This is one of the first really important lessons you learn in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Everyone walks in, day one, and is dumping adrenaline everywhere they look. I mean, the person in front of you is literally engaging you in practicing murder, so I get it. Everyone starts that way. Super tense, super shallow breathing, and everyone wears themselves out in about 30-40 seconds. Of a 6 minute round.
Doesn’t matter if you’re the most insanely buff dude ever, or seriously overweight. The first guy has better conditioning, no doubt… but not this kind of conditioning. One of my favorite things was watching a new guy walk in, looking like he had maybe 7% body fat, 6’2” at least, plays D1 basketball, and is just nothing but stacked muscle… and then him rolling with a 5’6” 130lb woman who just wipes the floor with him, because training matters more than strength, but even more importantly, breathing and staying calm, slow, and smooth matters even more. The basketball player spends the first minute or so using all his strength to try and get this “puny” girl off of him, unable to, and is now completely gassed. Meanwhile she’s tapped him twice and could go for a run.
Eventually, the most important thing you learn is to relax and breathe. Technique eventually comes, through iteration and lots and lots of practice; eventually, things become second nature.
But breathing? Reminding yourself to relax and roll smart, not fast? That I need to remind myself of most days, because again: you’re facing someone practicing killing you. :)
Jiu Jitsu practitioners have incredible conditioning from repeating that exact same story of {guy who thought he was tough} being defeated by {unlikely protagonist} in any scenario they can shoehorn it into, with extreme enthusiasm
It was Judo and I was a scrawny teenager, but a black belt used to hold me to the floor by doing head stands on me so... you hear those stories a lot because they're true.
As that cocky beginner who went in to Jiujitsu and ran out of breath after 30 seconds in a 6 minute roll and had to tap out 15 times in the next 5 and a half minutes against a smaller opponent, it is repeated because it is true. A huge part of beginner training is basically slow down and getting yourself into positions where you can perform the moves.
Pretty sure every martial art has a version of this tale. Either the old wizened master or a petite practitioner taking down the muscle bound action hero.
I’ve been training jiu jitsu for over 6 years now. The myth of the 130 lb woman doing anything to the <insert any weight above 180 lbs> is overused and not true; unless the man is being a gentleman.
I routinely get beaten by small women because I’m not a spazoid and I want my training partners to enjoy training with me.
But if my life was on the line, there’s no way they could tap me. Not even a chance.
> I routinely get beaten by small women because I’m not a spazoid and I want my training partners to enjoy training with me.
This is not the kind of thing I’m talking about. Of course we all regularly get “beaten” by people with less skill and who are smaller, or bigger, or anything else - but I’m not talking about training with a partner or letting them practice a technique during a roll.
I’m talking about people that walk in with their egos very high and their skill very low. There are those who come in and are almost afraid to use any strength at all. Then there are those who believe that strength is all you need, so on their first few rolls they gas out immediately and then get rocked.
I’m not suggesting that two trained people of vastly different weight classes would be equally matched. That would be absurd.
Also, I’m not talking about your life being on the line. I’m talking about BJJ.
I can tell you it’s a real thing because it happened to me.
6’3” and at that time (19 or 20) was probably right around that 180lbs - no one would have described me as muscular back then though, just skinny more like it.
Anyways, first day of training, the first thing the instructor did was assume I needed humble pie. Told me he wanted to see my baseline, said get in the cage, and called over the only female in the class. She was ~5’6” ~140lbs from memory. Not chubby, just stalky and solid. Rest of the class came over to watch with cheeky smiles too. Later found out it was kind of her thing to break in the new guys.
She had me in a rear naked tapping out in under 30s.
I didn’t know what it signified at the time, but she was a brown belt and regularly took home hardware from regional amateur tournaments.
I had ~6 mo striking experience (Muay Thai), but had never rolled, never wrestled in high school. Best and only entry on my grappling resume was growing up with a brother.
So it does happen, as I can attest, but I do understand your skepticism if you haven’t seen it, especially because of additional hidden context like this:
- I had never directly encountered, and was extremely uncomfortable with, the idea of physically overpowering a female. It was the most unnatural thing, and I was psychologically paralyzed by this until it was way too late.
- She had zero chill. Probably read my obvious body language, and knew her play was to blitz.
- I didn’t know how rolling was supposed work with any opponent, let alone a female. I didn’t know rolling etiquette, conventions, nothing at all. Not that it would have mattered because she had no intention of offering me the usual respects anyways.
If she had attacked me on the street with murder in her eyes, and I reacted with full force, would she still have gotten the best of me?
I’d like to tell myself I would’ve bested her in a life or death scenario, but truth is I’m deeply uncertain of the outcome in that hypothetical.
Some gyms have these “enforcers” and are into this sort of thing. I hate that so much.
Not everyone needs humbling. And I think that’s the point that people here are missing.
If someone walks in and is calm, respects the fact that the trained person has something they don’t, and so on… even as a skeptic they’ll be relatively fine, and won’t get “wrecked” in most places, at least not on purpose.
It’s the guys that walk in thinking they’re about to roll over everybody with their big muscles that get rocked. But they usually end up being great people; just that finding out how much you don’t know is extremely humbling, extremely fast.
And I respect that a lot of people don’t believe it. I honestly didn’t myself. I get that; I’m not trying to convince you.
Many people do need that initial "this shit is real" check. If you don't tap, I will pop your arm. This isn't karate.
The mythos of jiu-jitsu is so much bigger than the reality. I say that with all the love and respect of someone who trains!
Size matters. Despite what the brochure says.
Each belt is worth about 10-20 pounds of weight. At brown belt, sure, maybe she can beat up a completely untrained 180-pound guy, but with 3 months of training the math changes.
I'm not saying "It isn't real" in an absolute "it never happens" sort of way. I'm saying that it's not true for 90% of the real-world use cases out there. People should train to be aware of their limits and to be fit and capable. But anyone thinking a 140-pound woman is going to terrorize some 200+ pound weight lifter is delusional and hasn't trained before.
I learned this lesson explicitly Karate when I was younger. I was the spazoid. Had to be told, no, we don’t go even 75% capacity in most exercises, let your opponent carry out the routine when it’s their turn.
Same thing with Olympic weightlifting. This is a very common phrase in my gym.
Snatching has got to be the most humbling barbell movement ever. Dudes who can easily bench over 100 kg (220 lbs) would never get to close snatching that. (Myself included, but hopefully one day)
I know nothing about Olympic weightlifting! What makes snatching so unique and humbling?
Aside: you don’t have to, but a one sentence definition of it would be awesome too - my lifting has been limited to the classic stuff, no fancy Olympic “bend and snap” stuff ;)
You pull the barbell up from the ground (like a deadlift) while dropping into a squat, and then get it up over your head while standing up. It is much more explosive than either the deadlift or squat separately.
Why… well, it’s a sport where you compete to lift the most weight. The other competition lift is the clean and jerk.
For my old ass I do it because it’s so hard and the rest of my life is fairly soft. Waking up and getting beat down by some snatches (or occasionally having a great session) keeps me level headed in other areas of life, I guess.
If you’re not a competitive weightlifter but still training explosiveness for other sports then you’re better off doing variations on the lifts. Like hang snatches, power cleans, power snatches, etc.
Totally fair, all of it. Thanks for the explanation. When you put it as simply as “it’s about who can lift more weight,” my question looks dumb in retrospect, of course.
It would be just as easy for someone to incredulously ask me why I love BJJ, despite being hypermobile and having a much higher chance of injury as a result.
It’s about what you love. That’s why you do it. That makes perfect sense.
The point is to use the explosive power of your legs to optimally throw & catch a very heavy thing over your head. It’s not designed specifically to work any particular muscle but test your overall capability. That said it’s much, much harder on core & shoulder stability in particular than either deadlifts or back squat. Or front squat for that matter.
Oly lifts are humbling in that being able to squat or press a lot of weight doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to snatch a lot of weight because there’s so much technique training required. The explosiveness and the sense of timing is very hard to learn.
To answer an aspect of your question that other commenters haven't addressed, the snatch works hip and shoulder mobility in a way that deadlifting and squats do not. The barbell is driven by the explosive hip hinge (unhinge?) directly up, so it is a departure from deadlift even if it looks like it would train the same muscles. Training your snatch lift in a non-competitive sense really exposes imbalances the lifter has. Your hesitance is really reasonable though, it's a non-trivial lift so coming into lifting completely new and trying to throw a snatch up isn't a very good idea.
Not that I disagree with your point, but... throwing your fight against the much smaller woman at the dojo is contractual. Weight classes exist for a reason.
Sure, and I'd agree with you if the much bigger guy could, I don't know... breathe. :)
Weight classes exist because they matter amongst opponents of roughly the same skill and training level. If one person is trained and the other is not, they matter a lot less.
You're not the first person to be surprised by this and challenge me on it. You also wouldn't be the first person to come to the gym, try to prove your point, and fail. :)
Everyone that has cooed grappled has a story like this. Part of the reason is practice, part of it is giving up before the fight even starts, but also that BJJ places constraints on matches in such a way that make physical characteristics matter less between hobbyists. BJJ–and even contact sports like MMA–don't resemble combat from any era of human history, so we might as well cut the pageantry and settle this by seeing who has more caterpillars in their bedroom right now. I've got at least a couple dozen.
Sure, but none of that contradicts anything I said, and... makes my point?
Within the constraints of BJJ, which I agree is not full-on combat, obviously... training matters more than weight or strength, a majority of the time.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is, and you definitely win on caterpillars.
We are in agreement on the point of the article. Next time, consider the state on your butterfly army before sizing up strangers below a navy seal dot com article, and you'll save yourself some embarrassment.
I've seen it more than once, and the most recent time was my buddy who showed up specifically trying to prove a point. He was untrained. She was very trained. He didn't succeed at making his point.
Having wrangled toddlers, I'm entirely onboard with the idea that a smaller opponent fighting in unexpected ways can be surprisingly difficult to handle even with a clear weight and strength advantage.
Training exercise is not the same as life-or-death conflict. It may also be the bigger person is holding back because they don't want a manslaughter charge.
Being relaxed is important in boxing too, if you don't stay loose and relaxed (other than snapping explosively when throwing a punch), it is easy to get fatigued quickly and also harder to slip or roll.
Yeah - I imagine that’s true for a ton of sports, but especially for any combat sport. I mean, even in shooting pistol (I shot sport pistol in college), breathing is the main thing you can control, and the main thing that will screw you.
The point is that staying relaxed in boxing during sparring or working the heavy bag feels counter-intuitive in the beginning. It seems like tensing up the core and arms would help punch harder, but you quickly learn that conserving stamina is more important than hitting as hard as you can (especially when starting) because otherwise you run out of gas pretty quickly.
in the dojo. IRL on the street adrenaline matters and fights end in first 5 seconds. You get stabbed or pushed/thrown/kicked in the face before you realize there was a fight about to happen.
What good is grappling with an opponent when his friend will just curb stomp you the second you both go to the ground?
This is the most common thing everyone loves to say whenever anyone says they study any martial art, and they use it as an excuse to study no martial arts, because "what's the point"
I never suggested that BJJ was going to be the only thing you should learn or know if you wanted to defend yourself in a fight. Cross training with some striking (muay thai, boxing, something) and/or weapons training? Sounds great, go for it.
To be clear: I have been in my fair share of fights, IRL. I've been stabbed twice. I grew up in Brooklyn and spent a lot of time in, well, less reputable bars and clubs. Most fights do not end in the first five seconds, and you should GTFO if you can, at all. Not fighting is the best way to win. If your opponent has friends with them, GTFO at any cost; that goes without saying. Most fights go to the ground, relatively quickly. When they do, taking their back and getting your hooks in is far better than mounting them, since you can absolutely control them from that position while someone else calls 911 and/or finds help to break up the fight you definitely didn't start, because starting fights is the fastest way to lose them.
As for "adrenaline matters" - this is explicitly why you train. It absolutely matters. But someone untrained will just spaz. Maybe they get lucky, maybe they don't; but they usually don't. Someone trained may not remember every single thing they know; but so much of it becomes instinctual that even with the adrenaline dump they are definitely not on their best game, but are still far more capable than the untrained individual. Furthermore, competing helps a lot with desensitizing yourself to the adrenaline dumps.
Also, "before you realize there was a fight about to happen" is not a thing. I have never been 'caught off guard,' because that is not how fights start. Yes, sometimes an idiot will throw a punch at a random person on the street; but that is absolutely not how most fights start. Well before a fight starts, you have already tried defusing the situation and de-escalating, because engaging is a last resort.
But sure, maybe their "friend will just curb stomp you" so you may as well just never try.
Well yes, sport jiu jitsu isn't street fighting. No strikes, slams, small joint manipulation. Soft mats to land on, strictly 1vs1, no weapons, and the list goes on. What use is grappling? It's quite a lot better than nothing in some situations.
They're not "practicing murder". They're not "practicing killing you". Stop with this hyperbolic nonsense. The military practices murder, not you and your mates in your local BJJ class.
Do you say these things to make yourself feel cooler/tougher when you inevitably tell someone you practice BJJ? And I'm sure they didn't ask, you just worked it into the conversation (much like this post) because you can't wait to tell everyone you practice murder.
No, not even a little bit; perhaps you might consider lightening up a little.
The point I was trying to make is that when you're on the mats against an actively resisting opponent who is, yes, attempting to break your joints (which is what happens if you don't tap) or choke you out (which is what happens if you don't tap), you don't have a choice but to focus on only the thing in front of you. Your brain and body simply won't let you focus on anything else.
"Practicing murder" or "practicing killing you" is simply a cute way (and obviously exaggerated for effect, since nobody's literal goal there is killing anyone) of describing that last paragraph without having to use all of the words in that last paragraph. I never said I was Deadpool; relax. It's a self-defense focused martial art which, in real life, you would use to prevent someone from causing you harm.
So no, I really don't think your comment or this one were necessary. It's pretty cynical to go from 'exaggerating for effect,' which is the obviously charitable reading, to 'mak[ing] yourself feel cooler/tougher,' which is the cynical reading.
I haven't been on the mats in over four years, because I had surgery and haven't gone back yet; I miss it. I definitely don't work it into "every conversation," because I am not the one-dimensional NPC your brain decided I was when it read my comment. :)
Sometimes urgency does matter; for example, when I ran Tinfoil, we got a lot of good press from being the first ones to release a public vulnerability checker for things like Heartbleed and so on, and it was a common reason we made sales. Getting those out within 12-24h was an intentional part of our model, because our competition would take a week, so it was trivial to make them look bad.
That said, it was extremely important for it to be correct, so we never cut corners. Best way to never make a sale is to tell someone they are patched when they’re not.
But speed can be a major factor sometimes. It just can’t be the only factor.
‘Slow is smooth, smooth is fast’ is a mantra about how to go fast. I’ve heard it in a number of contexts - racing drivers use it, so do woodworkers, so do musicians. None of the people using it are trying to tell you to not try to get things done fast. Speed is still the goal, it’s just about the approach you take in how you act moment to moment, while trying to get things done fast.
This is true only in cases where the correct way to do something is known. In the face of unknowns, it is frequently more efficient in terms of time to iterate multiple times as a method of exploring the space to determine proper paths forwards.
This isn’t an argument against iterating. It’s about iterating with intent, rather than iterating just for the sake of iterating.
Taking notes, making educated guesses and hypotheses, planning experiments that are adjusted based on what you learned in the prior ones, etc.? All examples of “slow and smooth.”
But you can iterate smoothly, systematically, making sure you learn from the data you gather through your experiments and making informed hypotheses… or you can iterate haphazardly, reacting with kneejerk guesses based on whatever went wrong last.
This is something I've learned to really like after hearing it once, we never have time to do it right the first time, yet we always seem to find time to do it wrong multiple times.
Yes, agreed completely. “All hands on deck” can work really well for time sensitive things like this, but… it has to end relatively quickly, there must be a reprieve afterward (celebrate, take a day off, something), and it can’t happen all the time.
If it happens all the time, nobody will pay any attention to it when it actually matters.
Being fast in specific instances isn’t the same as treating every day as a crisis.
99% of the time navy seals aren’t doing tactical operations, they are setting things up so they can do them when needed. You prepare for doing 48 hours without sleep by being fit and well rested.
Especially as I've gotten older, I've noticed I do less work more slowly than my younger peers, but I only have to do it once, and I usually get closer to the root than my younger colleagues. Measure twice and all that.
Long ago a cousin challenged the uncle for a swim. Both are acceptable athletes. He started faster, was ahead for 50m or so and then came back cooked. The uncle started 30% slower... but he kept at that rhythm forever until we couldn't see him and came back unphased. Very telling lesson.
This is a really big problem for me in general, actually. I have ADHD, and so my brain is always telling me to go faster, so that I can get the dopamine hit and move on to other things.
It has to be extremely intentional for me to remind myself that pace matters. I really envy those who can just do that naturally; my wife is one of those people.
Meanwhile, when I forget, I find myself 25 minutes into what was going to be an hour-long strength/lifting workout… in the bathroom at the gym throwing up.
And then I remember to pace myself for like a year or two until I forget again haha
I have the opposite problem, I learned from 18 years of competitive sports to spend the minimum effort possible to keep the coaches from being mad at you at everything that didn't matter and go all out in everything that did. Coaches get annoyed when you're not hustling everywhere, but you don't play when you're too tired to do well in scrimmage.
I tend to over pace and not be fully spent at the end of a workout. I've had to work to just be toast 90% of the way through instead so I get the most out of my workouts.
I don’t think it always comes naturally. It’s often experience and lessons learned. Sometimes those lessons needed to be taught many times before they stick.
For me, I hate doing the same thing twice, because I didn’t get it right the first time. It hurts my soul. I’ll put in a lot of time and effort to avoid that feeling, which means being slow and methodical. The environment I’m in doesn’t always allow for that, which is where most of my stress comes from.
I get significantly further as a cyclist when I slow down to a more sustainable pace. It’s crazy how a little extra speed burns a disproportionate amount of energy.
I’ve been noticing something like this as well. I often feel like I’m not doing much, because some people on my team seem to be alway getting called about to deal with this or that. But what they are dealing with is fixing code they wrote. My stuff is running just as often (or more), but it isn’t breaking or needing major changes all the time. Usually when something comes up, I can just tell whoever is asking to set flag x, because I figured that thing would happen at some point and accounted for it.
As you get older you probably just get more sure in your on views, abilities and ways of doing things. Not judging whether or not what your saying is correct, just something I've noticed my parents do. Sometimes they do this to their detriment.
Yeah, this is something I try to be aware of - I’ve got my style and it works well, but it’s not the only style and in many cases it’s not the best. I’ve got a team of mostly senior folks, all of whom have very different styles, and it’s been a real delight getting to see how other people whose skill and experience I respect approach problems, even if sometimes I’m white-knuckling my chair arms because it’s so far off of how I’d handle it.
In mechanics this is similar to 'kinematic efficiency'. The idea is to achieve smooth and efficient motion by optimizing the ratio of useful work output to total energy input, without caring fo the forces that initiated the motion.
In other words, focus on making strategic decisions and making sure you are aiming in the right direction rather than pumping your chest when you pull an all-nighter or feeling too proud about "staying busy". No one cares!
US paramedic: Same here. If you have to run to a CPR to "save" that person, they're already dead. I had this argument with toxic bosses when I was an SRE - "If PagerDuty goes off I expect you to run to your computer, and have configured the escalations accordingly". No, boss, if I'm not running to a CPR, I'm not running to a "errors exceed 2% for XYZ API call".
There's also the adage of "if you get injured, now we're more resource-constrained, because we have an extra patient."
The only area where I could see "moving with a purpose" would be uncontrolled bleeding, and getting to a patient for a tourniquet, starting fluid resuscitation and getting you to a surgeon.
You're a paramedic, so you have more training than I do. I was always taught CPR is a form of life support, and you have around three minutes from the time of arrest to begin CPR to prevent brain damage from hypoxia. So, why would seconds not matter for initiating CPR?
Perhaps this is because, as a paramedic on an ambulance, you're simply never on scene within three minutes? (As compared to a bystander)
So a couple of things, in order: every minute from arrest that no CPR is being done, chances of survival decrease by about 10%. If bystander compression-only CPR has been started, there's about 8 minutes supply of sufficiently oxygenated blood (and while compressions aren't ventilations, they do still encourage some small oxygen exchange). Even when we arrive, gaining advanced airway access or ventilation comes secondary to compressions (our county gives a limited window of 10-15 seconds to pause compressions to intubate, but with Glidescopes it's often possible to intubate through compressions).
Eh, I don’t think that’s true. I think you’ve just had bad experiences, and that that can definitely be true in pockets.
For example, I am exceptionally happy that we have standardized on OpenAPI documentation and/or the self-documenting nature of GraphQL (where used) rather than WSDLs and the other ancient nonsense.
I’m also glad we’ve mostly progressed from SAML to OAuth2/OIDC/JWT. Sure, SAML still exists but it’s definitely on its way out, once the enterprises of yesteryear eventually switch.
I don’t know if you’ve ever built a SAML application and/or IdP, but it’s awful.
You're cherry-picking technologies. I'm talking about people.
Yes, I have. Krb5, LDAP, OAuth2, CAS, and SAML 1 & 2. XML sucks but sometimes you have to pee with bits you have rather than remake the entire world all at once with a utopian panacea.
Oh, of course - if you have no other options you go with what you have.
But if you have other options, I think too many people are also stuck in “I know what I know and I know it will work” and will happily kludge along while something else is sitting right next to them, better for the job.
I can only hope this is cyclical, like most other things. Eventually organizations will reach a breaking point and realize if they want reliability, stability, and longevity, they need to slow down and do things the right way. At least I hope that’s the case. It doesn’t seem like the current pace can or should be maintained. It produces so much throw away junk.
"slow is smooth and smooth is fast" also isn't restricted to navy seals, nor was it invented by the navy seals. it is common in all military branches and other organizations.
I think I can relate to this. I have a lot of projects that are time-sensitive. An event is coming up and I have a big project to do for it. The event is on a specific date, and there is no pushing that date back, it's a hard-stop. Moving a bit slower at first and focusing on the essentials and doing them well helps me move faster towards the end when I start to focus on smaller details.
I've been taking glassblowing classes for a few years, and this is easily the biggest lesson there. If I rush something, I will fuck it up. If I let things happen bit by bit while they can go smoothly, everything comes out much easier.
This probably applies everywhere, but it's really stark when you're playing with quickly-solidifying goopy liquid sand
Assuming the premise of this article: efficiency is the only way to survive death(literal or metaphorical). Say what you will about MAANG, but has anyone who is a meta/google etc engineer also been a SEAL?
I bet after both the experiences, they will be like: "The only thing we could say with certainty is that how to make effective teams one way or another. 97% you fail or flail. 3% you succeed and succeed big."
If you see the graveyard of MAANG Products you can see a pattern. The sheer volume and size of products that have come and gone IS how they survived[1].
Can any one say, for example, Meta is where it is today by doing any of this Slow is Smooth and that is fast culture?
Sure, there were acquisitions(those too were fast) and there are bad initiatives and orgs (alexa, google+social, facebook phone), but then there are also many amazing things like LLMs and MooCs.
There’s definitely plenty of survivorship bias in that argument - you’re making the argument that Meta could not have built successful products without also building a ton of unsuccessful ones, which they did by virtue of executing fast rather than slow/smooth. (I’m paraphrasing to try and ensure I’m understanding the argument correctly, just to be clear)
The issue is that if you look at Meta’s successful products…
1. Facebook - would have won whether it moved fast or slow. This was network effects, not “features”
2. Messenger - has not won, and only exists because of Facebook’s aforementioned network effects.
3. Instagram - acquired.
4. Quest - acquired.
5. A bunch of other random shit nobody cares about and will never make Meta money.
I can pretty much guarantee both FB and Messenger would be just as big as they are now if Facebook had “broken less crap.”
Moving fast and breaking shit made working at Meta fun, not necessarily more productive, even if at times it felt more productive to the engineer, since they could push code faster.
It's a good mantra - but I'm unsure about this page. Looks like a seal flavoured link farm?
I've heard the phrase associated with martial arts/self-defense - like drawing a gun and shooting in self defense, or initiating unarmed attack (defense). Rush and tense up in the muscles - and you will literally be slower. And probably miss as well.
I saw a few interesting comments here, like the expanded: "Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast"
I've only heard this in the context of Smash Melee, which has limited-to-no input buffering.
If you try to input your attacks and movements too soon, they won't come out at all. So advice to new players is to err on the side of being slow, since it ensures the move input gets registered.
Sounds like 'kinematic efficiency'. The idea is to achieve smooth and efficient motion by optimizing the ratio of useful work output to total energy input, without caring fo the forces that initiated the motion.
In other words, focus on making strategic decisions and making sure you are aiming in the right direction rather than pumping your chest when you pull an all-nighter or feeling too proud about "staying busy". No one cares!
- I'd be curious if the origin is really the Navy seals. I couldn't find in my brief searching any where else...
- I like John Wooden's saying "be quick but don't hurry". I mentioned that to a doctor who trained in the mid 20th century and he said that surgeons had a line "hurry, but don't rush"
- several people here mention that they learned this phrase in the military
- the first written mention I could find is in a 1998 army report [0]
- the first Google Books hit for this phrase is from 1970 but this seems to be an error - the full text preview is from a different, recent book [1]
- Internet Archive has a lot of hits - but the earliest ones - except for the army report mentioned above - are from the 2000s (don't be fooled by wrong publishing dates in the metadata) [2]
- Google Ngram Viewer shows a brief appearance around 1980 (maybe a fluke) and then a steady rise in the 2000s [3].
- In one army magazine I saw an extended version: "slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly" (which doesn't transfer that well to other professions)
It’s common advice regarding the golf swing. Keeping everything connected with an even tempo creates a fluidity that can be converted to “effortless” power. It’s how to be consistent swing after swing.
this phrase is used in sailing, skiing, motorcycling, showjumping, skydiving, tennis, classical musicianship, downhill mountain biking, and lately I hear, mma. I have some doubt that it originated with door kickers.
I suspect it does originate in the military, though, and probably reloading guns and cannons while under fire. Might go back further than that to bows and arrows.
I have a hard time believing that this phraseology originated in the military given its historical use in the motorsports community. See Alain Proust, who professed to embody this philosophy.
Granted the SEAL community predated Prousts F1 participation, but SeAL tactics were not top of mind in 80s popular culture like they are today.
It's a marksmanship maxim, extant during Vietnam, gaining ground in any profession or activity where the principle made sense. SEALs definitely embraced it, but I believe it originated in WWII in its modern form. There are all sorts of regional proverbs and teachings and sayings all over the world going back through history capturing the same basic notion, though.
Haste makes waste - British
Festina lente - Latin (Make haste slowly)
Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano - Italian (Slow and steady wins the race)
Slowly but surely - many cultures, probably dates back to hunter gatherers.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is quick, quick is fast" is the variation I was taught by a military relative. He was a Richard Marcinko fanboi, too, but I don't know if that's related. They all circle a notion we internalize with particular meaning that the words don't ever quite capture, perfectly, but we get the point across.
I don’t think it originated in marksmanship, that’s all. I agree marksmen say this and I agree it’s a good strategy for shooting, in addition to other fine motor skills. If you look to your Italian version, it’s quite plausible that the idea originated in racing. Further, I hesitate to call Roman soldiers marksmen although I acknowledge aim is required when using a sword or spear.
As with all catchphrases, it's a type of truism. Not that that's bad per se, just that it's better to takeaway that by going slow, you'll be better at identifying, planning, and avoiding "blunders".
The tradeoff is: you're going slow. (c.f. Uvalde)
There's a kind of corollary on how to get fast from music: you practice as slow as you can perfectly play the etude, then go one step faster until that is perfectly played.
Everyone walks in, day one, and is dumping adrenaline everywhere they look. I mean, the person in front of you is literally engaging you in practicing murder, so I get it. Everyone starts that way. Super tense, super shallow breathing, and everyone wears themselves out in about 30-40 seconds. Of a 6 minute round.
Doesn’t matter if you’re the most insanely buff dude ever, or seriously overweight. The first guy has better conditioning, no doubt… but not this kind of conditioning. One of my favorite things was watching a new guy walk in, looking like he had maybe 7% body fat, 6’2” at least, plays D1 basketball, and is just nothing but stacked muscle… and then him rolling with a 5’6” 130lb woman who just wipes the floor with him, because training matters more than strength, but even more importantly, breathing and staying calm, slow, and smooth matters even more. The basketball player spends the first minute or so using all his strength to try and get this “puny” girl off of him, unable to, and is now completely gassed. Meanwhile she’s tapped him twice and could go for a run.
Eventually, the most important thing you learn is to relax and breathe. Technique eventually comes, through iteration and lots and lots of practice; eventually, things become second nature.
But breathing? Reminding yourself to relax and roll smart, not fast? That I need to remind myself of most days, because again: you’re facing someone practicing killing you. :)