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Slow ls Smooth – Audio

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge and welcome to our new lesson. Our topic, slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

There I was sparring in my karate class. Sparring means fighting, it’s like a boxing match but in karate. They call that sparring. So I was fighting against an opponent. I was lined up and the instructor said begin. We started fighting and I tried to hit my opponent with a punch, but just as I started to throw my punch, my opponent hit me faster right in the head and scored a point. I was frustrated and thought okay, here we go again. We reset and the instructor again said, begin. Once again I started and thought this time I’m going to kick him, so I was running up, his stomach was open and I started to do a kick and he hit me in the face again, before I could finish my kick. I lost the match, very frustrated.

I sat and waited for my next match. The next match began the same pattern. Every time I started to throw a punch or a kick, every time I tried to attack my opponent beat me to the punch. That phrase, to beat you to the punch, to beat me to the punch, to beat someone to the punch, it means you hit them first. You succeed first before they do.

This happened again and again, every time I tried to do a kick or a punch or anything, the opponent would hit me faster. I felt slow. I felt like I was moving through water, while my opponent was super fast. I got more and more frustrated with each match. Each time I got beat. Each time my opponent hit me faster I got frustrated. I could feel it and I’m sure I showed it on my face that my instructor could see uh , I was getting really frustrated and upset. I was quite young at this time, a teenager.

Well, at the end of the class, I was sitting there at the end looking down, feeling terrible, frustrated and upset and the instructor came to me at the end of the class and said, if you want to stay after class I’ll help you so that you can improve your fighting, improve your sparring and get faster. So I was excited and said yeah, yeah, definitely, I’ll do it. Let me just tell my mom. I told my mom I was going to stay a little bit later and then I stayed for some special training with the instructor, for speed training, speed training.

I’m excited. I’m imagining I’m going to learn /ku: tʃə/, /ku: tʃə/, /ku: tʃə/, /wu:/ really fast. I’m going to learn how to throw punches super fast. I’m going to learn how to kick super fast. All of the students walked out of the class, I stayed. So I stayed and the instructor came to me and said okay, let’s get started. I said okay I’m ready, I’m ready. He said okay, what I want you to do, we’re going to work on your jab, your back fist. Strike first. I said okay, okay, /uhə/ yeah, lightning fast. This is a good one. This is a fast one.

I was ready to throw it as fast as I can. The instructor said okay, what I want you to do is to throw this punch, throw this strike as slowly as you can. Super slow motion. I thought, this is crazy I want to go faster not slower, but you know, I trusted the instructor. I liked the instructor and I followed his advice. So I said okay, okay, so I started like this and immediately he said stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. I was like yeah what, what’s the problem? He said no, no, no your technique, no you have to do this with perfect technique. I want you to throw this punch super slowly and with perfect technique. Everything must be precise and perfect.

Your balance must be perfect. Everything must be perfect. So I started again and he said whoa, stop! He says look at your other hand. You’re dropping your other hand that’s why you get hit so easily, because every time you’re throwing you’re dropping your hand and you’re open. He says also, look at your balance, you’re kind of leaning as you do it. You’re leaning backwards. That slows down your punch. He had a lot of other little tips, you know, keeping my elbow in, all kinds of tips, little small, very precise techniques for making my punches better. He said, if you practice this fast you’re not going to get the perfect technique, so instead you have to go much, much slower. But he said, I promise you, when you practice all of your techniques super slowly, with perfect technique, you will eventually become much, much faster.

Well, I didn’t know but I believed in my instructor so I did as he said. I practiced my back fist, my jab as slowly as I could with perfect technique, again and again. He watched my feet. He watched my knees. He adjusted my shoulders. He was making all these things that were so tiny, but he said were important. So I practiced it. Then he had me doing my reverse punch with the back hand and again I did this and he said /eh/ no you’re dropping your other hand, you’re going to get hit. So I had to practice, but while keeping my other hand up, turning my hips perfectly and exactly using my feet in a perfect exact way, turning my shoulders at exactly the right time in exactly the right way, keeping my head not too up not too down. There were a lot of things to think about in order to throw a simple punch.

I did it as slowly as possible. He had me go as slowly as I could. It felt weird. It was like I was trying to do like the Matrix movie, super slow motion, like this. This slowly is how slowly I practiced. Then it got more difficult, I had to practice my kicks that way. So I would get back and practice the kicks and, of course, at first I was completely off balance. Now if I did it fast I didn’t notice how off balance I was, but when I was practicing super slowly then I could feel wow, I am off balance completely. I can’t even hardly stand up while I’m doing this kick slowly.

He told me how to do all this stuff and then each day at home I would practice my punches and kicks super slowly, as slowly as possible and also too, the basic like moving forward, stepping forward, stepping backwards, left and right, in circles. Again, perfect technique but as slowly as I could.

For the first week I could hardly even do the kicks because I was doing this, like moving around and falling down every time I tried to do the kicks and it felt really weird. Eventually I got better, and my balance improved and I learned how to slowly throw the kicks. Of course, this worked my muscles a lot more too, my muscles had to get stronger because I was holding these kicks out for a long time.

I can’t do it now because that was a long time ago when I was a teenager and I haven’t done karate in a long time. So I did this week after week and after just a month, I think it was only about a month I came to another class and it was sparring time again, time to again fight. This time the instructor put me with a more advanced group. So I got nervous, I go oh my God they’re going to beat me. They’re going to beat my ass. I’m going to get kicked and punched all day today. But, I decided to do my best so in the first match I came up ready to fight. My opponent was there in front of me and the instructor said okay, begin.

Right away I jumped forward again, just like a month earlier, with a jab, with a front hand punch. Boom! But this time it was lightning fast. I moved extremely quickly with great technique, boom, and I scored a point. I was like /u:/ wow oh. I had this good little feeling. We reset and did it again. Boom, I did it again. Hit him and won the match. This pattern repeated for the rest of the evening and I beat all of my opponents in that more advanced group. In fact, at the end of the class I was promoted. I got a higher rank in my karate school.

So this stuck with me. It has stuck with me for a long time, because that happened way back when I was a teenager, but I still remembered it and I remember this phrase, ‘slow is smooth, smooth is fast.’ It’s an interesting idea and what it means is that with some skills, sometimes it’s better to practice them super slowly and very precisely.

This does not work with all skills, but it works with many skills in that by first doing the techniques very slowly and carefully, again and again and again and again, you train your brain how to do them correctly. Because some skills are very difficult to practice at full speed and if you try to practice them at full speed you will get lots of bad habits, just like me in karate. I had all these bad habits. By trying to go fast I was throwing punches and kicks with a lot of bad habits, with bad balance, with bad technique and my bad balance and my bad techniques were making me go more slowly, so by trying to go faster I actually went slower. It’s a little bit of a paradox, it seems like the opposite of what it should be, but sometimes by trying to go faster you actually end up going more slowly, because you’re practicing bad techniques that slow you down.

This is what I discovered in that karate class… slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Practicing slowly you learn how to do a skill, now it might be a physical skill like karate or punching or it could be some other skill, it could be for example, pronunciation; English language pronunciation, American pronunciation. That’s also difficult to practice at full speed quickly, because when you try to practice pronunciation very fast, you often will make mistakes and then you create bad habits of speaking and that’s how you get a strong accent that becomes very hard to change.

So what slow practice does is it creates pathways in your brain, nerve or neural pathways in your brain. What you want to do you want to create the exact perfect technique and you want to do it again and again with repetition and then you create the correct paths, the correct connections in your brain to do it correctly. And you must do that first, slowly, just as I did with the punches. I programmed my brain to do it exactly right, perfectly correct with my elbow in, prefect balance, all of those things. And I had to do it very slowly first again, and again, and again and again, so that it became super smooth.

It means I was doing nothing that caused problems, no bad habits at all, slow is smooth. Here’s the cool thing. When your technique becomes, when your skill becomes super smooth, perfect. Then it becomes much easier to go fast and you then get faster and faster, then you can start doing it a little faster with perfect technique still. Then you go a little faster with perfect technique still and then finally, full speed with perfect technique and perfect smoothness, even at full speed as fast as you can. In that way you actually will become faster and your technique will also be better.

Let’s talk about this. How do you do this? How do you specifically do this with any skill that, especially skills that are physical? This is especially good with physical skills that involve your body in some way.

Step one, you have to break the skill into small chunks.

In a previous VIP lesson we talked about doing simulation training where we’re trying to get close to the real world. In this one we’re going to do something different, a different approach where we take a skill and then break it into pieces, break it into small little manageable pieces, just like I did with my punch. I had to think about my feet, how I moved my feet. I had to think about my hips, how would my hips move while I punched? I had to think about my shoulders, how would my shoulders move when I punch? I had to think about my arm, my elbow will it be out or in? I had to think about my hand even, will it be this way or that, left or right? Will I point with these knuckles here? I had to think about my head, all of these things. I had to think about my other hand, what will it do?

So I had all those little pieces, so I had to break this into chunks, into small pieces. A chunk is a piece. So you break the skill, the whole skill into small little chunks. That’s step one.

Next you practice each chunk by itself perfectly.

This is important. You practice it slowly, as slow as you can, like slow motion with perfect technique. That’s very important. You do it again and again until you can do each chunk with perfect technique as slowly as possible. Once you can do that, then you put some chunks together. So maybe you put two chunks together, two small pieces together. You practice that bigger chunk super slowly with perfect technique. Then another bigger chunk, putting two together super slowly with perfect technique. Then finally, you combine them all back together into the full skill and you practice the full skill super slowly with perfect technique.

Finally, you’ll be able to go a little faster, a little faster, a little faster until you can do the whole sequence, the whole skill quickly.

Let’s talk specifically about English learning. Pronunciation is a good skill to practice in this way. Some English speaking skills are not good for doing slowly, but pronunciation especially is a great one for slow smooth training. Because, pronunciation is in fact a physical skill. To correctly pronounce English with an American accent, Canadian accent or even a British accent, whatever, but to correctly pronounce English like a native speaker you have to have physical skills. It depends on how you use your tongue, how you use your mouth, your throat and your neck and the muscles in your throat and neck. How you control the vibrations in your chest, and throat and nose and face. How you control the air coming out of your mouth.

All of these things are physical skills. They involve muscles in your body. They aren’t big muscles like your arms or legs, they’re small little muscles but still, muscles. Therefore, it’s a physical skill and is good for slow smooth practice.

One problem people have with pronunciation is they actually practice pronunciation too fast sometimes. So, for example, if you have trouble with the (r) and the (l) sound, trying to say them really fast might not help you you’ll just keep repeating the same mistakes, having the same problems again and again. It’s actually better to try slow is smooth training. Let’s try an example. This will help you with (r’s) and (l’s). Maybe you don’t have problems with (r’s) and (l’s), but just do this as an example. You can do this with any sounds in the English language.

Let’s take a phrase that has a lot of (r’s) and (l’s) with some difficult words in it. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. For some people this will be difficult to pronounce. Squirrel can be a very tough word for some people. Then you have girl and pearl, you get that /e:(r)l/, the (r) followed by the (l) with that /e:/ sound. That’s a tough combination for some people. So how can you do it correctly? Practicing it fast usually will not help. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. Of course, I’m a native speaker I can do it quickly, but if you have trouble with these sounds, doing them fast you’ll just make the mistakes. You’ll just end up making lots of mistakes, because you’re going too fast. So let’s follow the process.

First, break down into tiny chunks. What’s the small chunk, a small piece? Syllables. Syllables are the individual sounds in words. So you’re going to break this sentence into individual syllables and practice them one by one, these sounds. So it would be…

The, the, the

G /gu/, for girl has two syllables, there’s the g /gu/ and then there’s the /e:(r)l/, so you’re going to break it into syllables g /gu/, g /gu/, g /gu/ and then you’ll practice /e:(r)l/, /e:(r)l/, /e:(r)l/ Then you have gave right, another g /gu/, /gu/, /gu/ and then ave /əve/

The

Squ /Skwə/, /Skwə/, irrel /e:(r)l/, /e:(r)l/, /e:(r)l/

A /^h/

Love /l^v/ ly /li:/

P /pə/, /pə/, /pə/ earl /e:(r)l/

Each of those is an individual sound, an individual syllable. So you would write them down. You would listen to an audio of me speaking those sounds, speaking this sentence correctly and then you would practice each of those little sounds slowly and perfectly until you can say each sound correctly.

You could record yourself saying these individual sounds, syllables. Compare the recording to my voice, my pronunciation and slowly and perfectly practicing each individual sound until you sound like I do, with just the sounds. These are not even words, just the sounds.

When you can do that, when you can pronounce these individual syllables, individual sounds very well, super slowly, then you’re ready to put them into combinations. For speaking that means words.

Next you’ll focus on slowly and perfectly pronouncing the words, so then you have…

The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. You’ll practice each of those words 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 times or more slowly. The, the, girl, girl, girl, gave, gave, the, the, the, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, a, lovely, lovely, lovely, pearl, pearl, pearl. Pronounce each one slowly, carefully with perfect technique getting each sound exactly correct, recording yourself, comparing the words to how I say them, getting closer, closer, closer. You might need a week. You might need two weeks doing this, I don’t know, but you keep going, slow, carefully practicing each word until you can say each word perfectly.

Then what would you do? Then you would go a little bigger chunk, put them into phrases, natural phrases, two to three words and you’ll practice those super slowly. So the girl, that’s a natural phrase. The girl. The girl. And see the phrase changes, the pronunciation changes a little now you have to listen to the stress, the speed of each word. The girl, the girl, the girl, the girl. Gave the squirrel, the squirrel, the squirrel, a lovely pearl, a lovely pearl, a lovely pearl, a lovely pearl.

For example, or you could do the girl gave, the girl gave, the girl gave, the squirrel, the squirrel, the squirrel, a lovely pearl, a lovely pearl, a lovely pearl. And then you have three phrases if you do it that way. You would practice first very slowly and carefully, listening to the stress, the intonation, the up and the down, the loudness and quietness, getting all of that correct, perfectly correct, slowly with each phrase. Record yourself, compared to me.

Finally, when you can do all of that perfectly and slowly, then you would practice the full sentence again very slowly first. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. You could go even more slowly. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. You again would follow the same process repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, perfectly and slowly, carefully. Make your pronunciation sound exactly like mine. Record yourself, compare your pronunciation to mine again and again and again, until you do the whole sentence perfectly, slowly.

Then you go a little faster. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl. A little faster… then faster, faster, faster until you can say it at full speed… The girl gave the squirrel a lovely pearl, with perfect pronunciation of all those sounds.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. This is the way you master pronunciation of difficult sounds. Another mistake or problem some people have is they only focus on the individual sounds, they only do the tiny chunks. They only do /e:(r)l/, /e:(r)l/ or (a:r) (a:r), but they don’t put them into words and phrases and then sentences. But each chunk is a little bit different, so you have to practice the little tiny chunks first, just the individual sounds, but that’s not enough. Then you have to combine them into words, the next bigger chunk and practice those again and again and again, perfectly and slowly.

But that’s still not enough, then you have to put the words into natural phrases, two to three to four words and practice those again and again and again, slowly and perfectly. Then that’s still not enough because then you have to put the phrases into full sentences and again practice the full sentences slowly and perfectly, gradually getting faster and that’s how you will create fantastic pronunciation like a native speaker, using the slow is smooth training.

Another example I can think of, I took a course, a self-defense course with Navy Seals. Navy Seals are the elite unit of the American military. These guys are super, super tough. And some of the guys after they were Navy Seals they created a company to teach people, regular normal people how to defend themselves if they’re attacked. So I took their course, it was very cool. Very effective and very good. But, what was interesting was they used the same style of training, slow motion training. Everything we did we did slowly. So we would practice all the strikes, all of the situations, everything had to be super slow. They told us it was the same reason. We had to use perfect technique, learn to do things exactly correctly and they said if we really were attacked, we’re excited, our hearts beating they said don’t worry speed will be no problem, you will naturally go fast because you’re afraid. You have all that energy from being afraid, so they said don’t worry, practice the skill super slowly when you need them they will be fast. Another example of slow is smooth training Now, as I mentioned, slow training is not for everything. Some skills are great for slow training and some are not so good. The best skills for slow training are precise, physical skills that involve your body. Pronunciation is a great example with English speaking. It’s a great one for slow smooth training.

The kind of skills that are not good for this are: improvisational skills where you need to be very loose, very flexible, where you have to adapt quickly to lots of different situations. So, for example, fluency in English speaking where someone might ask you a question, you have no idea what they’re going to say and you have to answer very quickly, in fact, instantly, immediately and then they will say something else and you have to react so you’re constantly reacting to all these different things. You never know what’s going to happen next. That usually requires more of a loose, faster training like our mini stories, our point of view stories and things like that.

The cool thing is you can mix fast training with this slow training. Some skills you practice slowly and carefully and smoothly and then other skills you practice at a fast speed. Then by doing both, you’ll become a much better English speaker or any skill in your life.

So this month what I want you to do is to pick one skill, maybe pronunciation that’s a good one, English pronunciation and practice it slowly. Use the slow is smooth technique or method to improve your pronunciation or any skill that you choose. Good luck to you I know you will have success. Enjoy your slow smooth training this month.