As long as a skill is too big to practice, it’s going to feel impossible. Beginners try to perform the entire skill, and repeat it as many times as they can hoping that it will somehow become more solid. But when the whole skill is practiced, the problem area isn’t defined. There could be one transition, one response, or one technique that is weak, but it’s lost in the rest of the skill. This is why drilling is so important. A drill is not a watered-down version of the skill. It’s a drill, because it’s smaller, isolated so that the skill can be repeated multiple times in order to see what will and what will not change.
To identify what you should drill, simply watch what happens when the attempt fails. Don’t ask what will look cool, or what will be advanced, just watch where the attempt breaks down. If the timing isn’t solid, if the memory is weak half way through the skill, if the accuracy falls apart when the tempo increases, that is what you should drill. If the skill takes several minutes to perform, isolate the section that is a problem and drill that, nothing more. If the failure happens very quickly, slow the skill down so that the failure can be seen, then drill. The drill should be small enough so that it can be repeated several times without getting confused, and it should be narrow enough so that it only tries to train one thing at a time.
The Problem of the Drill Being too Broad: A mistake that many beginners make is that they tend to make the drill too broad because making it narrow seems too easy. They don’t believe a drill that is that short can be effective, so they add in more elements, transitions and even increase the difficulty of the movement before it is solid. The result is what you would expect; the failure comes back up, only this time it is harder to see because there is more going on in the drill. If this happens, narrow the drill down. If the full sequence isn’t solid, work on the entry. If you can’t do it at tempo, slow it down and build the accuracy first.
Simple drills are not a sign of a poor martial artist, they are sometimes the fastest way to get rid of clutter in a drill. A Simple Test: If you don’t believe me, try this experiment. Take fifteen minutes and work on only one drill. For the first three minutes, perform the full skill once or twice just to confirm where the weak spot is. For the next eight minutes, drill, and repeat the drill with enough focus that you are actually learning something each time you do it. Don’t worry about making the drill realistic just yet, let it get repetitive so you can see patterns. For the last four minutes go back to the full skill and see if your work on the drill improved anything. You will find that sometimes the improvement is dramatic.
Sometimes you will only feel like it is a little more solid. Both are good because they tell you what the drill is actually doing. Don’t Change the Drill, Change the Conditions: If you get stuck and the drill isn’t working, instead of giving up on the drill and moving to something else, change the conditions. Slow down the tempo, shorten the response, over exaggerate the correction or pause for a moment between reps so that you don’t lose attention.
You don’t want endless repetitions, you want repetitive practice that actually teaches you something. If the same mistake comes back for five repetitions in a row, this is not failure, this is information. It may mean that the drill is too difficult, or not specific enough, or too fast. It’s time to adjust the drill so that the mistake becomes manageable instead of mysterious.
Changing the Conditions The cumulative effect of drilling is that over time, it changes the way you feel about practice. Instead of looking at a skill as one big wall to climb, you begin to see smaller components that can be developed. This is important, because you don’t get better by forcing yourself to climb that wall over and over again. You get better by finding where the wall is weak, and working only on that, until it becomes strong.
