Flow Drills... (And why I dislike them)

I'm not a huge fan of flow drills.  Flow drills are, to my knowledge, set patterns of attack and defense designed to be continuous.  A good flow drill is designed to take advantage of the natural flinch and protective response/reflex mechanism.  This type of training most certainly has it's place, especially when practiced sincerely.  My fear, however, is it has the potential to build increasingly bad habits.

One bad habit is failure to commit to a technique.  This happens because we get too set in the "flow" of the drill.  We end up sacrificing technique (proper timing, distance, target, intent) for speed or perceived "intensity".  What I mean by perceived intensity is how it looks from the outside, someone watching the drill (for demonstration purposes, or video).  The drill's prescribed movements teach us to immediately "flow" from one technique to the next, usually in a back and forth manner, thus rushing and half committing.

A second habit flow drills have the potential to form are what I call "failure expectations".  Many of the flow drills I have seen or practiced usually involve sequences the have you launch an attack, and the drill dictates your partner counters your attack and responds.  You in turn block/counter etc.  The psychological repercussions of this practice, in my view, are they build a mental barrier for your technique.  I'm not a big subscriber to the "one hit, one kill" but I feel this is a proper mindset to have when engaging in self defense practices.  I just don't want to subconsciously train my technique to fail.

One last bad habit, and I'll give it a rest.  This sort of plays into the first two, but you run the risk of developing poor "launching".   As a flow drill is designed to launch a technique after another we learn to apply techniques from positions or situations we may never find ourselves in.  One flow drill I've seen practiced has your partner, about midway through the drill, in an armlock, they bite you on the shoulder and you release the lock, spin them around and "tear" our their throat(the instructors exact words) then put them in a guillotine choke... If I want to train a choke it won't, most likely, ever be after "tearing" someone's throat out.  And I want to train my armlocks in such a way that even if my attacker bites me, it's too late.

Do these potentially negative factors rend practicing flow drills pointless? Of course not.  The limited exposure I've had to them has been in most cases been fun opportunities to train with other Karateka.  I'm not looking to change anyone's mind or belittle their practice.  I'm simply offering up my view, and feel there could be time better spent.  I will give my thoughts on the solution to this in a future post.

Thank you for reading and happy training.