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 martial arts
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…
The Useful Fiction
In looking at the many and varied approaches to self-protection out there, I did what is becoming ever more uncommon. I started thinking. There are a widely separated set of world views to choose from. But at the base, we see the world in the way that best suits our needs at the moment. Our world…
Overlooked Self-Defense Elements 6: Physical Skills
This is part six of a series of articles where I look at the elements needed for a self-defense or self-protection course to be of real use. In a previous article I listed the required elements as follows: Awareness Avoidance Pre fight indicators (pre-fight rituals) De-escalation Adrenaline effects And last, actual physical skills Physical Skills…
To McDojo, or not to McDojo? THAT is the question.
I often joke that “if I had it all to do over again, I’d open a McDojo.” The truth is not really all that far from the statement. See, for years I took an almost masochistic pride in NOT being successful in my commercial schools. I taught, and made little to no money for it,…
A Better Approach to Teaching Martial Arts
This post is in response to an email from an instructor wishing to know more about how teachers teach. Working in a public school, I have had the chance to study up close the methods used by some very effective teachers, and apply what I learn from them in my own classes. This is just…
New Book
Within the next week or so, my latest book will be available. This one, titled “Kick it to the Next Level, Improve your martial arts instruction without selling out” is not about Hung Gar specifically, but is a collection of articles on teaching martial arts. I will post the link once it is available!
Wallace Smedley 