I am not talking about drill repetitions where everything is planned, I am talking specifically about repeating scenarios during push-hand practices as well as any random play.
Towards such goals, I recommend working in 3s and taking turns where possible – two doing push-hand plus another one as observer.
Trying to remember what you did during ‘sparring’ can be challenging, sometimes things happen so fast and instinctively that you don’t remember what you did. However, the will and effort to make a specific technique ‘repeatable’ provide the following benefits:
- The attacker is required to remember the specifics under which a technique worked: leg & arm position, direction of force, other person’s reaction, etc.. Once you know such conditions, ‘chance’ techniques can be refined and you can improve the success rate by ensuring that all the ‘pre-conditions’ are met. Some situations don’t happen often, so you may want to engineer a way to set your opponent up for the technique.
- The receiver is encouraged to creatively think of solutions, applying principles that has been taught before, finding the specifics why certain defences didn’t work, etc. Even if it is a technique that you cannot defend, maybe you learn a ‘useful’ attack.
- Both learn to provide a supportive environment so that both improve.
- For the observer, not being involved with the actual interaction allows you to see opportunities outside-the-box without stress, you may be the final fallback when the participants cannot reproduce the scenario – your job is to help the two primaries reset to the point immediately before the point-of-failure. Learning to ‘see and describe’ is just as important as learning to ‘feel and remember’.
- Training the ability to ‘replay’ a scenario allows you to see patterns and habits of yourself or that of your opponent. This ability, like muscles, is something that takes effort to develop.
Exercise
Please read up on an old article: To build a perfect team
What do you need to ‘capture’ to be able to sufficiently describe a scenario so that it can be reproduced?
Importance of ‘repeatable’