Old Habits

Last week, another black belt at my club told me he thought I needed to practice my kicks. If you've read my previous posts, you'll know that I don't find ushiro-geri and yoko geri kekomi that easy. After what this black belt told me, it occured to me that it was about time I sorted out these 2 kicks, I'd been ignoring them for long enough; it was time to break an old habit.

ushiro-geri from zenkutsu-dachi

Recently, I've been working on training with a less tense body and state of mind. I've done this by practicing slowly, (see my post, 'The Importance of Slow Practice' for more detail), breathing properly with techniques and just going in to practice with a more relaxed mindset. This has meant that I've had more space in my mind to look at techniques in detail and being less physically tense has allowed me to add that detail to my techniques. Increased space in my mind has also allowed me to express myself and engage with techniques on that level more. Less tension generally has meant that I don't physically and mentally exaust myself each time I practice. This has made it more enjoyable and means that even if it's been a long, tiring day, I can still face practicing. I'd advise anyone who, like myself, is prone to stress and is too tense in training, to try to relax more because it can really improve training and it's worth the time it takes to change your level of physical and mental tension.

So was this relatively new approach effective when it came to working on these kicks? When it came to breaking a much older habit? Not in the beginning. I tensed up mentally and physically as I had done before, as if to psyche myself up for it. After I'd done a few of each kick (badly), My mind was telling me to call it a day in terms of practicing, as I'd done the minimum amount and not found it particularly enjoyable- another old habit, I hate to admit.

It took a few days for my approach of being more relaxed in training to become compatible with improving kekomi and ushiro- geri. My aim with kekomi is to be able to execute it with fluidity as my current execution of it is jerky and hesitant. It turns out that, for me, it was breathing properly with the technique that made a change, I'm still not very fluid when it comes to bringing the leg back, but it's a work in progress.Intrestingly, when I did Nijushiho (a kata containing 2 kekomis), they remained very un-fluid. I haven't known this kata for long, but long enough for the way of doing it to become a habit, which, for me, jerky kekomis had become part of: another habit to break!  As for ushiro-geri(from zenkutsu-dachi), it's more about breaking the habit of pausing at the point where I turn to face the back and raisisng my leg before executing the kick. So far, I've managed it with my right leg but not with the left one.

yoko-geri kekomi

I've given this long account of my last few days of practice to try and illustrate how developing habits(certain ways of doing something becoming engraned in your mind) in training isn't always good. To an extent, certain ways of doing something becoming engraned (habits) can be a really positive thing in karate(and also a thing emphsized a great deal, considering the amount of repetition which takes place in training sessions). For example, developing the habit of doing a kata correctly means that you can do it in a pressured situation, like a grading, without having to think about it. The same could apply in terms of self-defense. Because if you ever have the misfortune to have to defend youself, having to think about it too much is the last thing you want to be doing-I'm not an expert and I don't speak from experience but it's a true enough fact. Also, developing the habit of regular training and practice can be a really productive thing. What's not so good is when mistakes or certain (not good) approaches to training among many other things become engraned. This happens to us all, but, certainly in the context of martial arts, we need to address those kinds of issues because, as I've learned, they're not going to go away otherwise. Practice and repetition are about engraning things in our minds, developing habits, the right ones.

Teaching a larger group

Early last month, I remember being faced with the task of teaching a larger group than one or two Karateka. I made the mistake of assuming that, since I had experience teaching one to one and had developed some basic skills and techniques to help me do that easily and effectively, this was going to be no different.

It was a group comprising of orange and red belts. Sensei had instructed me to help them with their kumite. There were only 5 or 6 karateka in the group alltogether, which dosen't sound like a  paticularly 'large' group to have to teach but, as I found out it was a group large enough to require a considerably different set of skills to the ones I use when teaching one to one.

I managed to go through their kumite with them on the count, before getting them to go through it on their own without much going wrong apart from the somewhat embarrasing, (for me) experience of hearing the lack of authoritativeness and the general uncertainty in my voice when I spoke, but I assume that kind of thing improves with experience. I know I've mentioned a great deal in previous posts that I don't like asserting dominance over students. But this is in the context of one to one teaching and as I said, teaching a larger group requires a different set of skills. With larger groups , I think you do need to take charge, to some extent, Because you are responsible for a larger group of people and have to organise them, when there could be a huge number of 'them' and only one of you (in this case, I was teaching alongside a fellow 1st dan, but while one of us lead the practice, the other paired up with one of the students because there was an odd number and we swapped places each time, but it was just one of us teaching each time).

Another difference I found was how I had to go about delivering advice and feedback. With one to one teaching, I'm used to having the freedom to be really precise and thurough with the student because there's only one of them, only one set of strengths and weaknesses. With group teaching, however, there's a difference. More students mean more sets of strengths and weaknesses and the chances are you won't have the time to go in to the same kind of depth with each student as you can when just teaching one student. The fact there's a whole group of students make going in to that kind of  depth impractical anyway.

I did attempt to look for mistakes that students were making when I was going through it with them on the count but failed to coordinate it with counting the group through it effectively. I put this dowm to partly my lack of experience and partly  because my mind had seized up! One thing I've seen my Sensei and some of the other black belts do is give advice generally to the group (eg: 'make sure you have a good sized stance', 'don't rush, focus on technique'). Maybe this  is the best way to deliver feedbeck to a larger group, especially when you are hard-pressed for time. There is no guarantee that all students will find this advice useful, which really came to the front of my mind, as a perfectionist and someone who enjoys being thurough, but it's just not possible to meet all the different the needs of every single student in a larger group.

Because I like to naturally like to take a narrow but deep approach, I was well suited to teaching one to one. However, the kind of approach needed for group teaching goes almost completely against my instincts. Nevermind, I'll try to enjoy the challenge and being forced to not be a perfectionist every now and then will probably be good for me.

When I see my Sensei or one of the senior black belts take the whole class during training  sessions, they make it look easy-it's not, evidently. Since my breif experience of teaching a group, I realise that what I'm seeing is the result of a huge amount of teaching experience and things learnt through countless trials and errors.

A Useful Technique for One to One Teaching(part 2)

This post follows right on from my previous one so I reccomend you read that one first. In my previous post, I said I'd be talking about where the approach to one to one teaching I described wasn't practically possible, or where it would still be practically possible even if it dosen't seem it when one first considers it;sometimes it's just a matter of being aware of other things apart from that particular aspect of the way one teaches instead of just classing it as impractical in that given situation,I think.

The first situation where my approach could be impractical is that the student is a quiet individual and answers any questions with few words. Here, I do speak from a small amount of  experience; once, I was helping a red belt about 9 or 10 years of age with his kata, who was very quiet. Initially, I got the feeling  that my approach wasn't working so well. This was based on the fact that my questions seemed to discomfort him and even now, I'm not entirely certain how to fully prevent that kind of thing and still find out from the student what to work on with them. Although I can minimize it through accepting the answer I get and not forcing a more detailed one(There's a difference between this and asking them politelyt to be more specific about something if neccasarry ) out of respect for the student both as a karateka and as a person alongside not asking the questions in an imposing manner.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, asking the student about their training instead of just telling them what to do all the time also means the student feels taken respected as a karateka and there's no reason why quiet people shouldn't be taken seriously as  karateka. Even if they answer questions with few words this is not a sign of incompetence because they might think about their training in a lot of depth and just not want to talk about it to a great length.

Another situation where it could be impractical is if the student is a total beginner. I've yet to discover if this is true or not as I've never taught a total beginner. Ovbiously, they don't have  training experience to discuss, so you can't exactly ask them how their training is going in the same way you could to a green belt! Also, they won't be able to say in as much detail what they find difficult about  various techniques, but equally,  they aren't training in that level of detail; as a karateka gains more experience in terms of executing technques, they tend to notice the smaller details. As previously mentioned, I have no experience teaching beginners so I'll be intersted to find out if my approach is practical in that context and how I might need to adapt it.

This approach definitely dosen't work when teaching a large group;it requires a different set of techniques, I will write about this in more detail in my next post.