skribs
Grandmaster
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2013
- Messages
- 7,504
- Reaction score
- 2,532
This post is just kind of to help me flesh out my thoughts on learning techniques in martial arts, based on my experience as an instructor in Taekwondo and a student in Hakpido. I'm going to look at different stages of learning, but some of the later stages will not necessarily come in order.
But first, some general principles regarding learning techinques:
Phase 1: Form
Form is the first level of learning a technique. Form is done either without a partner or with a completely compliant partner. In fact, if your partner is more advanced than you, then at this stage they should even lead you in what you're supposed to do (for example, if you're supposed to throw them, they should have you grab them, and then fall where you're supposed to throw them).
At this point, you're not learning how to fight with a technique. You're simply learning how to do it. Part of that is reinforcing the idea of cause and effect - when you do this technique, this is the effect it should have.
If your training ends here, it's obviously very bad, as you will eventually need feedback on how to improve the technique. But your training should start here, as without this stage you will be in way over your head.
Phase 2: Drills
The next level is to drill a technique. Drills should progressively provide more and more feedback. The idea here is to build muscle memory and neural pathways. In doing drills, the student should do the same thing every time, but get faster and more precise with each repetition. The partner should be progressively increasing the level of resistance to a technique, but should still follow the script of the drill.
Let's take Hapkido as an example. Now, I'm going to butcher the names of these holds because we basically go by numbers at my school, but let's take a cross-arm grab as an example. One technique we have would be to bring our hand out and towards their ear, and then transition into a supinating wristlock. Another technique would be to circle our hand across our body and transition to an armbar. If they stiffen their arm to prevent Option 1, then we take Option 2. If they press their elbow in to prevent Option 2, we take Option 3, which is to transition to a Figure 4.
But if I want to work on my techniques for Option 1, then constantly preventing me from doing that (but opening up another option) isn't going to help. Also, simply locking your arm for any movement, but not trying to advance your position, is setting me up for failure in my drill in an unrealistic scenario. So that fails on both realism and training. Failure drills and sparring will come later. Right now, the goal is to learn how to properly apply this technique.
However, if the student completely fails at doing the technique properly, then it is perfectly acceptable for the partner to just stand there and wait for something to happen, to politely mock the student (one guy at my school will pick his teeth while waiting for you to get a submission hold right), or to use the student's failed leverage against them and send them sprawling with a nice little hip check. Of course you have to have a good sense of humor for some of these to be appropriate, but the point is that while in the first phase you make the student succeed, and in the later phases you try and make them fail, in Phase 2, you allow them to succeed or fail.
Drills are how you get the muscle memory you learned in the Form phase and get it correct at speed in order to advance.
Phase 3: Failure Drills
Failure drills start off scripted, but go off-script as you fail, or as your partner prevents you from being successful. It is at this stage that you start doing the things I listed as no-no's in Phase 2. You prevent them from doing what they want to do, so they have to learn how to adapt to failure.
Where before they were either learning enough techniques to DO a failure drill, or they were working on a new technique in particular, now they have enough that they can transition into something else. Or, in the case of striking, if they miss or get countered, then how can they still protect themselves and/or follow up with another strike in the combo?
Alternatively, reset, and see what you can do different to lead in. Your back kicks keep getting dodged? Set it up with a roundhouse, or use motions to mask it. Your reverse punch isn't landing? Use the jab to set it up, or use the threat of a kick to get their eyes off your strong hand.
Failure drills are still drills...but they're the lead from drills to sparring. They're generally skipped over in striking, I think, and that's not a bad thing, but they can still be used. They're very important in grappling, from my experience.
Advanced Phase: Symmetrical Sparring
Ok, so white belts do sparring. It may not be "advanced" in terms of what belt, but this is one of the top levels of working on techniques - putting it into application. Symmetrical sparring is any sparring in which both people are free to initiate combat. If your instructor has you partner up and spar for 1 minute, that's symmetrical sparring. Competitive martial sports, like olympic-rules Taekwondo, boxing, MMA, wrestling, Judo, are all symmetrical sparring.
In this type of sparring, your goal is to apply what you have learned, but to do so without compromising your defenses. Instead of your partner creating scenarios for you to defend and counter, now you have to deal with your partner ALSO trying the techniques against you.
Advanced Phase: Asymmetrical Sparring
Asymmetrical sparring is somewhere between symmetrical sparring and a failure drill. This type of sparring usually has a "good guy" and a "bad guy", but is less scripted. It may be one person creating a scenario for another to defend. It may be one person taking on the role of an aggressor. Or it may be similar to symmetrical sparring, where the "good guy" has a handicap. My favorites are the 2-on-1 or 3-on-1 sparring matches we do in Taekwondo class, and the sparring we do in hapkido.
This type of sparring is designed to give the "good guy" practice in using his techniques in a more realistic situation, where you may be outnumbered or caught off guard. It's also an opportunity to play the bad guy, which is something that's always fun. (Seriously, watch any kids action show, like Power Rangers, and look how much fun the actors have when their character is mind controlled and they get to be evil for an episode).
Advanced Phase: Experimentation
Experimentation is what I do when I get bored of a drill. Where you take a drill, and make it your own. Where you try different things. This can be done in conjunction with pretty much any phase. You can try a new way of striking when working through your basics. You can modify a drill, or try out a new tactic in sparring.
Most experimentation leads to failure, but that's okay. You can cross that idea out in your mind in practice, instead of trying and failing during a fight. But those failures can often lead towards learning something new. "How can I take this idea and make it work" is a question I've asked a few times. Sometimes there's no right answer, but sometimes you can learn something new.
Where the other "Advanced" levels of learning I discussed are about the Form vs. Function rule, this goes back to the idea of learning rules before exceptions. It is at this phase that you can try different things and see how well they work.
The key difference between experimentation and a failure drill is that experimentation is elective, while a failure drill is required. For example, a failure drill is "this move failed, how can I succeed?" Experimentation is "this can work, but what else can work?"
Closing Thoughts
These are the stages of learning I've used. I'm pretty sure there's a few more. Some closing thoughts I have:
But first, some general principles regarding learning techinques:
- Learn the rules first, and the exceptions later. This also applies to learning the "primary" application of a motion, and then learning other applications for similar motions; and also applies to learning the "primary" way of doing a technique, and then learning variations of that technique.
For example, always keep your hands up! That is a rule. Of course, at high levels of Taekwondo sparring, many of the Olympic fighters keep their hands down, because they're going to use footwork to avoid being hit. But you don't teach a new fighter to fight with their guard down. You teach them to keep their guard up and later teach them when to keep it down, if they'll need to use that exception.
Similarly, as it applies to learning the primary and secondary application, if you throw too many possibilities at someone right away, it can be hard for them to make sense of it all. An outward circular motion with the hand can be used as a block, as a grab escape, a grab counter, or as a guard clear. If you just teach the motion without an application in can appear abstract, but if you sell the motion as an infomercial (it can be any of these hundreds of things, just call now!) it remains just as abstract. But if you teach the motion within applications and give more applications as students advance and experiment, then they'll get it a lot easier.
As to learning the primary way and then variants of doing a certain technique, it's the same as above. Front snap kicks can be done with the heel, ball of the foot, or instep, depending on your target and training. If you teach all three options, then it might overwhelm students as they're learning the proper form. Having them work on one at a time can be much easier for the learning process.
- Along those lines, Form before Function. I'm not talking about katas, but rather that students shouldn't put speed or strength into their techniques before they learn how to use them right. There's the silly stories about someone punching without proper footwork and throwing themselves down when they whiff, or what happens at my TKD school a lot which is front kicks and ax kicks where people's feet come out from under them.
But in a more serious note, people shouldn't punch heavy bags full force if they don't have a proper fist and proper wrist alignment. People shouldn't do full-power roundhouse kicks into kicking shields if they haven't learned to properly turn their body and curl their toes back. And people shouldn't go into a wrestling match having been shown a few moves and never gotten a chance to drill them.
Phase 1: Form
Form is the first level of learning a technique. Form is done either without a partner or with a completely compliant partner. In fact, if your partner is more advanced than you, then at this stage they should even lead you in what you're supposed to do (for example, if you're supposed to throw them, they should have you grab them, and then fall where you're supposed to throw them).
At this point, you're not learning how to fight with a technique. You're simply learning how to do it. Part of that is reinforcing the idea of cause and effect - when you do this technique, this is the effect it should have.
If your training ends here, it's obviously very bad, as you will eventually need feedback on how to improve the technique. But your training should start here, as without this stage you will be in way over your head.
Phase 2: Drills
The next level is to drill a technique. Drills should progressively provide more and more feedback. The idea here is to build muscle memory and neural pathways. In doing drills, the student should do the same thing every time, but get faster and more precise with each repetition. The partner should be progressively increasing the level of resistance to a technique, but should still follow the script of the drill.
Let's take Hapkido as an example. Now, I'm going to butcher the names of these holds because we basically go by numbers at my school, but let's take a cross-arm grab as an example. One technique we have would be to bring our hand out and towards their ear, and then transition into a supinating wristlock. Another technique would be to circle our hand across our body and transition to an armbar. If they stiffen their arm to prevent Option 1, then we take Option 2. If they press their elbow in to prevent Option 2, we take Option 3, which is to transition to a Figure 4.
But if I want to work on my techniques for Option 1, then constantly preventing me from doing that (but opening up another option) isn't going to help. Also, simply locking your arm for any movement, but not trying to advance your position, is setting me up for failure in my drill in an unrealistic scenario. So that fails on both realism and training. Failure drills and sparring will come later. Right now, the goal is to learn how to properly apply this technique.
However, if the student completely fails at doing the technique properly, then it is perfectly acceptable for the partner to just stand there and wait for something to happen, to politely mock the student (one guy at my school will pick his teeth while waiting for you to get a submission hold right), or to use the student's failed leverage against them and send them sprawling with a nice little hip check. Of course you have to have a good sense of humor for some of these to be appropriate, but the point is that while in the first phase you make the student succeed, and in the later phases you try and make them fail, in Phase 2, you allow them to succeed or fail.
Drills are how you get the muscle memory you learned in the Form phase and get it correct at speed in order to advance.
Phase 3: Failure Drills
Failure drills start off scripted, but go off-script as you fail, or as your partner prevents you from being successful. It is at this stage that you start doing the things I listed as no-no's in Phase 2. You prevent them from doing what they want to do, so they have to learn how to adapt to failure.
Where before they were either learning enough techniques to DO a failure drill, or they were working on a new technique in particular, now they have enough that they can transition into something else. Or, in the case of striking, if they miss or get countered, then how can they still protect themselves and/or follow up with another strike in the combo?
Alternatively, reset, and see what you can do different to lead in. Your back kicks keep getting dodged? Set it up with a roundhouse, or use motions to mask it. Your reverse punch isn't landing? Use the jab to set it up, or use the threat of a kick to get their eyes off your strong hand.
Failure drills are still drills...but they're the lead from drills to sparring. They're generally skipped over in striking, I think, and that's not a bad thing, but they can still be used. They're very important in grappling, from my experience.
Advanced Phase: Symmetrical Sparring
Ok, so white belts do sparring. It may not be "advanced" in terms of what belt, but this is one of the top levels of working on techniques - putting it into application. Symmetrical sparring is any sparring in which both people are free to initiate combat. If your instructor has you partner up and spar for 1 minute, that's symmetrical sparring. Competitive martial sports, like olympic-rules Taekwondo, boxing, MMA, wrestling, Judo, are all symmetrical sparring.
In this type of sparring, your goal is to apply what you have learned, but to do so without compromising your defenses. Instead of your partner creating scenarios for you to defend and counter, now you have to deal with your partner ALSO trying the techniques against you.
Advanced Phase: Asymmetrical Sparring
Asymmetrical sparring is somewhere between symmetrical sparring and a failure drill. This type of sparring usually has a "good guy" and a "bad guy", but is less scripted. It may be one person creating a scenario for another to defend. It may be one person taking on the role of an aggressor. Or it may be similar to symmetrical sparring, where the "good guy" has a handicap. My favorites are the 2-on-1 or 3-on-1 sparring matches we do in Taekwondo class, and the sparring we do in hapkido.
This type of sparring is designed to give the "good guy" practice in using his techniques in a more realistic situation, where you may be outnumbered or caught off guard. It's also an opportunity to play the bad guy, which is something that's always fun. (Seriously, watch any kids action show, like Power Rangers, and look how much fun the actors have when their character is mind controlled and they get to be evil for an episode).
Advanced Phase: Experimentation
Experimentation is what I do when I get bored of a drill. Where you take a drill, and make it your own. Where you try different things. This can be done in conjunction with pretty much any phase. You can try a new way of striking when working through your basics. You can modify a drill, or try out a new tactic in sparring.
Most experimentation leads to failure, but that's okay. You can cross that idea out in your mind in practice, instead of trying and failing during a fight. But those failures can often lead towards learning something new. "How can I take this idea and make it work" is a question I've asked a few times. Sometimes there's no right answer, but sometimes you can learn something new.
Where the other "Advanced" levels of learning I discussed are about the Form vs. Function rule, this goes back to the idea of learning rules before exceptions. It is at this phase that you can try different things and see how well they work.
The key difference between experimentation and a failure drill is that experimentation is elective, while a failure drill is required. For example, a failure drill is "this move failed, how can I succeed?" Experimentation is "this can work, but what else can work?"
Closing Thoughts
These are the stages of learning I've used. I'm pretty sure there's a few more. Some closing thoughts I have:
- You can always go backward if you need a refresher or if you want to work on something. There's no problem drilling something after you've sparred and found it lacking.
- Other things I can think of would be to eliminate techniques, to test techniques (i.e. gather data and run analyses on how well certain things work), and to work on counters to the techniques you know