out and get back in before they can even see you. So footwork keeps you safe. That’s one of the most important things in Taekwondo is how we move, stepping forward, stepping back, side shuffling, a stepping, lunging forward, all of these different moves keeps you safe.
And then you can use your strike, right? Maintaining distance with our speed. That’s very critical. If you’re small, You’re going up against somebody’s big, let them throw a strike, get out of the way, get in, throw one, two, three, and then get out so they can’t grab you, so they can’t pummel you down into the ground, right?
So use what you know, what your strengths are against someone else’s [00:30:00] strengths. We’re going to be going more into how we apply the strength, the speed, and all of this in a self defense aspect in a few different videos. Later episodes. I hope you all enjoyed. If you have any questions about speed, how it applies, how to develop it, let me know I can, I’m going to be sharing later on these podcasts, specific drills that we do, I kind of went a little bit into it and like going into the pool, doing squat, jump tucks, punching the pool and things like that, doing band exercises, we’re going to be showing you a little bit more detailed information later on and like how these.
These things are actually working how they’re, you know, developing your muscles, what to focus on the hardships of training in certain areas. But when you train speed, please make sure that you’re doing it carefully. when you push your limits, you become more prone to injury because you’re essentially refining the line [00:31:00] between safe training and injury, and you’re walking this tight path and the, faster you get and the stronger you get, the narrower that gap gets.
So you have to be very aware of your body. So train hard, push yourselves, but give yourself time to rest. That’s really critical. your ligaments, your tendons are not going to heal as fast as your muscles. And when you’re firing and delivering really heavy loads, you need a little bit more time to. to let it heal.
And this is where our training kind of hits different parts of your body at different times of the week. So that we do legs on one day and we let them rest for two days. We do arms the next day. We let those rest for two days. Then we do core and then we do a full body workout. That’s so we can give each muscle group time to rest.
The rest is really important. So train hard, give yourself some resting time, take care of yourself. Subscribe, like, and we’ll see [00:32:00] you on the next episode of The Unlimited You. And if you want to get some more information, check out FeraAcademy.com/You to find out more information. See y’all later.
