How Instructors Improve their Martial Arts Abilities!
One of the most shocking things in the martial arts is how instructors let themselves go. By this I mean, after they reach a certain point, they never get any more instruction for themselves. The idea here is that you know everything, and all you have to do now is polish it, perfect it, and time will be your teacher.
This concept, of course, is ridiculous. Yes, time will make a person better, but what will improve a person faster is getting more data. Imagine a computer which never inputs any further data and my case becomes obvious.
So you need more data if you are going to get better, and you need to make mental connections with other arts. For instance, if you’ve got a black belt in Karate, a course in Aikido is going to open your mind up. At the end of every karate technique, once you understand what Aikido really is, you can make additional techniques.
And, if you’ve got some good hard Kung Fu, the next step is exploring the internal schools of Kung fu. Aside from improving your understanding of the martial arts, you now have more to offer students and prospective students. This is going to result in better quality of instruction, and it’s going to be a lot of fun besides.
Now, let’s say you don’t have access to an aikido school, or a Wudan school, what do you do? Well, you read the magazines and the books, and this goes a long way. But the real key to improvement is in DVD courses.
You can pick up a course on an entire art, sometimes for as little as ten bucks a DVD, and you can lay on your couch and get up and practice to your hearts content. I used to buy so many arts at my supply store the owner gave me an automatic, good customer, ten per cent discount. And I would spend my late evenings and weekends analyzing and dissecting new arts until I had them totally cold.
When I walked into my kung fu school on a Monday morning, I always had a kettle full of great ideas. Students were always wondering how I cam up with so many great ideas, and they were always blown out by the twists and interpretations I could give the same old same old forms and techniques. I tell ya, when people were bowing to me, they were bowing to superior knowledge by disk, and that can happen to any instructor!
Now, when you pick out an instructional Martial Arts DVD, make sure it deals with an entire art, and not just an overview, an overview is nothing more than an advertisement, there is rarely any meat to this kind of DVD. And, make sure you pick up a new DVD every month, you need to make a project out of this, and not a whim. Martial Arts DVDs are one of the best ways to learn that I know of, I tell you, if you are an instructor, it is imperative that you keep improving yourself, and DVDs are the best and most fun way to do that.
Al Case has studied more than 21 Fighting Disciplines in depth. He has packaged these arts in intense DVD courses such as the Evolution of Art course and Butterfly Pa Kua Chang. Drop by Monster Martial Arts for a sample and a free ebook.