"I'm saying, when you're ready, you won't need to..."
Aaaaaaah Morpheus analogies.
Is there any complex-learning or flow-state phenomenon we haven't resorted to The Matrix to explain?
Today, I was rolling with a purple belt from Marcelo Garcia's academy. (Can anybody else say "bad idea"? 😉) And suddenly, I was Neo, on the mats with Morpheus.
The dude was countering things I hadn't even thought to do yet.
In the military, they call it the OODA loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
Wondering what it feels like when somebody's got a faster OODA loop than you? Try shedding with Dan Weiss. Or Nate Wood. Or Andy Prado. Or Maison Guidry.
Time is clearly not moving at the same rate for these guys as it is for us. (Will it move slower for Conor McGregor or Floyd Mayweather?)
I've long taken the controversial position that the way to stack up better in sheds is not to spend countless hours making your hands faster. It's to make time slower. As Morpheus puts it, "do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles? In this place?"
In Juijitsu it's utterly uncontroversial that the way to win is not to increase your brute strength (though, as in drums, that will help), but to shorten your OODA loop. The beer-bellied account black belt who taps a younger, bigger, stronger opponent handily, simply because he knows what the opponent's going to do before the opponent knows is so mundane as to be a day-to-day occurrence.
Soooo, besides just "grinding it out", how do you shorten your OODA loop with the drums? Luckily, an idiosyncrasy of the human brain helps: chunking.
Quick illustration: you used to think of a paradiddle as eight discreet strokes. Now you think of it as a unit.
Now that you've got that unit, you can orchestrate it, vary it, change its rate, etc.
That's chunking.
So, when Devon Taylor seems to reorient gravity to a right-angle in a solo over Knower's What's In Your Heart, he's actually applying a learnable "chunk", albeit at a super high level.
And it's this chunk I'm going to teach you in this week's lesson.
It won't be second-nature until you shed it a while. You'll know you've got it when you start "hearing" ideas without thinking consciously about them.
Check that lesson out.
Now, if only I could do that with juijitsu...
Check you next weezy,
N8