The Foundation and Structure of Learning (Revised)

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 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 learned.

          You see in these courses alot of time there's alot 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 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 reflect 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's 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 to 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 a 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 your supposed to be doing. This goes right into learning instead of memorizing. It's about being goal focused. If your a judo guy your goal  is to put that attacker on the ground. If someone is choking you then you don't just grab there 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 your 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 your dealing with your beginners they will appreciate this. It instills 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. 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.

A Rant on Haters and Trolling

    If your on facebook for any given amount of time you'll already know these terms. Now to start I can honestly say I've never really had a problem with people trolling my stuff. I've pretty pretty lucky in that aspect most of my friends are pretty supportive. However, I see alot of things that they post as well and frankly some of it dives me nuts. Some don't even know they are doing it. Some do and don't care. Yes we are talking about being a troll. A troll is a hater but a specific kinda of hater. A troll actually goes out of their way to look for things to be pissed off about and then ruins everyone else's day by sharing it. I'm going to give a couple examples of what a troll is and how they operate.
    A light example of this will be when someone posts a video of some martial arts program they are trying to sell. Now I'll tell you straight off it takes roughly 100 martial art instructors to screw in a light bulb. It takes 1 to do it and 99 to sit around and claim they could've done it much better. I see videos all the time that I think are terrible but then I ask myself some questions. Since it's clips am I looking at every technique in it's proper context. Why are they doing their technique that way. Do I understand the purpose or their technique or system. If I answer no to any of these questions then I'm honestly not qualified to comment on their video so I don't. Videos like that are put together to get people interested in that system they aren't designed to inform or educate in anyway. They are teasers put together that leave out stuff on purpose otherwise they are just giving it away for free and they'd be out of business. I know in the past when I've done videos I'll shoot them at an angle or leave something out on purpose to keep people from stealing my stuff(it happens). This is common sense to most people but not a troll. They are going to attack something they know nothing about because it makes them feel superior and all high and mighty even though to the educated they just look like fools. I recently saw some friends of mine bashing some guys combatives video because they felt it had too much Wing Chun in it. Now I've seen their videos and well and they weren't that impressive but I didn't say anything because I'm not a troll. I do however know the guy they were bashing as well and know in a fight he could beat the piss out of them with his eyes shut. They'll never find that out though because frankly, they are trolls.
  Another magnet for trolls is politics. Now I want to make an obvious statement before I continue. All  governments are corrupt. All politicians are corrupt. No politician is any better than another regardless of party affiliation. Their are just some politicians who get caught and some that don't. I see things on my newsreel of people who go out of their way to find the craziest shit who can imagine to rant about. Some of it is completely made up. Some has some truth but not very much. They actually go out of their way to find time in the day to look for this crap. I would never post anything about politics it's stupid. All it does is tear people apart and does damage it can never help anything. Here's a simple fact for you. If you get up off your ass and focus on what you need to do to get where you want to be then it doesn't matter who is in the white house. A politician is never going to fix your broken life that's your responsibility.  You can spend your entire life blaming someone else for your problems or you can be an adult and grow up just a little bit and take control of your own life. Why post that stuff anyway no one in Washington cares what you think. Most people don't care what you think they are only concerned with themselves. In reality all your doing is wasting time that you could've been doing something productive. The world is full of self centered people who only care about themselves and their own personal biases and preconceptions. Even if they agree with your post they aren't going to do anything about it. You should just stop intellectually masturbating and find something better to do with your time.
  This next one could've been part of the politics but I wanted to make it separate. It's a special troll known as the facebook revolutionary. A facebook revolutionary will look for any and everything they can find to be pissed off about. Some legit and some not. It could be politics, health care, science, and anything else they can find. They by nature are delusional and get in their head that they are the leader of some revolution and the public is waiting on their next post because their movement is going to change the world.Now for  the reality check. No one gives a shit. The fact is your a very small minority and everyone has their own opinion they don't need yours. Oh but the revolutionary will have studies to back what they say. The problem is all studies tend to be biased based on what the researcher was trying to prove when they started. 20  years ago eggs were bad for you and no one should ever eat them for any reason. Today eggs are good for you and you should eat them. It's the same eggs just the study changed. in 20 years they'll be bad again. If someone decides global warming exists they'll spend the money and come up with studies to prove they are right. If someone doesn't believe in global warming they'll spend the money and come up with studies to prove they are right. See where this is going? For every study you can find to prove your point another study will prove it false. In truth it isn't really about saving the world it's simply about your ego and the romanticized vision you have of yourself. Sure you and your hater circle jerk will always have each other but that's about it. As an alternative try making someone smile. Squash the bullshit propaganda your embarrassing yourself and misleading others. Everyone should make up their own minds you can all be leaders don't follow anyone make your own path.
  A thousand years ago their was bad things going on in the world. There's definitely bad things now. In a thousand years there'll be more bad stuff. Posting a blurb that may or may not be accurate isn't going to change anything just get over yourself. If you want to change the world start with changing yourself and let your example change the people around you. If you can do that you can accomplish so much more instead of being some angry troll all the time. This is the best advice I can give on that I try everyday to be the best person I can be and help at least one person with something a day. If everyone done this the world would be a much better place instead of arguing over something irrelevant. I may lose some friends for writing this article but if I do that's alright because......they are trolls.