A few weeks ago, I was in Tang Soo Do class and we were doing speed breaks. For those who may be unfamiliar the goal of a speed break is to break a board by generating speed versus focusing on power. I am used to power breaks, I have a lot more experience doing those. Yet, I found speed breaks to be very interesting ever since I saw David throw a board in the air, punch it mid fall, and broke it. I was shocked. With speed breaks, you don’t have the boards as secure as with power breaks. The board is either dangling from someone’s hand, you are holding in with one hand and using the other hand to break it, or you break it while it is free falling. Breaking a board like this was completely foreign to me until I started Tang Soo Do. Sometimes I succeed in breaking the board and sometimes I don’t.
Well a few weeks ago when we were breaking boards in class, I didn’t succeed. Usually after trying to break the board a few times, I just walk away defeated and just not worry about it. This time in particular I did something else. I hit the board, trying to break it with a ridge hand while David was holding it, and I failed. I felt the pain in the hand from failing to break it, anyone who break boards knows the pain I am talking about. For those who are reading and wondering, trust me when I say hitting a board and not breaking the board hurts a lot more than if you actually succeed in going through it.
Anyways, I felt the pain in the hand and usually after failing the first attempt, I keep trying until I succeed or just can’t hit it anymore because of pain or bruising. But this time I did something different, I told David I was done after hitting it the first try and that I didn’t want to continue. I knew I was going to just try to do the same thing again and if I repeat the same thing over and over I would just continue to get the same results.
Yes, I know some of you may be thinking “well, practicing is repeating something over and over again”, but I thought to myself why practice incorrectly. I took a step to the side, let the other students attempt their breaks and I actually took the time to think about why I failed. I didn’t want to try again without analyzing why I had failed and coming up with something different to do.
After analyzing, I walked up to David after class and told him what I was thinking “I have no idea why I failed”. I asked David if he saw what I did wrong because I couldn’t tell. Now I will admit that this is a hard thing for me to do. I am a 3rd Dan in Taekwondo, hold an immediate rank in Jujutsu, and do Kung Fu. I am admitting, outloud, I have no idea what I am doing wrong in terms of trying to do a simple board break, on a board that is barely 1 inch in thickness! David thought about it and he told me, I hit the board in the wrong location, I was hitting it too low, I just need to hit a bit higher. He let me redo the break and of course I broke it.
At this moment, I learned something about myself. Up to this point, the reason I wasn’t getting these breaks was because I never gave myself the chance to figure out why I couldn’t. I kept telling myself I should be able to do something instead of asking myself why I couldn’t do something. For the first time, in doing this break I took a step back, analyzed what was happening, realized I didn’t know what was going on, and did something I really didn’t want to do. I admitted I didn’t know what I was doing and asked for help. Because of my martial arts
