Matt, what do you make of the Mangini routine that Big Foot outlined? Does it only apply to short periods of fast play?
I see a lot of merit in applying Magadini's concepts/ assuming you didn't mean Mangini/ But, when you're asking some of us old speed freaks from those competition times, I intentionally avoided maximum practice speeds except for the smallest increments, say one or two brief
max out runs per day.
First I didn't see the need in doing it, but most important I wasn't going to get an idiot's case of carpal tunnel. See, what I think people don't realize is how ridiculous the speeds had gotten for straight ahead singles by that time. Art Verdi's short bursts for example were regularly being clocked faster than the craziest stuff seen in the famous Buddy Rich 1970 white turtleneck video after it had been run through a computer. Yes I know that you can't compare Rich's spontaneous set creativity with a singular objective on a pad, but I'm only saying that to give you a point of reference.
Back then everybody was doing routine warmup stuff at 250 and above, while now you see the new
push pull guys try to go even faster. But the difference in straight ahead singles playing and
push pull was the exertion factor. Straight ahead is tougher on you physically. Now I'm betting at least one guy disagrees with me there, but I think most would agree with me. With that said, myself and others were very mindful of what Mike Mangini used to believe about the extreme thresh- hold for straight ahead playing. I think he believed you would max out at around 325, before you did really bad things to yourself.
So that's why I for instance probably took things very cautiously back then. I just don't think people sometimes understand how crazy all that had gotten. I used to watch Art, Mangini, Tom Grosset, Seth Davis etc, and their hands even in warmups were this wild looking blur, although totally controlled. Those speeds were just something different. We used to hear people say I know so and so who plays faster and we would just roll our eyes, and so did guys like Jim Chapin who hung around the venues for hours. I remember when I heard Jotan Afanador do that stuff and his sticks would make this whiiiiiirrrrrriiiing sound. It was like a little helicopter. When I first saw Tom compete his sound was exactly the same. Those guys didn't want to do a lot of extra pushing because the regular effort was already out there enough.
And even then for all that great care, there was Art, the 10 second short burst world record holder getting out of comps before everyone else. You just instinctively felt he knew he was doing something too dangerous.
However with all that said, if you're talking about working up to very, very strong but entirely versatile/practical thresh-holds like 240-250 then yeah, sure why not taking a couple of more chances? But back then I wasn't going to play physically damaging games in 300 territory.