Taido Training Tips

You Need Reminders

It hap­pens to the best of us: we get caught up in the process of going to the dojo, putting on our uni­forms, warm­ing up, prac­tic­ing tech­niques, etc. We get lost in the rit­ual of train­ing and the time flies by. Unless we make a con­certed effort, it can be dif­fi­cult to focus on the fun­da­men­tal skills and habits that make every­thing else work.

Just a Quick Fix

You’re in the mid­dle of a ses­sion, putting every­thing you’ve got into mas­ter­ing a tech­nique, or maybe a hokei. Perhaps, some­body will remind you to pay atten­tion to your breath­ing, and you’ll think “Of course, I know that.” And you do know, but you weren’t think­ing about it until some­body reminded you. We all need reminders, and we need them, by def­i­n­i­tion, when we’re not think­ing about ask­ing for them.

Training tips are use­ful reminders about ideas or tech­niques that are often for­got­ten or over­looked dur­ing train­ing. Here’s a good one:

Mindful prac­tice will improve your skills much more quickly than would mind­less prac­tice. I sug­gest you keep a small note­book you can carry in your gym bag. Making notes of your own obser­va­tions will help tremen­dously. Just take a few sec­onds to remem­ber your goals before prac­tice and a cou­ple of min­utes to write down your thoughts afterward.

You’ll find that this sim­ple habit can increase your aware­ness and accel­er­ate your progress dra­mat­i­cally. Really.

The Plan

I used to offer an email coach­ing pro­gram con­sist­ing of one such reminder every one or two weeks for you to think about dur­ing your nor­mal practice.Several peo­ple told me they got a lot out of fol­low­ing them, so I’ve decided to forgo the email deliv­ery sys­tem and just post them here on the site. It just seems like a much sim­pler way to do things.

I’ll begin by post­ing the orig­i­nal ten+ tips I had been send­ing out via email. They’re still really use­ful, and I think you can get a lot out of putting them to work in your train­ing — even if you already fol­lowed along once before.

Once all the pre­vi­ous tips have been pub­lished, I’ll begin adding fresh ones that I had planned but never got around to send­ing to the email list (sorry…).

What To Expect

The tips them­selves will usu­ally be very sim­ple — all you have to do is remem­ber to pay atten­tion while you go about your usual train­ing. The goal is to build good habits for practice.

Nothing I’ll present in this series is meant to change the way you think about life. They are just quick sug­ges­tions that can improve your Taido prac­tice. They’re not new or sexy, but if you can focus on each one for a week’s worth of train­ing, I promise you’ll see progress. The best part is, fol­low­ing these tips will make your train­ing more effec­tive whether you’ve a begin­ner or a vet­eran, because they help you develop the most basic and impor­tant skills in any dis­ci­pline: self-awareness and con­sis­tent action.

Lots of peo­ple use this site as a resource for learn­ing tech­ni­cal details and Taido the­ory. I think that’s spec­tac­u­larly good, but there’s more to Taido than mem­o­riz­ing the gojo­jun and watch­ing videos of hokei from some tour­na­ment five years ago.

Bringing greater atten­tion to your own learn­ing process and think­ing actively about your train­ing will pay of big time for your skills and under­stand­ing. Be on the lookout.