What Is A Martial Arts Class?
My daughter is an avid soccer player, which means I’m an avid soccer dad who takes her to all the trainings, practices, and games I can.
Watching her private lessons with her coach is, admittedly, pretty boring. Observing footwork drills, calisthenics, and mobility exercises is not exactly must-see TV.
Once they get to kicking the soccer ball around it gets a bit more interesting.
Yet, seeing the coach set up certain positions and scenarios to drill over and over, and seeing Petra perform with varying degrees of success — from missing the ball, to bobbling it, to perfectly touching and controlling it — is not the stuff of a spectator’s dreams.
There’s no wildly cheering for your team during practice, nor are there any wild celebrations for getting the ball in the goal.
It’s Practice; It’s Not An Actual Game.
And it’s on game day that I see all of her hard work and reps she took in practice finally pay off as she shows off her skills when it counts.
It occurred to me, after having taught for decades, what a regular martial arts class really is.
I regularly teach class with people sitting on the other side of the glass watching class, not giving a thought to what they think they are watching.
Recently, a grandfather was visiting and commented that the beginner kids weren’t very disciplined. “Of course they aren’t, they’re beginners,” I thought, even as I was somewhat frustrated because I wanted to show him what it looks like when high-level students perform at full-speed, power, and control.
He just didn’t understand, but what was it exactly that he just didn’t understand?
Then it hit me, the simplest way to explain what spectators are seeing in class is this — class is practice.
He Didn’t Understand That Class Is Practice, Not Performance
Each class is practice, and what practice means is that students are NOT performing, they are learning, struggling, and working to improve themselves for a later performance, be that a belt test or an actual physical assault.
What practice looks like is anything but performance.
Soccer practice looks like hundreds of balls being shot wide or over the net, landing in a scattered field of missed shots behind the goal.
Based on practice, it looks like they’d never score a goal
Martial arts practice (class) — especially beginner and intermediate classes — looks like a group of undisciplined, un-coordinated students, not avoiding strikes, blocking late, missing their targets, failing at takedowns, being unfocused, and struggling with strength, mobility, and flexibility exercises.
Based on class, it looks like they’d never be able to protect themselves.
The Real Purpose of Practice
The purpose of practice is to make every mistake so students do not make those mistakes when it counts.
The macho military saying is “the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle,” essentially saying that when you make, then eliminate your mistakes in practice, when it’s time to perform you will succeed.
In class students practice to do things right, then keep training so they cannot do it wrong.
Judging long-term performance based on the learning process of many trials-and-errors as seen in any one class is unfair to the people on the mat.
The Only “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect” Myth
Aside from this defining itself and saying essentially nothing (Perfect makes Perfect, really?, and how do you get to this perfect practice in the first place when you cannot display the required skill?), this is not how anyone learns.
If you could magically do something perfectly the when you are first learning it, you’d never have to practice it.
For the rest of us, we need to do it wrong, while getting closer and closer to doing it right the more we practice until eventually doing it right becomes the norm, with mistakes being an anomaly.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite stories, about an Olympic figure-skater.
A reporter asked her why she could perform a triple-axle so beautifully.
The skater responded by saying,”by falling on my butt 1,000 times.”
“How did you get yourself to do that”?
“Because falling on my butt 1,000 time is what it takes.”
Remember, when you are watching, as well as taking and teaching, a class, you are witnessing those 1,000 mistakes it takes to excel, whether it’s to pass a Black Belt test, to perform a triple axle, or to score a soccer goal.
Practice is the process of perfecting your performance.
By the way, my daughter, who plays left-back defender, just scored her first soccer goal this weekend at a tournament in Utah.