Years ago I sat in the audience at a brown belt test for a friend's
dojo. It was towards the end and the guy going up for his brown belt had done
all of his kata and one step sparring and all that stuff. Now it was time for
the actual sparring. As they bowed and began to spar it became painfully clear
this kid had no idea what he was doing. A much lower belt rank was just picking
him off at will and he seemed to be just looking for a spinning backfist
because he couldn't think of anything else. He had done all of his kata
correctly and his one step spars and demonstrations went fine. So what
happened?
This is something that is all too common that we will revisit later in
the article. For those that haven't read my other articles I've been involved in
martial arts since I was 4 years old back in 1977. For the last several years
I've developed programs for Law Enforcement here in the United States. This
gave me a greatly different perspective as a teacher and really changed the way
I look at curriculums and structure.
You see with law enforcement I don't get the luxury of giving long term
training. I have to teach in a way that they can learn and retain in a very
short time span. If I can't break things down to a strong foundation within a
couple days then I've honestly wasted their time. I think being forced into
doing this made me a much better teacher and gave me so much more of an
understanding of what I need to do.
As I’ve visited departments over the years and seen other programs out
there I've noticed some striking similarities between defensive tactics
training and martial arts that was both disturbing and enlightening at the same
time. The problems I found in the short two day programs seemed to be a
microcosm for the problems that plague martial arts programs everywhere. I was
asked to develop a specific outline for a department that wanted to fully adopt
our program and had difficulty doing it. It was at this time that I figured out
the problem and I want to share with you all what I’ve learned.
You see, in these courses a lot of time there's a lot of material to get
through. So the instructors come in with an outline and work straight down it
like a checklist. If they get behind they may even speed up a little to make
sure all the material gets covered.
This causes a very specific problem. The students memorize the
techniques but they never learn them and that's a big difference. This is what
happened to our brown belt at the beginning of the article. He got in a hurry
and he memorized the belt requirements but never actually learned how to apply
them under real conditions. This is a bad curriculum.
I'm not going to get into certain techniques being better or worse than
others long term that isn't the point of the article. The point is that the student lacked a proper
foundation and the curriculum didn't have a structure that was conducive to
learning. When the minimum time in grade came around the instructor was too
worried about the student's feelings and wanted to give him a sense of
accomplishment so he rushed the test. However it goes much deeper than that.
This student had been let down by this instructor the whole time. These errors
didn't just start with this belt test it had been ongoing since white belt and
it was obvious. Now the type of martial art being practiced doesn't matter in
this case because with a proper foundation and structure you can produce high
quality students in any art form so it isn't really about tossing or bashing an
art so let's look at some solutions to these problems.
The first thing is concepts over techniques. For the purpose of this
article a concept is basically a general principle such as breaking balance
that anyone can perform in one way or another. A technique is a specific task
that must be performed a specific way. Now we all come in all shapes and sizes.
The simple fact is that not every technique is going to work for everyone. When
dealing with a beginner you should never force them to perform techniques that
you know are going to be problematic. They often get frustrated and leave then
never come back and it reflects badly on you and your dojo because now these
people are going to go around and tell people your stuff doesn't work or even
worse blame themselves and damage their own self confidence.
In the beginning concepts should be the part that matters most. Not
everyone can do the exact same technique but they can execute the same concept.
I'll give you an example. Let's say you want the student to begin learning how
to break a person's balance. Now a big guy might be able to grab someone's head
and control it breaking the balance that way. A smaller person may not be able
to reach the head but they can attack the legs with knees, kicks, etc. Both
break the balance by upsetting the person's structure. Both are correct in the
big scheme of things. Later on in their development, because of this, the
student will be able to adapt new techniques easier and make them work for
themselves at a faster rate.
Now of course a technique is the execution of the concepts so of course there
are techniques but the concepts must be fully understood before learning a
bunch of techniques. There's a program here in the U.S. where police officers
learn 165 techniques in 5 days. Under stress very few of them work and they can't
even remember most of them when they leave. There will be plenty of time for
teaching your student techniques but they will be understood much better when
they are taught as an extension of a concept.
People retain things better when they can relate to them. Sure you may
want them to try different techniques to find out which ones work for them and
which ones don't. After that however don't force a technique on someone when
it's useless to them it will only bog them down and confuse them as well as hurt
their development.
I'm going to skip over the techniques in the middle for now and go to
strategy. Strategy is a part of a good foundation and is what keeps you from
basically being hung out on an island like our poor brown belt. Direction would
be another way of saying it. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of
something and having no idea what you’re supposed to be doing.
This goes right into learning instead of memorizing. It's about being
goal focused. If you’re a judo guy your goal is to put that attacker on the
ground. If someone is choking you then you don't just grab their thumbs and
jerk their hands away and stop. You follow up and put them on the ground. This
is an idea that needs to be established from the beginning. If your just
memorizing techniques you will stop after you've gotten the hands pulled away
and that is bad training and bad structure.
When you’re working on executing a strategy from the beginning it
teaches the student how to think and adapt. It also teaches efficiency. It
teaches you how to deal with problems instead of just symptoms and is a great
metaphor for leadership in daily life. In the beginning you never want to teach
a technique that isn't moving towards executing your ultimate goal. An example
of this in law enforcement courses would be that the ultimate goal is to get
the guy in cuffs and in the car. Well if you have to do a takedown and don't
have some control over the guy beforehand then you lose contact. Now you have
to get on the ground and fight with his hands to get control, but if you hand
an arm control and maintained it then it would be much easier to get them in
cuffs. When you’re dealing with your beginners they will appreciate this. It instils
confidence in them because they are able to accomplish something that's real
and substantial right away instead of something hollow.
When you do this it establishes a great foundation and your students are
already learning something useful. Now you can plug in techniques. Since your
students have a full understand of what they are ultimately trying to
accomplish and good sound concepts to always fall back on they can now adapt
and deal with random changes. They understand the purpose of the techniques
they are learning and they learn them faster. You never have students that
don't know what to do. I've seen students invent techniques out of nowhere and
make them work because when something failed they understood the concept so
they made something else work. It's a great thing to see. They can take techniques
and modify them to their needs. At this point it starts to become a real art
because they are now expressing themselves.
My only caution would be when teaching new techniques you must protect
the foundation. People have a tendency when learning something new of tossing
out the old and you can't let them crack the foundation. Even if they are going
up for black belt make sure they focus on the core techniques that they learned
in the beginning. Everyone likes the new cool thing just make sure their
foundation doesn't crack while they are playing with it.
In developing these ideas about structure we also developed a new
program for the public called KONBATTO (Stonewall Tactical Jujutsu). In this
program you not only learn some very simple, direct, and vicious combatives you
will also learn how to implement this structure into your curriculum at your
school that we discussed in this article as part of that two day course. We are
happily launching this program in England and Ireland this summer. If you like
these ideas and find them useful I'd be more than happy to show each of you how
to apply them to your martial art in person. I thank you for your time and
remember. Learn don't memorize.
To find out more about Stonewall Tactical Defense Systems visit http://www.stonewalltactical.com/index.html
