 Anyone who is training in the martial arts can certainly understand the concept of the importance of repetition. I mean, if the karate kid taught us anything, is that if we paint a fence long enough or we wax on enough cars, we'll build up all the muscle memory we need to win a tournament, right? In reality, repetition can absolutely help us learn and practice, but we also have to be smart about it. I was recently asked the question relating to this issue, so I thought it was worth addressing to the point of discussion with all of you. So we're going to get into that about the importance of repetition. So basically I want to start this topic off with a story that my first instructor used to tell us, and it kind of stuck with me, so I'm going to relay it to you. So basically, a long time ago, there was a painter who commissioned paintings out, and he was supposed to be really, really good. People would seek him out for his expert work. So one day, a business man came up to him and said, hey, I heard you do great work. I would like to hire you to make a painting. The old man goes, sure, absolutely, what would you like? And the guy said, I would like this beautiful, beautiful Chinese dragon, you know, in a world of fire, flying in the skies, and just make it absolutely gorgeous. And the guy said, no problem. I'll have it done for you. Awesome. They go in their own ways. A week later, the business man contacts the old man and goes, hey, I just kind of want a chicken. See how the painting's going. And the old man goes, oh, it's going well. I'm still working on it. I'll let you know soon. Another week goes by. The business man hasn't heard anything. Then another week to another week, he reaches out, contacts the old man. He goes, hey, I'm just kind of, you know that painting that I commissioned you for. I'm just checking in on it. And the old man goes, oh, yes, yes, it's going awesome. It's going great. I'm still working on it. It'll be ready soon. This went on for months and months and months. And finally one day, the business man got really upset, stormed over to the old man's house, pounded on the door. The old man opened up the door and the guy says, look, dude, I paid you for this painting. Why is it taking you so long to do it? Can I please have it? And the old man goes, oh, sure, no problem. Goes over, pulls up a blank canvas and quickly within five minutes, finishes the painting and it's the most beautiful painting he's ever seen. And the business man is like, this is absolutely amazing. This is the gorgeous. This is the best painting I've ever seen. But how come it took you all this time to do it if you could just do it in five minutes? The old man walks over to the closet, opens the door, and 100 canvases fall out of different variations of this painting. Basically, he'd been practicing all these months the same painting to get better at it. So it started from one level and he kept doing it to the point that when he had to do it on the spot, it was perfect and it flowed. So, you know, obviously the moral of that story is practice makes better. You get improvement by repetition. And to some degree, this is true. The more you repeat something, the better you can get at it, or at least the more fluent you can get at it, but it doesn't necessarily make you smarter at it. Repetition and building muscle memory is very important, but it's not an end all. There's more to it than that. You need to understand why you're repeating what you're doing, what the motions mean rather than just imitating. And more modern martial arts, it's good to ask questions. It's good to understand why, because if you can't explain it to somebody else, you really probably don't understand it that well yourself. And I come from, you know, American Kemple. We are known for memorized sequences. And this is both a gift and a curse to our system. We are judged a lot on, you know, oh, well, you've got a sequence of 20 techniques that you just memorized, you do over and over and over. That'll never work on the street. Well, yes, we have a sequence that we memorized that we do over and over and over, but it's not because we want to just produce it as it is. We do these motions over and over and we study the motions in between. So we're not just imitating each time, or you shouldn't be imitating each time. You're studying what those motions mean, because especially in Kemple, if anyone in the American Kemple community understands that no school performs it the same way. And there's usually reasons for it. So as long as you understand what reaction you're trying to get and understand the motions you want, then it'll have more meaning than just simply imitating an action that you've just done multiple times. Some of the repetition pitfalls that you can fall into is exactly that. Just doing a motion over and over and over and over and over and over, just because. And yes, you might build up muscle memory, but it might not be for the right thing. There is a story that's going around the internet. I don't know if it's true, but you hear it brought up a lot about a cop who was training disarmed techniques with a gun. And he worked with his partner over and over. He would disarm the gun, give it back. Disarm the gun, give it back. Well, one day the cop came across a criminal, the criminal pulled the gun, the cop disarmed the criminal and gave it back to him. And just out of habit, the guy shot the cop and killed him. This might just be an urban legend. There's the base of whether this happened or not, but the idea is there. If you just practice something just a memorized motion without understanding what you're doing, there could be pitfalls to that. Also, rushing through something might make you faster at it. It doesn't necessarily make you better at it. And I fell into this trap. When I trained on my own for a couple of years, when my school closed, I was learning the sequences. I understood what they meant, but I was practicing on my own. I didn't have an instructor at the time. I didn't have schoolmates to work with. I was just in my garage and I was just practicing the motion. And I got fast with it and I was really proud about it. When my instructor came back and reopened the school and I showed him my technique, he goes, yeah, that's cool that you did it fast. He goes, but you didn't do jack to me. He moved like a jack rabbit. He goes, but none of the strikes actually worked. So he spent time with me to rework on it because at that point in time, I was younger and all I did was memorize the motion and repeat the motion. So he slowed it down, he broke it down and showed me each individual piece so I understood what each motion was. Slow is smooth, smooth is speed. Do it slow to understand it. The more you understand it, the better you get at it. The more you practice it properly, naturally you're going to get faster with it each time. And by that point when you get fast with it, you'll be applying it properly. Now here's where the question came in. I actually had somebody ask me recently that they're in class and they're trying to learn a technique and I believe it was a grappling technique and he said no matter how hard he tries, he was having trouble with a particular maneuver and he was doing it over and over and over and over again in class. The instructor kept showing him and he goes, no matter how hard or how many times I'm practicing this motion, he goes, I'm not getting it right. And he goes, I'm getting really burnt out. What should I do? My suggestion to him was, okay, you've tried the repetition, try a different perspective. Again, I'm just starting jiu-jitsu and judo. I'm about a year into it. There's still some throws I have trouble with. They're not natural to me yet. We repeat them over and over in class. And then my first few weeks of learning, I wasn't quite getting it. I was trying to focus more on picking the person up and throwing them with physical strength rather than technique. And I was trying it over and over and over again and my instructor was telling me how to do it properly. But when I was trying to regurgitate it, it just wasn't flowing the way it should. And then one day he was showing another student, and it was just a word he used. He used a different word, and it made me realize, oh, I'm not picking them up and throwing them so much as I'm making them roll and trip over me. And just that little bit of a mental switch, that little bit of a perspective change, made me look at the technique in a whole different viewpoint, and I understood it much better. So I basically told him, if you're having trouble with the technique, then no matter how many times you're repeating it, that you're still getting stuck, ask somebody else to describe it to you. Or go online, maybe go on YouTube and see how somebody else might be describing it because it might be a simple matter of a single word or maybe a different camera viewpoint or maybe even a different concept to make you go, oh, I got it, now I gotta work on this. So it's not just a matter of repeating what you've seen, it's a matter of understanding what you're doing and repeating that the correct way each time. That's how you're gonna learn, that's how it's gonna get ingrained. You practice how you train, and this is an expression a lot of arts use and for example, we know when we work with partners in Kemple, we like to make contact, and if you're at a good Kemple school, you're gonna make contact with your partner. And if you're doing drills that say, maybe do a groin strike or you actually have you hitting the body or even hitting the face, we'll make contact. We're not gonna clock our partner's heart as we can, but maybe if we're doing a facial strike, we'll kind of go and we'll stop and maybe make contact and push, but what we're not gonna do is, the face is here, we're gonna go, ugh, punch out of here because we didn't wanna hit their face. That's developing bad habits. If you develop habits of not hitting your partner or not working it properly, that kind of repetition is gonna stick so that when you do need to use it, there's a good chance it's not gonna work right. And there's actually a famous quote by a Parker during the making of The Perfect Weapon. He was asked in the interview, why do you teach your students to pull punches? And his answer was, I don't teach students to pull punches, I teach them to control punches. We'll throw a punch at our partner and we'll stop within one inch of their face. If you really wanna hit that person for real, they really doesn't take any more effort to go that extra inch. So we don't pull our punches, we control our punches. In conclusion, the brain and the body, they work together. Just because you mimic something over and over and over does not mean you understand it. Break it down, study it, do it slow for us, repeat it slow for us until you have it solid. Speed will come naturally from there. So repetition done that way is intelligent and smart and it's gonna go a much longer way for you. Yin and Yang, brain and body, it works together. Like I said, we listen to our questions and our comments and that's where this episode stemmed from. So if you have questions, please ask them and we'll be happy to try to address them here on the show. Hit the like button, subscribe, share it with all your friends and we'll see you next time.