Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

coaching

You can’t train with them!

You can’t train with them! You can’t be my friend if you’re their friend! This ex-instructor is stealing all our secrets! This ex-instructor is offering a lower quality product! You can’t train with anyone else but us!

It seems like it’s a playground out there. Not a nice one either.

What’s on my mind? I recently saw a letter that the JKA sent out to its members forbidding them from training with an offshoot organisation. A letter that also that also states that attendance at such seminars may violate their ‘ethics and discipline regulations.’

Wow.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen this behaviour before though: across Karate styles, in other martial arts, and in the ‘Reality Based Self Defence’ community. For my own part I’ve had an editor remove my name from a karate article that recommended me and I’ve known one instructor to imply that my decades of knowledge (and magazine articles and the karate system name in use before we even met) are based on the little common material he shared in two weekend seminars. I find it a shame that people can be so insecure.

There are good ways to attract and retain students and there are bad ways. There are good reasons to recommend someone not train with another group and there are bad reasons.

Let’s start with cross-training, that training element that probably every style founder and good quality teacher has in common. That training approach of taking and adapting good information from multiple sources that is best practice in every single physical discipline and common to all top tier professional coaches. After paying attention and putting in effort, cross-training is probably the single most important thing you can do (whether that is in person, online or through wider reading and research).

The only really good reasons to recommend that a group or instructor be avoided is if you have evidence of poor safety practices, fake qualifications, or knowledge of inappropriate behaviour that may put trainees at other risks (which, if held, should have been reported for investigation if it breaches any laws). It boils down to ‘Is there a physical or mental health risk or risk of abuse to my student?’, if not, it’s none of your business.

Any other reasons are probably bad reasons. If what is being taught elsewhere clashes with your organisation’s approaches it is up to the student to rationalise or compartmentalise such differences and to be able to separate them. If the process of doing so slows their ability to perform appropriately for gradings, that is their choice. If they decide to continue their training elsewhere and no longer train with you, that is their choice too. Students are not serfs.

If an instructor leaves an organisation and chooses to teach under a new umbrella, that is their choice. If they have been awarded grades then they are a reflection of that organisation’s standards. Those grades are not automatically invalid; they will always be an accurate reflection of how their skills and knowledge were valued at the time they were awarded. Organisations also need to accept that they may not have been the only source of an individual’s knowledge. It may be that a departing instructor is actually offering a more appropriate different training opportunity for other people. It might be that their choosing to move on should be cause for introspection rather than isolation or insults.

If an organisation chooses to ‘kick out’ an instructor for any non-criminal activity, or suggests they move on, that does not remove their ability to teach what they know. When an organisation seeks to undermine the qualifications of any former instructor or student they are actually discrediting their own current students and teaching. The martial arts are no different from any other walk of life; you will get ‘bad eggs’ and sometimes these individuals are very skilled at concealing undesirable traits and actions, but how long they are able to do so and how much responsibility they are given also says something about the culture of their parent organisation.

Students pay for the training and knowledge instructors provide. That information is already in the public domain, across multiple martial arts styles and in multiple publications. The information is rather like food; all teachers, texts and styles do is create interesting menus and dietary plans and recipes of dishes, they are not bio-engineering new crops or inventing new cooking methods and their organisations cannot trademark their techniques or knowledge because it isn’t new. Non-disclosure or non-competition agreements have no validity given that the techniques and information that are passed on can already be learned elsewhere. There is nothing new under the sun in thousands of years of human violence. The only thing that can be trademarked are logos and any in-house teaching terminology devised to describe pre-existing (and often common) concepts.

So how do you retain students if they are able to train with whoever they want? The simple answer is you make your club or organisation a place where people want to train.

There are many different reasons why individuals may take up a martial art, and their interests and aims may change over the time they train, but there some aspects that encourage people to stay that I think unite most:

  • good quality instruction in good quality material
  • a welcoming and supportive training environment
  • opportunities to progress
  • to get fitter, stronger and faster and be pushed but also to enjoy the training
  • good value for money
  • safe and hygienic practices
  • feeling valued and respected

These are not unreasonable expectations. It’s also not unreasonable for you to raise concerns about how you or anyone else are treated.

It is unreasonable to be told with whom you can or cannot train with in your own personal time. It’s okay for a supermarket to say that you can only use their rewards card to get discounts off their items, it’s not acceptable for them to attempt to forbid you from shopping elsewhere, from holding multiple reward cards, or to track your social media to see if you are shopping elsewhere.

Wherever I train I look first and foremost for the top item on the list above, but if the other items aren’t met then I wouldn’t stay. There is a world of amazing instructors out there that meet all those requirements. Find them and enjoy your martial arts journey.

Spinning Plates

That was really hard!

That phrase, sometimes combined with an expletive, is usually the first thing one of my team says to me after I’ve asked them to teach a full lesson for the first time. Sometimes I’ve given them the chance to plan in advance, on other occasions they’ve just had a moment to look at the group dynamics and ‘go’.

A planned lesson is something I ask all potential Dan grades to do before I’ll put them forward to attempt the physical exam. On other occasions I might ask it because I believe the challenge of teaching will improve their technical ability and understanding. No-one gets thrown in the deep end without some experience; they’ll all have had to teach or supervise some element with a small group within the main class on a number of occasions.

I choose not to teach using line work.

I teach fundamental techniques against pads or partners in armour. For thin-air refinement of stepping, turning and techniques I use Kata. In addition to Kata and pad work Kihon is further reinforced and assessed through static, dynamic and alive Kumite which is taken directly from the Kata I teach. To do this I try to limit how much time I spend in class on ‘solo kata’ because I believe that when you have training partners you should be using them. Solo Kata in class is the teaching and assessment of a training method that I expect Karateka to be working on in their own time.

Students won’t always explain stuff the same way as you…

One of the consequences of teaching without line work is that there are always a lot of different activities taking place. Sometimes everyone is doing pad work or doing sparring at the same time, but due to the kit involved and the broad student age and grade range, no-one is ever going to be doing the same thing or working at the same level. We correct general points before and after a section of class, but in most lessons every student will get individual coaching feedback of some kind. The result of this is that while an instructor might not be training, they are constantly moving round the class talking to participants and demonstrating. It is physically and mentally demanding and an eye-opening experience for those doing it for the first time. They don’t realise how busy the instructor is.

Videoing coaching can help reinforce feedback.

Not everyone likes to teach or train this way. Some people prefer everyone in class to be doing the same thing or at least moving to the same count. That does make life easier for the instructor, it might also help those on the autistic spectrum. Personally, I have always felt that enabling students to set their own pace and explore their own options for the majority of the class allows for better learning opportunities. I was first exposed to this method in the years I trained regularly in Aikido and I chose to drop line work in my classes within a year of developing the Heian Flow System (now Pinan Flow System) in 2004. I don’t use line work in my Shotokan or DART classes.

Students can learn a great deal coaching under supervision.

One thing I do use is the instructor potential of my students. Is a 3rd kyu or 5th kyu going to instruct something as well as the Dan grade supervising them? No. I don’t expect them to. Are they likely to cover enough of the foundations of a drill or combination to enable a grade below them? Yes. If they weren’t they would not have been awarded that higher grade. Teaching may not be for everyone, and it’s certainly not something I’d expect anyone to do all the time, but it does show both student and instructor the scope of their technical knowledge. That is invaluable introspection. The junior grade receiving the instruction is not likely to take away any ‘more’ at their level from teaching by a senior instructor, developmental repetitions are more important than continuous coaching interventions, but the intermediate grade will benefit tremendously from having to teach. That creates a positive development loop.

Whatever the teaching subject area, kumite, kata, or kihon, any student can teach a pair or a few pairs with supervision from one or more Dan grades. You don’t have to change the training method, you can still use line work, you just split up the class into as many or few groups as you choose, for as much or as little of the class as you want, and supervise.

So, if you don’t do it already, perhaps it is time to get your students to spin a few plates.