Step into many dojos today and you’ll see students moving through kata and floor drills with a kind of casual rhythm. Their stances are loose, their strikes lack conviction, and their eyes drift as if the mind is somewhere else. The movements are performed, but the spirit is absent. This is not how martial arts…
Tag: Teaching
Reflections on Aging in the Martial Arts
I turned 56 yesterday. That number feels different than the ones before it. Not heavier, but more textured. It carries decades of sweat, bruises, blood, breakthroughs, and quiet moments of clarity. It reminds me that I’ve spent most of my life in the martial arts and that the path I walk today looks different than…
When Injury Takes a Toll
Through the years I have had many setbacks in training. I suffered some pretty serious damage to my knee in my early teens. This single injury resulted in several more injuries through the course of my life, and today I have what I call a bad knee, and a worse knee. Of course, the knee…
Teaching Martial Arts: A Positive Classroom
We all have to be mindful of our interactions with our students. As I have said in the past, it is easy to catch people, kids especially, doing things wrong. There is no special skill or training needed to do this. The real challenge lies in catching them doing things right, and finding ways to…
Wallace Smedley 