Michele over at Just a Thought has kind of started a meme with a recent post about whether black belts need to teach.  A number of other blogs have chimed in a bit.

It has always been the policy at our dojang that the adult and older teen black belts help out in some way with teaching.  The beginner and intermediate classes are normally broken down into smaller groups after the entire class bows in and warms up together.  The advanced classes aren’t usually subdivided.  Each class has a primary instructor who is responsible for the planning of the class and either running it or delegating all or part of it to other instructors.  The primary instructor breaks down the class into groups and gives the group instructor their plan for the class.

It is a system that works well for us.  Prior our Grandmaster passing away, the Primary’s duties more often just involved running the warmup and then the Grandmaster would break down the class and create the plan for the day.  So perhaps now we’re less connected class-to-class; I’m not always sure what the other instructors have worked on recently, so I’m creating my plans a bit in isolation.  But quality has still remained high, so I know we’re doing lots of things right.

Back to the original point — all adults and near-adults are expected to help out either as a Primary or as an assistant instructor.  And I think that is a very important thing for black belts to do.  As a student, you are focusing on your own training.  Hopefully you are also paying attention to what others are doing, right or wrong.  But the process of teaching others really crystallizes your understanding of what you are doing.

In my mind, a black belt is defined by what they know, not necessarily how proficient they are at doing things themselves.  I’ve trained with too many black belts that I respect but have physical limitations to equate being able to beat people up with being a good martial artist.  To me, progressing in knowledge requires teaching at the black belt level.  Yes, there are still plenty of new things to learn at that point, but teaching helps give a much deeper understanding of what you are doing and why than you can get as just a student.  I can’t even count the number of times I’ve felt confident of my knowledge but then realize when I’m teaching that I’m actually confused by something.

So, I’d have to agree that in a traditional martial arts setting that teaching should be required.

I’ve been thinking about what I’m up to in this blog.  When I first thought about having a martial arts-only blog, I thought it’d be great to have a place to share my martial arts thoughts.  But here’s the thing — I’m an introvert, and we introverts can just sit back and think our thoughts and not really feel a need to share them.  I’ve thought about plenty of things I haven’t put on here, which is kind of a shame in a way.  And Wife of State knows that language doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me: when I’m not taciturn, I’m usually laconic.

But that brings up another point: I’m lazy.  My martial arts aren’t lazy, but I am.  One of the goals of martial arts is to use the lesson one learns in the context of the dojang and to apply them to the rest of one’s life.  Well, if so, I’m not there yet.  If I can put things off, I do.  I’ve had things on my to-do list for years.  And I very rarely say to myself: Ooh, what I want to do now is write in my blog.  If I’m not working or at the dojang or otherwise working out, I’m playing computer games, or watching TV shows on the DVR or DVD, or reading books, or one of several other things.

Anyhow, for the next couple of months, I’m going to change up what I’m writing about.  In aggregate, whether I went jogging or lifted weights over the weekend isn’t interesting, and I’m not a fitness professional to turn it into a fitness blogs.  There are several blogs I read that can make class recaps interesting (Steve’s BJJ Blog comes to mind); I don’t have the patience for that.  I’m also not Black Belt Mama who can even make posts about her personal life interesting.  I don’t have the technical expertise of a Wim Demeere or a Patrick Parker. 

I believe that what I should be focusing on are “hot button” items that come up in teaching or in training.  Things that really strike a chord with me for some reason or another.  We’ll see how that goes.  I might be posting less frequently (though, really, is that possible?), but hopefully I’ll actually come up with some worthwhile posts along the way.

I’ve had a tough few days dealing with this.

Today was my first full PT appointment.  I worked isometrics, and also some resistance band exercises working the triceps.  There were a few other arm stabilization drills, such as a “tripod” drill where I was on my knees and my left (bad side) hand.  From there, the other arm moves around the body, and the bad arm gets to work on stabilization without going through a range of motion.  The therapist did some manual stretching and stabilization exercises as well.

I’m actually having to hold myself back from going full-bore in workouts, because the shoulder feels so good.  I may have overworked it slightly tonight at TKD, but it is still feeling good.  Since I hurt this shoulder just about the same time the other shoulder was healing up from the Lyme disease nerve damage, I haven’t had a fully functional set of shoulders since September of 2007.  And my shoulders probably feel as good right now as they have at any point in the last year and a half.

The shoulder was sore today after having done the Kali exercises Tuesday night.  It is feeling pretty good (though tired) right now.

As a bonus, the following is a fairly short video of the Palasut drill I mentioned several times.  There are a couple of differences between how they do it and how we do it, but this gives a pretty good idea of it.

When we broke down into sparring, we had half a dozen rings set up and run by black belts.  I was running one of the rings, so I could choose the participants for my ring, as well as choosing people to spar against me.  As a minor digression, there is a variety of sparring styles even within Tae Kwon Do.  Olympic-style sparring looks like the following highlight video:

As an artifact of the rules, punches are basically eliminated, and combatants drop their hands to their waists.  Frankly, I’m not a fan of that type of sparring.  In my dojang, our hands are up, and we approach it a lot more like kickboxing; punches are an integral part of sparring, and dropping your hands means that you’ll get punched in the noggin.  Not that it wouldn’t be cool to do some of the things that the fighters in the video can do, but I’d rather not work on sparring in a way that’ll get my head taken off in a more serious encounter.

Back to today’s class, I started out light by sparring against a college-aged female black belt who is probably literally about half my weight.  She’s good and quick, but the length of my limbs (and bulk) give me a good advantage.  And I knew she wouldn’t hurt me.  So, I sparred with my right lead, ending up using primarily jabbing techniques.  Turning my hips over for a left leg kicks left my bad side too exposed.  Next up I sparred against a larger blue belt, probably 6’1″ and 250 pounds.  He’s got quick hands and a quick inside-out arc kick, but isn’t very quick with his movement.  That match went fine for me, as did my final match against another black belt (who is a bit lacking in speed and flexibility).  I worked him hard enough that he was gasping for breath.

All in all, I was pleased.  My endurance still seems to be there, and I was able to toss in a couple one-handed fingertip pushups as well.  I got an opportunity to try out one-handed sparring, which was new and fun.

That was Saturday class; I was less pleased after Thursday night.  I hadn’t planned on going in, but my instructor called me up and asked if I could come by to help teach, since he was short of instructors.  I agreed, and helped teach both a beginner kids class and a beginner adult class.  The adult class was fine, I worked with three yellow belts on back, back side, jump back, jump back side, back hook kicks, back step arc kicks, and a couple of others.  But the kids class is still bothering me a bit.  I was tasked with working with a young (maybe 6?) white belt who hadn’t been to many classes.  He was not the most coordinated kid, but I thought I was doing okay with him for most of the class.  At one point we were working on punches and he told me that he didn’t want to do that any more.  I told him that he didn’t make those decisions, and kept him at punching drills a while longer.  That was around half an hour into the 45 minute class.  We switched back over to kicks for the last 7-8 minutes, and he eventually had a meltdown of the stubborn variety.  Fortunately for both of us, that was right at the end of class.  At the end, the head instructor for that class asked him if I worked him too hard, to which he replied “Yes”.  And I guess I probably did work him beyond what he wanted to do.  Had the class been 10 minutes shorter, I think it would have been fine.  But I’m left with the realization that a newer student ended up leaving class unhappy and most likely not looking forward to his next class.  His father trained briefly in the adult class a couple of years ago (and knew me), so he can probably convince the kid to come back to next class, and hopefully a different instructor will do a better job with him than I did.

I ran the warmups for the beginner TKD tonight.  There were 17 there tonight, which is a pretty large showing.  We had some of the blue folding mats out, so I used those as the base of a different kicking surface.  Some calisthenics, punches, then spent a decent amount of time isolating some of the basic kicks.  Some of the white belts still want to drop their hands when they kick, so that was one of the points of emphasis.  Once we broke down into smaller groups, we worked on poomsae and one-step sparring.  It was a productive class.  And afterwards, as part of my normal Tuesday routine, I hit Kali sticks for a little bit.

In any event, this is a martial arts blog.  Check out my short About section to get an idea of my background.  I myself subscribe to several dozen martial arts blogs, and am fascinated with the different approaches I read about.  So herein will contain my approach to training, and thoughts, triumphs, and failures as I travel along my own path.  Hope you find it interesting.