Do you want to get promoted?
Do you want to do better at tournaments?
Do you want the confidence that comes from knowing your forms well?
Do you want to be AWESOME?
It all comes from PRACTICE!!!
Let's talk about how to practice....
The secret to practice is CONSISTENCY.
That means you must practice EVERY DAY!
If you practice for 15 minutes every day, you'll be amazed at how well you remember your forms,
and how much better they start to look.
The key is practicing every day. If you skip the whole week and then practice one day for 5 hours,
all you get is tired.
Just as important as HOW MUCH you practice, is HOW you practice.
You've heard "Practice makes perfect". It's missing a word. It should be "PERFECT practice
makes perfect".
If you practice something wrong, you get really good at doing it wrong.
You need to concentrate on doing the movements correctly as you practice, otherwise you
develop bad habits that are very hard to break.
It is much easier to learn something correctly the first time, than to go back and fix something
you already know.
When you first learn something, you have to struggle with it mentally. As you put time into it, it
becomes more and more natural and requires less and less thinking.
Here's an example: If you never take the time to fix you forward stances in your katas, you
become really good at doing them wrong. If you remind yourself to fix them EVERY TIME you
do a kata for a week or two, (which is tough, mental work) then it becomes natural to do them
correctly and you don't have to think about it as much. With your mental effort, you "paid" for
the forward stances, and now you "own" them.
Here's the order in which you should learn and practice a form.
Pattern: You learn how it goes. The order of kicks and punches and stances.
Technique: You learn how to do all of the kicks, stances, punches and blocks correctly.
Power: To make the techniques work, you put power into them.
Speed: To make sure the techniques get where they're going, you work on making them fast.
Rhythm and Timing: When to go fast, when to go slow and when to pause. The space between
the moves.
Realism: Making it look like you're really defending yourself.
Many of the steps overlap, but you can't do a step correctly unless you have the previous step
down.
EXAMPLE: It just won't do any good to add power without knowing how to do the punch correctly.
Here are two quick short cuts to realism:
Look Before You Move: Always turn your head to the direction of the next technique before you
move. How would you know to go that direction without looking at your opponent first?
Do Your KI-AI's: You need a good "soundtrack" to go with your movie.
WHEN TO PRACTICE:
It is important that you practice as soon as possible after learning something new.
Here is a sample practice schedule when trying to remember something new:
You learn a new kata (or part of a new kata) in class. After you get home, review it several times before bed.
Review it the next day, as early as possible.
Find time to practice your fifteen minutes.
When you get to class, review your form before class begins.
If you wait until the next day to review the form after learning it, you may forget key
points.
WHAT'S THE PAYOFF?
The obvious results of practice are better results at tournaments and rank advancement,
but the are far more important, more subtle results.
These include:
CONFIDENCE: The confidence that comes with knowing what you're doing.
PRIDE: You can be proud of the work you've done, and be proud of your improving skills.
MORE KNOWLEDGE: Proficiency in you previous forms is the prerequisite to learning new,
more advanced forms.
Being good at any skill requires the self-discipline to practice. Imagine doing a kata
correctly costs five dollars. Every time you practice the form with good effort and smart thinking,
it's like putting a penny in a jar. By the time the jar has five hundred pennies (five dollars) in it,
the kata will be looking great! But remember, you can never save up too many pennies. There's
room in your jar for ten dollars; or even a thousand dollars!
Each week that passes without putting pennies in the jar, a few cents disappear from it.
You have to keep putting pennies in or the total starts to go down.
A Little Time...
A Little Effort...
A Little Thinking....
You'll be AMAZED how much it does for you!