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Voice of the Fox
The Newsletter of the Martial Arts Training Service

Teaching Martial Arts
by John R. Gussman
Summer 1998

I have been teaching martial arts since 1968, and I find the experience to be unique and rewarding. I’ve seen many types of students, and the one thing they all have in common is that each one is different from the others.

Students come to the dojo with varying degrees of physical skills, different interests and different levels of martial arts knowledge. They sometimes have predetermined ideas of what they know—or what they think they know. The challenge for the instructor is to mold these ideas to conform to the way he or she teaches, and to overcome the students’ prejudgments and fears.

Fear of falling

Students who have no previous martial arts training are often the easiest to create trust with, because they want to believe their new instructor. If they are older, however, they may have fears of falling after years of being told that if they fell they would get hurt. Even when Maureen and I stand in front of them and say, “Fall like this and it doesn’t hurt,” some students find it very difficult to believe. Maureen and I believe this is why we have such a high student turnover.

One of the hardest parts of our system is learning how to fall. Most of the time this learning is mentally hard, not physically hard. This translates to body control, an understanding of where your body is in the air and how to make your body land in the correct position so that you avoid injury.

We believe that this control is one of the most important skills in martial arts, because if you fall and can’t continue, the struggle is over. If you avoid injury, you can continue in a tournament or in a street fight.

We feel that many students discontinue practice because they don’t understand why they need to learn how to fall, and find it boring. “Just show me the good stuff,” they tell us.

“I can fall!”

But just being able to hit the ground is not the essence of what we do. Some students coming in with experience from other martial arts say, “I can fall. I’m a black belt and we fall down.”

So Maureen and I call over one of our experienced students to demonstrate, and we ask, “Can you fall like that?” If the prospective student gets it, they say, “No, not exactly.” If they don’t get it, they say, “Sure, I can fall.” But when they sign up, we find they can’t fall -- or maybe they don’t sign up.

As instructors, we’re faced with changing the new student’s previous teachings and telling them that they need to relax and relearn the same things they were taught by someone they trusted.

Win the fight and go home

Our goal is to produce a good martial artist, not a judo or karate or ultimate fighting champion. If a student truly wants to become a good martial artist, we will help them try to realize their goals. But as most of you know, the good martial artist is the one who can win the fight on the street and be able to go home for dinner. It’s okay to win medals, but medals don’t make you a better martial artist, just as losing a match after doing your best doesn’t diminish you.

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