Long story short:
*I only have a 12K stone and a strop-on-a-board.
*There are no hone-masters in Honduras (that I know... the owned of the company I work for does shave with SR but I don't feel confident enough to ask him to hone my blade... plus chances are he travels to the US to get his blades honed)
*An awesome member sent me a 1k/6k combi King stone which is on its way to Honduras so this will help a ton!

The thing is, I've been playing with my blade and strop and have managed to get decent WTG passes, but there are some things I am curious about:

1. Pressure. I do apply pressure to the blade when stropping. Contrary to what's normally advised (light strokes, the weight of the blade should suffice) I found that if I do not apply pressure (I slightly press the blade against the strop with my thumb) the edge does not lay flat against the leather.
As a matter of fact, I noticed the place where the bevel ends was shiny but the bevel itself had no changes. This because it was not touching the leather, for mere fractions of a millimeter but it was not touching the leather. Applying pressure has proven to change the behaviour of the blade, while it still needs work, behaves much better than when I only used the weight of the blade.

Is pressure completely ill-advised? Because it seems to me it's actually situational.

2. Speed. What's the point of stroking with speed. I mean, from a physics point of view
I've seen people saying that you must move your blade fast across the strop, an average of a stroke per second. Why is that? What happens if you move your blade slow (from a physics point of view)?
Moving slowly does not help fix possible missaligns in the blade due to the low amount of force?... or it's to use the friction to heat the blade and make it more malleable and, as consequence, more able to be aligned

3. Palm heating What's the benefit? A wild guess would be that the heat from the leather is transferred to the blade, making the edge more malleable and helping align a part of the blade that could be missaligned... or the reason is something else?

I ask because I don't think all these common practices are the result of "tradition", there should be a physical reason behind all this and why it works and it's recommended... and hence, posted in the wiki. Understanding the reason why something works is more often than not the key to do it right.