Your timing skill development has become a part of your game. As a white belt you were tasked with slowing down your partner to the speed of your thought. As a blue belt you were tasked with seeing into the future. Now it’s time (all puns intended) to step into the timebox and play.
First, let’s get physics-al. Time is relative. It’s more than a metric of passing existence. It’s a pace of experience. It’s the experience of pace. Here is where you play with time and shape the contours of the experience. When you can bend the experience of time - slow it down, speed it up, shape its parameters - you add a skill that exists in parallel with the physical exchange. With each game you employ, you now have a two-pronged system of attack.
If this sounds entirely conceptual, it is. Until you feel it. When the exchange starts to become significantly easier, or more grueling, it is on the backdrop of a well developed sense of timing.
Shrinking Time
We have seen the relationship between what is happening physically, and what is happening in your mind. We have introduced the idea of creating timing through our games and attack systems. These concepts are largely about shaping time in reference to your actions. When you are shrinking time, you need to shrink the sense of time in relation to your opponent’s actions.
To do this you need to define the parameters of space. As a blue belt, I asked you to focus on your connections. This is an important prerequisite skill to understanding how to shape the parameters of your opponent’s movement. Whatever their physical objective, they are forced to accomplish it within the space that you give them. By developing your sense of connection, you develop your ability to define how much time your opponent has to make a move.
This idea is simple on paper. Distance and speed will determine the time one can get from point A to B, or from the mat to your hip. Eliminate distance, and you eliminate the amount of time available for your opponent to respond.
When you extend this idea to a dynamic exchange that’s always shifting, the idea gets a little more challenging in practice. Keeping space constrained as you move into the future requires some high level thinking. You may be seeing a pattern here. As your skills develop through the ranks they begin to create synergy. You need one skill to develop and execute there rest.
Constraining space and reducing time in a dynamic exchange often boils down to two simple strategies:
Angles. If you imagine your opponent’s legs and arms as lines beaming from their body, you want to move off the line to create an angle. Moving in and out will often be dictated by these beams, rotating around them will diminish their capacity and allow you to navigate through space easier. A concrete example would be a dynamic guard passing exchange. You move left, then right. Then left. Your opponent’s hips will adjust to face you, and your redirection will create an angle to continue to keep space tight.
Persistence. You step into the future with the intention of landing with more advantages than your opponent. But they adjust. And adjust. The present physical realities may not be the future you planned. This is the power of persistence. You are never actually in the future. You are constantly creating it. As a purple belt, I have asked you to develop more complex games. This allows you to stay persistent with ever-looping attack sequences.
With this, finding timing is a matter of patience. You keep at the future setting until the physical answer you are looking for is presented to you. Then you fit in. At that moment, you created a small moment of time in which your opponent had no chance. Even when recognizing the challenge and solution, they simply can not execute because you constrained the time available to them. This is the moment when your timing is winning the game.
Extending time
Extending time is extending the experience. It’s an understanding of your opponent’s assessment of position and comfort level against the odds of a reversal in control or momentum. Extending time forces your opponent to change their decisions. It will make them give up their position. When the clock is set, it sucks away what possible section of time they have left to control (more on this topic later). There are two general strategies, sometimes overlapping, than can help you make a moment feel like an eternity.
Pressure. Upon purple belt, I told you to drop 100 kilos. The progression I’ve outlined for these skills through the ranks is no accident. You have had to develop the skill of pressure through movement, connectivity, and 100 kilos, in order to use pressure to manage a sense of timing. When you apply significant pressure, your opponent’s sense of time expands. 30 seconds of high pressure feels like 5 minutes. It takes away energy, hope of advancement, and puts your opponent in the mindset of stopping the experience instead of initiating an attack.
Positioning. Strong pressure is typically a case of strong positioning, but strong positioning doesn’t always come with pressure. Any vulnerable position where your opponent has lost all of their options will kill their decision tree. Their best path out of this moment is to let you take them to the next. A crucifix, a cradle, a stack, etc…. all can be positions that don’t have to involve pressure (but certainly can), and can make your opponent feel ready to cry uncle.
In both of these examples, your next move is given to you. You aren’t fighting into the future. You may have fought into the present moment, but the next is given to you. By extending the experience of time, you have effectively used timing as a means of executing your advancement.
4th Dimension
These two means of playing with time, extending and shortening, may seem fairly different in their physicality, but they can certainly overlap. How can you extend and shorten time, at the same time? This is certainly playing in the 4th dimension. Pressure, positioning, angles, persistence. These are not mutually exclusive. You can control the parameters of your opponent’s spacing, cut angles, dominate the position and deliver high levels of pressure all at once. When you do, you will have begun to develop a high-level timing game.