Tag Archive: teaching Taido

How I Teach Beginners

“I’m a pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tor.” That’s what teach­ers say when they want to sound like experts. I don’t know if I’m really an expert  —  there are a lot of vari­ables involved depend­ing on how you define the roles of teacher, instruc­tor, and coach. I’ve played each role in a vari­ety of aca­d­e­mic and sports envi­ron­ments, and I’m always learn­ing and…

Technique and Principle

Most mar­tial arts (of which I am aware) are essen­tially technique-based. By this, I mean that they were syn­the­sized from groups of exist­ing move­ments. Demonstration: Many mar­tial arts use the exact same mechan­ics for deploy­ing a front kick. It would be ridicu­lous to assume that each art’s cre­ator inde­pen­dently designed a kick that looks exactly like every other front…

How to Fly

Fact: Taido uses lots of jumps. If you want to be able to take full advan­tage of Taido’s unshin, tengi, and ungi, you will need to have plenty of jump­ing skill at your dis­posal. This arti­cle is about build­ing these skills. Before I get into my rec­om­men­da­tions for improv­ing your jump, I want to make a brief disclaimer…

Taido's 5 Simple Rules

The gojokun (or five guid­ing prin­ci­ples) is the set of state­ments that forms the heart of Taido ‘s phi­los­o­phy. Since it is pre­scrip­tive rather than descrip­tive, the gojokun acts as a sort of mis­sion state­ment for Taido. Though it gives us a few ideals to shoot for, it doesn’t offer much in the way of prac­ti­cal guidance.…

How to Practice

there is an out­lined method for prac­tic­ing taido move­ments. i have also spent a good deal of time research­ing var­i­ous train­ing and prac­tice meth­ods as well as gen­eral edu­ca­tional the­ory. using the stan­dard method as a frame­work, i have made addi­tions and adjust­ments that i think are applic­a­ble to most skill acqui­si­tion sce­nar­ios we are likely to encounter in taido practice.