A study in efficiency [Training, Private]

Tue Nov 07, 2017 5:15 am

Shunsui

Artist: Bleach OST - Song: Mysterious - Word Count: 733

Now that he'd settled in to his new quarters, and finished setting everything up for his new position, Shunsui was anxious to get some training done. A few recent events had shown him that his speed could use improvement. That was what he planned to focus on for however long it took. When he was done he would have a brand new shunpo
technique, one that he hoped would prove many times more effective. His first priority was to completely break down and understand the mechanics of shunpo. To do this he simply imagined doing it himself, or watched others. This process took several weeks, as Shunsui wanted to make sure that he was as thorough as possible in this matter. He wasn't just going for a minor improvement. Shunsui planned to completely redefine what a shunpo was.

After collecting all of the data he'd acquired Shunsui spent nearly as long looking over it. He experimented with various angles of the foot, tensed and untensed muscles, with shoes and without, with small steps and with large steps. He was able to find a few key factors that would be fundamental to his research, the angle of the foot when running, and the length of the stride, but he would still need much more.

About a month and a half after having first started his testing Shunsui made a measurement of his progress. He realized that if he angled his foot more, made more of a violent motion when he left the ground, and widened his stride then his speed was considerably increased. Now that he knew this he went back to his training and aimed to improve these factors even further. Although many would consider him lazy in the past, at the moment Shunsui was filled with a burning passion. Soul Society was being invaded left and right, his strength was no longer a deterrent. None of their strength was. He was determined to change that though, in the future no one would even consider invading his home. He aimed that passion into his work , and due to that he achieved results quicker than one might expect.

Two weeks more after his first test Shunsui once more recorded his speeds and was amazed at his improvement. He wouldn't have believed it if someone else had told them they'd done the same. It wasn't just his shunpo that he was improving though. By gaining greater knowledge of the mechanics of moving fast he was also able increase his normal running speed.

This was just a study in efficiency, something that Shunsui already had previous experience with from implementing these kinds of ideas into his swordplay. With that in mind he went through the same kind of processes here as he had then, and that was when he realized just how inefficient a normal shunpo truly was. Only a fraction of the energy that was exerted was actually assisting in propelling the user forward, the rest was wasted, absorbed by the ground. He was making great strides towards improving the technique, but he realized that the work involved would take longer than he'd initially thought. The alterations he needed to test were extremely minute, and he was the only test subject he had, so it was mainly just trial and error with a few educated guesses.

Eventually though, Shunsui settled with the efficiency that he'd already built up and decided that the best way for him to build up his speed now would be to practice this newfound efficiency. He could do it currently, but he was much less certain of himself than with a normal shunpo, and found his feet getting out of sync occasionally. It was truly an odd way to move around, but much faster than others he'd witnessed. After a few days though he began to more fully grasp what it was that he was doing. One of the main reasons that it was so hard for him to develop his new technique was because he'd already been using shunpo for nearly his entire life. It wasn't an easy task to completely alter something that was so firmly ingrained into his muscle memory. He'd heard somewhere that it took one hundred times longer to correct a bad habit than to learn something completely from scratch. The thought was daunting.