One thing I’ve noticed with most mar­tial arts stu­dents is that their stances are pretty poor. Learn­ing stances is def­i­nitely a hard thing to do; it takes a lot of prac­tice before you can just step right into a per­fect stance. How­ever, it’s impor­tant. Every one of the phe­nom­i­nal mar­tial artists I’ve had the plea­sure of know­ing agrees: if your stances are bad, your motion will be bad.
For the first three lessons I taught, I took this idea to heart and focused a lot on them.

Today was review, and while they were still strug­gling with it, those three lessons were enough to get them think­ing about it. As they com­pleted each move­ment, I saw them going through a short “where are my feet?” stage. The num­ber of times I had to remind them to think about it was pretty low. Though they’re still rough, the stances them­selves are start­ing to look rea­son­ably decent too. It took a week to get their feet look­ing like an aver­age yel­low belt at my school. This is effec­tively 6 months of progress in just 7 days! It might just be because this group is par­tic­u­larly intel­li­gent and moti­vated, but I can hon­estly say I’ve never seen results like this before.

This may not be too applic­a­ble to a com­mer­cial school. Stances take a lot of prac­tice, and the first few lessons (espe­cially if it’s a “free trial” like most schools give) can’t be too frus­trat­ing. How­ever, given the results I’ve seen over the last week, if you have the option, stress stances more than any­thing for the first sev­eral lessons. Some exam­ples of things I did:

• When prac­tic­ing kicks with a pad, have the stu­dent check their stance before and after each kick.
• Once they get the basic mechan­ics of a kick, have them look down at their feet dur­ing the place­ment phase.
• In a self-defense tech­nique (Amer­i­can Kenpo’s kumite), have the stu­dent stop after each move, tell you what stance they’re sup­posed to be in, then have them check it.

Of course, look­ing at the feet con­stantly is a bad habit, and I’m hop­ing they’ll get the feel for it pretty quickly, after which I will ask them to work at not look­ing at their feet. I haven’t yet taught them any forms, but I think the same kind of thing is applic­a­ble there.

My goal is to have great stances in just a month’s time. If this hap­pens, I’ll be well on my way towards my pre­vi­ous 18-months-in-6 goal. Woo!

Tags: martial arts

About a week ago, I began teach­ing Kenpo to a small group of friends. A cou­ple of them have been ask­ing about it for a while, and we finally got it all orga­nized. It’s great fun, and they’re prov­ing to be bet­ter stu­dents than I could have ever asked for.

After teach­ing a cou­ple lessons, I decided to look for infor­ma­tion on mar­tial arts ped­a­gogy. After all, there are a lot of mar­tial arts teach­ers out there, and there’s got to be some good infor­ma­tion out there on how to teach, right? Appar­ently not.

Quick searches for ped­a­gogy infor­ma­tion for my other two fields (com­puter sci­ence and music) both turn up mil­lions of results. The first sev­eral pages of results for both of these are full of excel­lent infor­ma­tion. The same search for mar­tial arts turns up only a few thou­sand, and none of them are use­ful. Why is this? I don’t think your aver­age com­puter sci­ence teacher is any more ded­i­cated to his stu­dents than your aver­age mar­tial arts teacher. In fact, the vast major­ity of mar­tial arts instruc­tors I’ve met have been incred­i­bly devoted to their stu­dents, whereas most com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sors would have a hard time car­ing less.

Most of the infor­ma­tion I did find started with the sug­ges­tion that tra­di­tion is impor­tant, and you should teach like your instruc­tor taught. While there’s a lot of his­tory in the mar­tial arts, I doubt most peo­ple teach the same way peo­ple hun­dreds of years ago taught; every teacher along the way makes their own changes, and the real­i­ties of try­ing to pay the bills by teach­ing mar­tial arts dic­tate that some things just shouldn’t be done. Run­ning an MA school is not a good way to make money, and every train­ing tech­nique that dri­ves away a stu­dent is a liability.

While I do agree that tra­di­tion is impor­tant, I think there’s a lot of progress still to be made. Peo­ple have had great suc­cess “tak­ing com­puter sci­ence out of the lec­ture hall.” While MA is a lot more hands-on (shame on me) than CS, I do believe that there’s got to be bet­ter ways to do some things. At my Kenpo school, a ded­i­cated stu­dent can become a pretty decent 1st degree black belt in about 5 years. Can the same results be gained in 4? Maybe even 2 or 3? I hon­estly don’t know.

But I want to find out. I’m going to exper­i­ment with teach­ing meth­ods, and I’m going to blog about it. I have these stu­dents for 6 months before I move to Cal­i­for­nia to join the VMware world-domination machine. After those 6 months, my goal is to have them move like they’ve been at it for 12, maybe even 18 months. If I dis­cover some­thing, and these posts show up on the results page the next time a bud­ding instruc­tor looks, it will have been com­pletely worth it.

Tags: martial arts