tcs-21 Tracking Your Progress

Tracking Your Progress

Time Control

You’ll know you’re at Level 2 when...

As you approach Level 2 Time Control (slowing time down), you may not yet see things in slow motion, but feel as if you have more time to react. Sparring gets less hectic, your reactions tend to be correct — and more certain — more often.

The more you build on this certainty, the closer you get until that moment when— BOOM! — the things around you suddenly slow down. It’s as if you’re moving at normal speed, while everything and everyone around you is moving in slo-mo.

For some, seeing in slow motion will come within days of beginning their practice of Time Control Sports, for others it will take weeks before the first slo-mo experience. Either way, you must continually build on this as a part of your martial arts discipline and not just sit back and wait to get better.

Remember what it was like when you first learned to execute a kick? When you first tried you were probably challenged by your lack of balance and most likely couldn’t kick above your belt. You worked at achieving balance — worked at it until you had it.

Kicking is easier to learn than time control for the simple reason that we can watch others kick and copy them. To succeed at Time Control Sports we must truly look within ourselves to find what is holding us back and to chart our progress.

You’ll know you’re at Level 3 when...

Level 3 of time control (time stop) is unmistakable. You’ll experience sound dilation. Music, ambient noise, voices — all will sound like one long echoing tone. Your sense of sight will also change. What you see will seem unreal — almost as if the people around you (especially your opponent) are statues. All of your senses will be heightened like never before. You will taste the air, smell it, sense it moving around you.