Drills, Mastery, and Multitasking

Turn your judo into a reflex - push it to your subconscious.

Lots of people have been pressing the importance of drilling, lately.  Several posts from Ann Maria DeMars' blog stress this, Sensei Bernie Gill recently mentioned you need 5,000 reps to make something a habit, and, of course, this lowly blogger tries to stress in every class that if you drill lazy, your Judo will be lazy.  I really don't think you'll find anyone that disagrees that drilling in some shape or form is important.  But Bernie's comment got me to thinking about something else I had read recently...

I have read in a number of places that humans can't actually multitask - we can switch our focus back and forth quickly, but our brain simply doesn't focus on more than one thing at a time.  So, you can't read a newspaper and listen to a conversation at the same time.  You can read a little, listen a little, then read a little more, and each switch takes time.  Same thing would apply to listening to a coach and executing a new technique... they don't happen simultaniously. 

Old news.  But a recent article added to that:  once something is a reflex/habit/subconscious activity, you can do it simultaneously with something that requires focus.  So... when a baby is first learning to walk, he'll *really* focus on those first steps.  And the next few.  If he loses focus, he generally screws up and falls down.  But as he gets older, walking becomes reflexive, and he can now walk *and* carry on a conversation. 

Well, the same thing should apply to Judo, right?  When you start out, you can learn a bunch of techniques, get some basic proficiency with them - but your Judo will still be a very conscious process... "Okay, I'm going to try to make him step here, then go for my Osoto... I'll put my left foot here, and OHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAP!  He's attacking!  Drop my weight!  Phew! Okay... where was I?"  Might go through a Judoka's head in this phase.  But once you have practiced something a bajillion times (or Sensei Bernie's 5000 times), you get to a point where you don't have to think about where to put your foot in relation to your opponent - your body just does it.  Same with defending that attack:  your body can just do it and launch a counterattack without much in the way of conscious thought.  That's always been the goal of drilling in any sport.  But there's more...

Once we move our Judo into the realm of subconscious actions, we now get to avoid that multitasking problem, at least to a large extent.  In any given Judo encounter, there is usually at least one attack we want to launch, and at least one attack from our opponent that we want to avoid.  Usually, it is many of both.  Throw in things like boundary lines, gripping timing rules, etc., and you have even more things that require your attention.  The un-drilled brain will have to jump from one to the other to the other, and hopefully fast enough that it can come out ahead.  But the well-drilled brain (too gory?) can drop the fastest moving and least controllable of these (the opponents' actions) right off the list, and much of the other stuff falls out as well (like finding the right timing for an attack, the steps in launching an attack,  etc) because they can "reflexively" react, instead of consciously react.

Now, with less stuff that requires attention, the Judoka's brain will be in a better spot, and the Judoka has a much better chance of coming out ahead.  You'll never eliminate all of the multitasking that needs to go on, and you'll never drill enough for every possible situation, but you can really help your Judo by doing lots and lots and lots of *quality* drills.