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 refin­ing my approach.

In this arti­cle, I’m going to give a brief out­line of my cur­rent approach to teach­ing new adult stu­dents in Taido.

First Lesson with a New Student

A few days ago, a new stu­dent came to our dojo. She’s a rel­a­tively fit-looking 30-something with no mar­tial arts experience.

The Diagnostic Warm-Up

The prac­tice started off with the usual warm-up rou­tine and went into some unsoku and basics. I stayed with the new girl and helped her as she fol­lowed along. I showed her the basic foot­work for So, In, Ka, and Gen. Then I gave her point­ers on try­ing the kihongi and broke down dif­fi­cult moves into steps. Nothing out of the ordi­nary, but all this time, I was watch­ing her move­ments, breath­ing, and facial expres­sions to eval­u­ate her abil­i­ties and needs. All of this took about ten minutes.

Where To Begin

Now, I could have done a lot of dif­fer­ent things at this point. Many instruc­tors in Japan will start new stu­dents with unsoku. I think that’s a good way to con­fuse peo­ple. Most stu­dents already know how to walk, and they tend to think unsoku looks like walk­ing in a pat­tern. Of course, we know that unsoku is spe­cial and impor­tant, but the first les­son is not the time to sell a stu­dent on that idea. First, we need to sell them on join­ing our class.

Kamae is another pop­u­lar start­ing point. It’s very impor­tant, but really bor­ing. Everyone will have plenty of time to prac­tice kamae. We don’t need to drive it into the ground on the first night.

So what did I start with? Hokei.

I took senin as my basis to teach the her fun­da­men­tals of kamae and sengi. If she joins the class, she’ll be work­ing on senin for a few months while she also learns unsoku and gets com­fort­able with kamae and the kihongi. Hokei includes all the basic ele­ments of Taido train­ing, and it has a flow to it that pre­vents bore­dom from repetition.

I know teach­ing a hokei may seem like an odd place to start for a new stu­dent, but I think it’s a really good way to let the stu­dent get an idea of what Taido prac­tice entails. It also lets me test out their abil­i­ties in terms of phys­i­cal skill and men­tal flexibility.

We can focus in on some details and leave oth­ers fuzzy. We can drill one or two parts or work the whole rou­tine. We can work on fun­da­men­tals like bal­ance, line, eye direc­tion, kamae, and breath­ing. There are a lot of options.

Why Not Start From the Basics?

My teacher always started new stu­dents with punches from fudo­dachi. The idea was to mas­ter the most basic tech­nique first. When I started teach­ing on my own, I found that every­one already thinks they know how to punch. People join mar­tial arts classes to learn how to kick, so I started off with maegeri. Same basic prin­ci­ple. I still believe that teach­ing form the basics is important.

But I now use a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of “basic.”

What is "Basic"?

When most instruc­tors talk about basics, they mean basic tech­niques — punches, straight kicks, stances. To me, the basics of mar­tial art are fun­da­men­tal to tech­nique; they’re the prin­ci­ples and abil­i­ties on which good tech­nique rests. Balance, body mechan­ics, pos­ture, tim­ing, spa­tial aware­ness. These are the true basics which stu­dents need to mas­ter in order to be effec­tive and efficient.

You can teach these basics from almost any tech­ni­cal start­ing point, but you have to teach them. Many instruc­tors seem to assume that stu­dents will learn these things mag­i­cally if they just do enough rep­e­ti­tions of the tech­niques and hokei. However, a quick look at all but the few “tal­ented” stu­dents reveals that this doesn’t hap­pen. Indeed many black belts in Taido have ter­ri­ble fun­da­men­tals; I know quite a few who can do bakuchu but can’t kick hard at all. I know even more who rotate on their heels in sentai.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not claim­ing that I exem­plify mas­tery of these fun­da­men­tals. In fact, one of the rea­sons I insist on teach­ing them explic­itly is that my own teach­ers gave me very lit­tle prac­ti­cal instruc­tion in them. Sure, some­times they would say “watch your bal­ance,” but they very rarely gave me any advice about how to develop that.

Most black belts find them­selves telling stu­dents to “punch harder.” When was the last time you saw some­one explain­ing pre­cisely to a stu­dent how this is done?

Hokei is Basic

The thing about teach­ing basics that they require a lot of time to mas­ter and pol­ish. If you begin by teach­ing straight punches, your stu­dents will get bored long before they begin to improve their body dynam­ics. Of course, you also lower the stan­dard of per­for­mance and allow stu­dents to move on to the next tech­nique with­out refin­ing the first. This keeps stu­dents inter­ested, but teaches them lit­tle more than mimicry.

Hokei includes all the fun­da­men­tal qual­i­ties of mar­tial art. It includes every aspect of Taido: kamae, unsoku, tech­nique, breath­ing, line… It’s all in there.

It’s easy to tell stu­dents that we have five kinds of tech­niques and unsoku and unshin and etc., but that doesn’t make sense to peo­ple who haven’t already invested some time with Taido. I want new peo­ple to begin devel­op­ing a feel for Taido ASAP. Hokei is the most effi­cient way to give that to new students.

How to Teach Hokei to Beginners

Here’s a run-down of how I approached teach­ing senin no hokei to the new stu­dent a few nights ago.

The Overview

First, we walked through the entire rou­tine together a cou­ple of times with me giv­ing very lit­tle tech­ni­cal detail. I had already deter­mined that she could imi­tate my move­ments with­out too much trou­ble. Her bal­ance was good enough to do sen­tai with­out falling over. She wasn’t so out of shape that a hokei would chal­lenge her endurance at walk-through pace.

Kamae

She man­aged to keep up well enough, so we went to the next level. I showed her how to do gedan kamae prop­erly from seiza. Only one side is nec­es­sary for the hokei, so that’s all we prac­ticed. I cor­rected her hands and back foot posi­tion while she mem­o­rized the move­ment. After five or six times, we did the hokei again. This time, I pointed out every gedan and eji­dachi and we cor­rected each one. I gave slightly more detail on the foot and hip posi­tion as we went along and con­tin­u­ally reminded her about her back foot and pulled-back punch.

Then we did the same thing with chu­dan kamae. This time, we did both sides. I didn’t get too detailed about the posi­tion­ing of the lower body. Instead, I focused on get­ting her hands in the right place. The hands are the most con­fus­ing for new stu­dents and also the eas­i­est to fix. Everything from the waist down will take months to mas­ter, so I just let it go for now.

Evaluation

Walking through the hokei again, we cor­rected each kamae as we came to it. By this time, she was show­ing signs of start­ing to mem­o­rize the rou­tine, so I stopped mov­ing with her and switched to ver­bal instruc­tion so I could watch her bet­ter. I looked mostly at her eye move­ments and places where she held her breath. Of course, I was also check­ing her over­all move­ment, but she was start­ing to get the hang of it..

Course Correction

The mis­take a lot of new stu­dents make on sen­tai is step­ping the wrong direc­tion — to the front side of the body instead of behind. I began to stand close to her while cor­rect­ing her kamae, so when she stepped into the sengi, she had no choice but to step behind. She inter­nal­ized that habit and didn’t make any more mis­takes on that.

Ebigeri was the other big chal­lenge. Like a lot of new stu­dents, she would try to kick with the front leg. I broke the move­ment down: turn, kick with the foot you are look­ing at, step back, and turn again. Since ebigeri isn’t the most impor­tant part of this hokei, I didn’t take it out of the rou­tine. I just slowed her down a bit when it was time for the ebi. After a few tries, she got this too.

Adding Details

Finally, we came to tech­nique. Up until this point, we were just step­ping and spin­ning as we went through the hokei. I wanted her to work on a proper sen­tai, but doing too much sengi on the first night can be a good way to make sure stu­dents never come back. Sentai kills your thighs, and peo­ple don’t like being too sore to walk. I don’t want new stu­dents to think that Taido is too hard for them, so I avoid torch­ing their muscles.

We had already gone through the rou­tine sev­eral times, and I could tell that she wanted to make her sen­tai cor­rect. We didn’t have a lot of time left, so I wasn’t wor­ried about doing too many rep­e­ti­tions. I reviewed gen­dan (this time both sides) and chu­dan kamae again for a cou­ple of min­utes, and then we went on to senin nukite — the main tech­nique of senin no hokei.

I broke down the steps with the front hand lead­ing the eyes and step. From there, I con­nected the head turn with the sec­ond nukite. These two joined in the turn. Then the front hand again strikes to the front. Very sim­ple, 1 – 2-3 expla­na­tion — it’s all that was required.

Bringing It All Together

In the last few min­utes, we put those tech­ni­cal details back into the rou­tine. I let her try to work from mem­ory as much as pos­si­ble and gave her reminders when she needed them. As she did the tech­niques, I con­tin­ued to give her point­ers and cor­rect any mistakes.

By the end of an hour, a first-time stu­dent was doing a not-bad senin hokei with very lit­tle help from me. Not bad.

This last run through the hokei served to inte­grate all the details she had learned into a cohe­sive whole. What’s more, she could see how all the things she had prac­ticed that night worked together in syn­ergy. That syn­ergy is Taido.

But What if She Forgets the Whole Thing?

I couldn’t care less if this stu­dent comes back in a cou­ple of weeks and can’t remem­ber the hokei. She will remem­ber the habits I ingrained in her move­ment. She will learn the tech­niques and hokei again quickly and eas­ily next time. She’ll be able to join in the warm-up and prac­tice with­out feel­ing con­fused about why she’s doing what she’s doing. In short, she’ll be ready to learn Taido faster and bet­ter than if I had just made her do a hun­dred punches or kicks or lots of unsoku or kamae.

The Only Best Way

This method proved suc­cess­ful in this instance (and in oth­ers), but it might not be the best way to teach every stu­dent. The eval­u­a­tion process is maybe the most impor­tant part of mak­ing this style of instruc­tion work — if you don’t watch the stu­dent closely and tai­lor your feed­back to their per­sonal needs, they won’t get nearly as much out of it. It will be like telling to mem­o­rize some long rou­tine they don’t understand.

Providing con­text is extremely impor­tant to mak­ing sure the stu­dents grasps the con­tent. The con­tent is the tech­nique or rou­tine being prac­tice. In this case, the con­text is the basics — the fun­da­men­tals that make Taido work.

There’s no one best way to teach every stu­dent, but the most suc­cess­ful meth­ods will focus on pro­vid­ing con­text to the indi­vid­ual move­ments from the first lesson.