What Growing Tomatoes Taught Me About Coaching Kendo

The funny thing about tomatoes is… you can’t actually grow them.

You can water them, cage them, chase off the aphids. But in the end, you’re not making a tomato. You’re just creating the conditions where the plant can do its thing.

That’s coaching, too.

I was thinking about this while reading my brother’s recent piece on hyakuren-jitoku (百錬自得) – the idea that, through relentless repetition, something deeper emerges. That skills aren’t just learned, but absorbed. Embodied. Worn into the body through effort.

It’s compelling. And honestly, it’s a logic I leaned on for years. As my brother notes, you see it everywhere in budo.

But lately, I’ve started wondering: does all repetition lead to mastery? Maybe, sometimes, it just leads to students going through the motions. Clean cuts, perfect drills… that fall apart the moment the pressure shifts.

That’s not through a lack of grit, though. It's not that the student didn't practice hard enough, or long enough.

Indeed, it's just as likely to be a training design issue. And it gets me thinking: what if it’s not just how often we repeat something that matters… but what’s happening during the repetition?

That’s where this post begins.

Repetition Works… Until It Doesn’t

If you haven’t read the article, you should. Better yet, listen to it here. Meanwhile, here’s my take on the core idea:

Hyakuren-jitoku translates roughly as “self-attainment through a hundred practices.” Although, “hundred” is symbolic, not literal. The message is simple, powerful, and rooted in centuries of Japanese thought: through dedicated, disciplined repetition, skills move from conscious control to instinctual action. You don’t just know the movement, you internalise it.

My brother describes this as the soul of early martial training. Less talk, more doing. Less explanation, more cuts. Embody the strike through effort, not over-analysis. “Just shut up and keep doing it. You’ll get it on your own eventually…”

As Alex puts it in his piece:

“In an era that often prizes shortcuts and rapid results, hyakuren-jitoku serves... as a reminder that proficiency/mastery cannot be rushed.”

And he’s right. There’s something enduring and important in that. Mastery takes a boatload of time. And that slow burn is the whole point.

After all, that’s the long-term goal, right? For the body to move freely. To know what to do, without thinking.

But here’s the tension: if we repeat the same drill, the same pattern, under the same conditions… are we really preparing students to respond freely? Or are we just getting them good at the pattern?

This is where the concept of repetition without repetition, coined by Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein, adds something powerful. Bernstein wasn’t talking about kendo, of course, but about movement in general. He argued that the goal of practice isn’t to replicate a fixed motion perfectly each time, but to solve the same movement problem across different conditions.

It's the idea, for instance, that every men-uchi should be practiced slightly different, because the distance, timing, pressure, and opponent are always shifting. So, the skillful practitioner isn’t the one who performs a textbook cut on command, but the one who can adapt the core action in response to what’s unfolding in front of them.

Which brings me back to a point Alex makes, through analogy, when comparing hyakuren-jitoku to language and music:

“Hyakuren-jitoku applies beyond budo. In language learning, for instance, one may study vocabulary or grammar, but until these elements are practiced and repeated in conversation, they do not become part of one’s natural speech… Similarly, a musician may understand chords and scales theoretically, yet it’s only through playing them repeatedly that their fingers and ears become fluent, allowing true musical expression.”

He’s absolutely right. There’s no shortcut to fluency. But the question I keep circling back to is: what kind of repetition actually gets us there?

Let’s pull on that thread for a bit.

Arguably, fluency, in language, music, or kendo, isn’t just about nailing the form. It’s about expressing that form under pressure. In context. In chaos.
The kind of deep embodiment that actually transfers doesn’t come from rote alone. It comes from trying, adjusting, and trying again while the conditions shift.

Think about language. You don’t get fluent by repeating “Where is the toilet?” 10,000 times in a row. You get fluent by fumbling through real conversations, missing cues, picking them back up, adapting on the fly...and eventually, making yourself understood.
Same with music. Drilling scales matters. But musicality, that expressive, reactive quality, emerges when you bend those scales, play with them, respond in the moment. (I say, still fumbling my way through the same 5 'cowboy chords' after seven years.)

Agreed. It still takes time. But that time has to include variation. Because fluency doesn’t emerge from one perfect phrase or pattern. It emerges from solving the same problem a thousand slightly different ways. That's the kind of practice that prepares students for the unexpected.

So what if we approached kendo training like that?

What if we didn’t just rehearse the cut, but created environments where students had to adapt and execute in new and realistic situations by adjusting pressure, distance, and intention on the fly?

What if the goal wasn’t about executing the cut the same way every time, but about recognising when not to strike men-uchi? Reading the moment, adjusting distance, timing, and pressure, and still landing the counter with meaning.

In this way, ecological dynamics doesn’t aim to do away with repetition. Rather, it aims to reframe it. It says: let’s repeat the right things. Let’s repeat variation. Let’s repeat decisions. Let’s repeat pressure.

And importantly for coaches: let’s set up situations and scenarios that challenge our people to solve realistic problems while gradually sharpening their movements.

So yes, just like language, fluency in kendo needs repetition. But without variation, that repetition risks becoming hollow. Real fluency grows when those patterns are tested, bent, and applied under pressure. When students engage with the mess, not just the motion.

The Tomato Comes Back

Here’s where the tomato metaphor makes a triumphant comeback in this post.

Embodied skill, or 'being skilfull', requires us as coaches to factor in the soil, sunlight, and nutrients present in our students’ training environment. In other words, the conditions we create matter. You can water a weed a thousand times and still get a weed. More to the point, you can repeat a pattern so many times it becomes rigid, automatic, and brittle under pressure.

Anyone who’s done keiko outside their own club with someone from a different region, country, or just a wildly different style knows the feeling. Your go-to techniques stop landing. Your timing feels off. You find yourself saying: “They don’t do what they’re supposed to do!”

(Translation: I’ve trained for a predictable pattern, and this person doesn’t follow it.)

Facing off against beginners is often the clearest proof of this. Their ‘wrong’ timing, strange rhythm, or unorthodox movement throws us off, not because they’re doing kendo better, but because they’re doing kendo differently.

That’s not a technique problem. That’s a transfer problem. The conditions we trained in were too clean, too consistent, too far removed from the messy, adaptive reality of real keiko.

Shu – Ha – Ri (And Where We Get Stuck)

To understand why this happens, I’ve been mulling over another concept that shows up often in budo: shu-ha-ri (守破離).

You’ve probably heard this before: shu (守) means to obey or protect tradition; ha (破) to break or detach from it; and ri (離) to transcend and act freely beyond it.

In learning terms, it paints a path from beginner to mastery. First, you follow. Then you experiment. Then you create.

But here’s the problem: it’s a linear model. And in too many dojos, shu becomes a tunnel you have to crawl through for years before you’re “allowed” to experiment.

It’s all kihon, all the time. Hundreds of repetitions. Maybe thousands. Months and months of suri-ashi, okuri-ashi, fumikomi, and suburi. Underpinned by an unquestioned adoption of the hyakuren-jitoku idea.

That sounds noble. But in my own coaching experience, here’s how it tends to play out:

Students plateau, get bored, or burn out.
Coaches double down on repetition, thinking “they just need more time.”
Nobody questions the design, because 'hey, that’s tradition'.

I don’t say this to dismiss the value of shu or hyakuren-jitoku. I say it because if we really care about skill, then we have to look honestly at what actually produces it... and what doesn’t.

Reframing ‘Ha’ as a Coaching Strategy

So what’s the alternative?

This is where ecological dynamics offers a useful reframe. It says skill doesn’t live inside the coach to be downloaded like a file. Instead, it suggests that skill emerges from interaction with space, with timing, with pressure, with opponents, and with emotion.

It’s not about repeating a technique until it sticks. It’s about shaping conditions where adaptation can happen. Where players notice more, adapt faster, and make meaningful decisions in context.

To me, that’s ha. A playful, purposeful 'breaking' of the mould...just enough to spark attention and deepen understanding.

In my own sessions, this looks like:

Letting kids experiment with weird kamae or wild feints… then guiding their reflections (to better appreciate why the ‘Star Wars’ model isn’t going to be effective).
Changing the scoring rules mid-drill to see who adapts fastest, and build the ability to make quick(er) decisions.
Using time pressure, directional bias, or maai shifts to keep students recalibrating.
Asking: What happens when you go off-script? What happens when your opponent doesn’t do what you expect? What are your options here?

It's not about abandoning tradition. It’s about opening the door to ha earlier and more often… so by the time students reach ri, they’ve already started thinking, feeling, and adapting.

And from my perspective, that doesn’t dilute tradition. It deepens it.

Tradition Evolved Isn’t Tradition Lost

I’ve coached for long enough to admit that, for years, I leaned heavily on the hyakuren-jitoku logic. Stuck in the ‘shu’ phase, telling students: “Just keep cutting. It'll work out.”

But if I’m honest, transfer was always a bit hit-and-miss. Some students stuck around. But many quietly drifted away… maybe before things had a chance to really click?

And looking back, I don’t think it was because they lacked grit or patience. They were plenty tough. More than able to do the reps.

Perhaps why they left is because the structure I gave them didn’t offer enough meaningful feedback or variation? They were repeating the moves, but not seeing how it all fit together. Maybe it was in that gap that motivation slipped?

Tomato analogy: Perhaps I had been overwatering the garden, without paying enough attention to the soil or the sunlight - the actual conditions they needed to grow?

These days, I still value repetition. I still believe in effort. And I absolutely believe in the power of patient, dedicated practice of the basics.

But I also believe in designing sessions that stretch perception, reward curiosity, and let students break things occasionally (and do this earlier, and more often). Not to destroy tradition, but to help better understand the 'why' behind the technique, tactic or strategy being repeated.

Rooting It Back to Tradition

In a nutshell my thinking is this: Not all repetition leads to skill. And not all tradition needs to stay fixed.

If hyakuren-jitoku is about absorbing skill so deeply it becomes part of you, then the question is: what kind of practice actually gets us there?

For me, ecological dynamics doesn’t throw out the old wisdom, it digs under it. It sharpens it. Because it prompts us to think about fluency, about mastery as something we achieve by getting messy. From adjusting on the fly. From facing people who don’t “do it properly.”

And that’s not about rebelling against tradition, that’s about giving it roots in evolving understandings of (skill) learning. More importantly, its about preparation for the world outside our own dojo.