This is a bold statement indeed, but how could we go about proving it. If you would guess how fast a drummer is moving his sticks in miles per hour going his fastest, what would it be? What about the fastest drummer in the world who can play over 1200 beats per minute? That is 20 beats per second! Would it be 100 mph? 200 mph?

Well there is a very well known physics equation that most of us learned in highschool. Speed = Distance/Time. All we have to do is find all the variables to figure out what speed is. Distance will simply be how far the stick travels between each time it hits the surface. Assuming the drummer allows the stick to rebound 4 inches from the surface then we know the stick is traveling 8 inches before it hits the surface again (4 inches up and 4 inches back down again). The WFD competition uses 1 minute as the rule in their speed contest, so we can use that time for our measurement. If we divide 60 by the number of times the stick hits the pad in a minute, then we have the time in seconds. The only thing that is left is a little conversion and plugging in the numbers and we can solve for speed in MPH.

There are a few very interesting observations that you can see from this data. One is that the sticks never move faster than the average of 4 1/2 mph even at a world record speed of 1200 spm. The second thing is that the speed of the stick is directly proportional to how high the drummer lets them rebound. You can see that moving from a 4 inch rebound height to a 2 inch rebound height cuts the speed in half. And from 2 inches to 1 inch the speed is cut in half again. Lastly, if you let your sticks rebound 4 inches from the drum/pad you'll have to increase about 0.38 mph for every 100 spm you want to increase. If you only let your stick rebound to a 1 inch height, you only have to increase about 0.1 mph for every 100 spm faster you wish to play.

These numbers depict only the average speed of the stick because the stick is never moving at a constant rate of speed. An interesting fact that Boo McAfee discovered through his research was that the stick spends most of it's time in the state of slowing down to a stop and reversing direction to speed back toward the drum pad again. The stick spends very little of it's time actually going fast.

What do we conclude from this? If you read my lesson on "How to get "FAST", one of the tips says that lowering your stick height is one of the secrets to gaining speed endurance. Lowering the sticks without changing the frequency (SPM's) will conserve energy. The reason for this conservation is that you are actually slowing down! The laws of physics tells us that it takes more energy to move mass a larger distance (4+ inches) and less energy to move it a smaller distance (1 inch) given the same amount of time.