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…).

ach week, I’ll upload a new tip – every Thursday. So stay tuned.

I’ll be announcing new posts on the Taido/Blog Facebook page, so make sure you follow along by “like”-ing Taido/Blog there.

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.

And that’s actually the first tip: keep a training journal.

Even just a very simple one can help. I recommend a sturdy notebook that’s small enough to keep in your bag, but large enough that you don’t loose it easily. If you need ideas for how to structure a journal, or are simply curious, you can check out my (old) Taido Training Log.

Keep in mind that there’s no reason you need to keep an elaborate record of everything you practice. I suggest noting the date and length of your practice along with what you spent most of your time working on. Also write your impressions of your own performance or anything you want to remember to practice more next time.

Spend a couple of minutes before each practice reviewing the last session, and then a couple of minutes after practice to reflect and make notes. That’s all. Spend two weeks building this habit, and you will find it much easier to apply the tips that follow.

Remember

These tips are not 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 improve.

This week, I want you to remember to relax.

It’s probably the most common advice in the world as it can pertain to anything we do in life. Of course, learning to relax can improve your relationships, your health, and your mood. But what we’re most interested in here is how relaxation can improve our Taido.

Everyone remembers learning to punch. We all started out in the same place: trying to use our arms and shoulders to push our fists forward into the target. As we kept punching, our shoulders inched higher and higher.

Eventually, we all learn to relax our shoulders when punching, and we know empirically that it increases speed, power, and accuracy. So why do we carry around so much tension in our other movements?

Relax. Everyone says it, everyone forgets to do it.

Awareness

It all starts with becoming aware of tension.

If nothing else, over the next couple of weeks, try to pay attention to the tension in your shoulders during practice. Notice this tension when you punch, when you’re standing in chudan kamae, and when you’re doing hokei. If you can just be aware of the tension, you can remember to let it go. Make a concerted effort to be aware of any tension you find yourself holding. It may not be in your shoulders. Some people tend to keep a lot of tension in their hips and bellies. Others in their hands.

You’ll have to pay attention to figure out where you keep your unnecessary tension. Then, it’ll just a be a matter of releasing that tension when you notice it.

Face It

If you’ve ever watched a kung fu movie or even a video of a Taido practice or tournament, you’ve probably noticed that strange facial expressions are very common in the martial arts. The truth is that our facial expressions reveal a lot about our internal states. Obviously, we show our emotions on our faces. It works the other way around, too. Smiling actually releases chemical that make us happy.

By the same token, relaxing the muscles of the face signals other parts of the body to relax as well.

If you can, try to get some video of yourself practicing, and notice your own facial expressions. What movements or techniques cause your face to tense up?

You can increase your overall relaxation by periodically relaxing your face during practice. Clench your teeth, then stretch your mouth wide, as if your were yawning. Shut your eyes tight, then relax and blink a few times. Relax your jaw and shake your head vigorously from side to side with a deep exhale. All of these things can help loosen your facial muscles and relieve general tension.

Techniques

There are lots of things you can do the help yourself relax, the most basic being to simply LET GO. For some people, this will be a significant process that is more psychological and physiological. For others, it might just mean bouncing up and down a few times while shaking the tension out of your arms and legs.

Figure out what works for you and start reminding yourself periodically during training to relax.

Everyone knows that breathing is important in Taido, just as in… well, pretty much everything.

Learning to use your breath is a big part of Taido’s taiki (“body energy”) idea. Every hokei includes techniques for learning to master the breath, and we all know what it feels like to be “out of breath.” This tip is about one half of breathing.

Remember to Relax

One of the reasons that exhaling is important is that it helps us to relax. Everyone has experience with this phenomenon in the form of yawning when we shift gears to prepare for sleep. When we need sleep, the body begins to progressively relax in order to reduce energy consumption and lower core temperature.

In much the same way, the “hold your breath and count to ten” method of anger management works by forcing a full, deep exhale at the end. This helps us relax and let go on anger and frustration.

Exhaling is a physiological trigger for relaxation, so it naturally works in tandem with the first tip.

Kiai!

Of course, the most obvious example of a focused exhale in Taido is the kiai. Done correctly, the kiai is short, focused, and doesn’t strain the vocal chords. If you get a sore throat from doing too many loud kiai, you should practice relaxing your mouth and neck while forcing the air out from your belly.

When you kiai during practice, try to think of it as a sharp exhale rather than a shout. Most of us kiai quite often, so changing this emphasis (from shout to exhale) offers many extra chances to practice exhaling during practice.

Stop Holding Your Breath

Again, we all have had experiences where we stopped breathing, and the results are never positive.

Often, when excited or threatened, we’ll take a sharp inhale and forget to let it go. After a few seconds of holding our breath, we may feel lightheaded or simply stressed out. Part of this has to do with the increase in blood pressure when we hold our breath. The cure is to simply exhale.

How many times have you been moving at a frantic pace (either in practice or in the real world) and found yourself gasping and panting? It’s a physiological stress reaction that may have served a purpose in the early days of our species. But it just gets in the way when we’re trying to learn.

Since breath-holding always begins with an inhale, the best way to avoid it is by remembering to exhale. Exhale whenever you kick or punch. Exhale when you complete your kamae. Exhale when you are resting between techniques. Just exhale, and do it often. The more you remember to exhale, the easier it will be for you to remain relaxed.

Focus on the Exhale

If you just remember to exhale, your body will inhale naturally. It’s a simple fact of biology that our bodies need oxygen to continue living, so don’t worry about inhaling – your body will handle that for you.

Try it right now: exhale.

Exhale as much as possible. Now relax. What happened? Of course, you inhaled, but without having to try. This is called passive inhalation.

Your body expels air by compressing the lungs and releasing that compression results in a natural inhalation. You never have to worry about inhaling. It will come if you relax. Your body knows what it needs to survive, and it will always override your instructions when survival is at stake.

You cannot prevent your body from inhaling when it needs to. So just let it happen. Don’t worry about it. Inhalation is taken care of, so you can put your attention on exhalation.

Focus on the exhale, and let this become a trigger for relaxation. Experiment with this in your training for a few days and see if you don’t feel more relaxed and move more smoothly.

Work on your balance. Everyone knows that balance is important, especially in sports. Most sports movements take place on one leg, or by transitioning the weight from one leg to another. This means shifting our balance.

In Taido, the balance shifting is extremely important since we use dynamic, full-body movement through all three dimensions. Learning to control our balance is extremely useful.

I wrote about this before in my article on warming up. Balancing brings together a lot of the body’s resources, so it’s an excellent addition to your warm-up.

Challenging your balance helps “tune and prime” the nervous system’s use of mechanoreception information along with visual and vestibular sensation. It also “turns on” fine motor control of muscles used in stabilizing the body. Another good reason to include balance training during your warm-up is that you warm up before every practice. This means that you will do balance training at every practice. Simple, right?

It’s difficult to improve without consistent practice. Balance is no different. Of course, just doing Taido movements will result in improved balance, but focusing your attention specifically on balance for a couple of minutes during your warm-up will accelerate your improvements exponentially.

Plug in some balance training every time you practice, and you’re overall agility and coordination will begin to improve rapidly. Your techniques will get better too.

Slow Kicks

The easiest way to practice balance is by doing slow kicks. Try doing five slow front kicks on each side, focusing on keeping your stationary foot flat on the ground. Hold your gaze steadily on some point in front of you and attempt to move your kicking leg slowly with as little loss of balance as possible. Start with low kicks and gradually work on kicking a little higher each practice. You can do five low kicks and five middle-height kicks on each side (remember, slowly…) and then move on to practice at normal speed.

Remember to breathe. Holding your breath makes this exercise much more difficult. As you extend the kicking leg, exhale slowly. It may help to count out three to five seconds as you extend the kick. Also, don’t just extend the leg and then let it drop. Practice controlling your balance for the full path of the kick. For many reasons, the return trajectory that the kicking leg follows is just as important as the extension. Extend the leg with an exhale, inhale, and then exhale slowly again through the return to kamae.

After you are comfortable balancing with the most basic kick, progress to using other kicks as well. Kick to the side and back. Don’t worry too much about kicking technique at first – you’ll probably tense up and have difficulty balancing. Work on balance, then gradually improve your technique while balanced.

The Balance Drill

This is a drill that is just for training balance. It may work better for some people since it doesn’t look like a kick. If you have trouble focusing on balance instead of technique, try the “four corner balance drill,” 4CBD:

You don’t have to hold each position for very long, and you don’t have to hold your leg very high. At least, not at first. As your balance and leg strength improves, you’ll want to gradually increase the height and duration of the holds in each position. This ensures continued improvement. You have to keep the drill challenging if you want to keep getting something out of it.

Lots of Benefits

Obviously, you can expect your kicks to improve tremendously when you start making a habit of training your balance at each practice. You’ll also notice increased foot-eye coordination and surer footing when stepping and moving in unsoku (due to increased foot and leg sensitivity).

I do some balance drills each day, but you can get some excellent results just by devoting 30 seconds during your Taido warm-ups to building your balance using the drills in this mail.

By now, you should have incorporated regular logging of your training. You’ve probably noticed that you can move better when you’re relaxed and that you can relax easier when you breathe. If you’ve been doing the balance drills and dynamic swings in your warm-ups, your kicks will have begun to show increased speed and control.

Today’s tip is about where to place attention when learning new techniques, or practicing ones you already know.

When we watch someone who is really good at a particular movement, we tend to want to emulate their skill. Unfortunately, it’s not usually as easy as just watching and doing. We have to train our bodies and minds to perform the movement correctly. Chances are that the people whose skills we wish to emulate practiced a great deal to refine their technique.

Technique

What is technique? In it’s most basic form, technique is performing a particular action that produces the desired outcome in the most mechanically efficient manner possible. Technique is good mechanics. Nobody begins Taido with a prior knowledge of proper technique – the movements we perform in training are just too far removed from daily life.

We have to develop good technical mechanics through practice.

Accuracy

The key to developing technique is accuracy, and this should be the first goal when practicing any movement.

When your instructor teaches you a new movement, you should pay close attention to performing it as precisely as possible. Don’t tense up (we already know that relaxation is preferable to tension), but focus on moving your body exactly as the technique dictates.

In Japan, we teach students to avoid “muri” and “muda” – impossibility and waste. This means to avoid either forcing the body to do things that are unnatural, or adding unnecessary movements. Accuracy simply means to make the technique as close to correct as possible – without forcing it or cheating it.

Ideally, we want to discover the exact mechanics of each technique that result in the most efficient and effective movement. This can take a lot of practice, but it’s the first step to mastery. People with excellent technique spent time developing accuracy.

Precision

After some time of practicing for accuracy, precision will naturally develop. As we refine the technique, we will begin to notice certain things that make the movement easier and better. As this happens, we will start to develop a habit of performing the movement the same way each time. We want this precision.

If accuracy is the first goal in mastering a particular movement, precision is the second.

Precision means that the body responds like a machine when performing that technique. You should almost feel as if your body is a robot – a precision instrument designed specifically for performing the task at hand. This increases efficiency. You want to be able to hit the same target time and time again with the same amount of power and perfect control of your balance. (Hint: exhale).

Precision leads to control.

Control

Once you can produce predictable results, it’s time to try and change those results. Control is the ability to be achieve a desired outcome. Once you can perform senjogeri precisely in it’s most basic form, you need to develop the ability to kick at different heights and distances and at different angles.

Control comes after precision because control requires us to predict the result of achieving a particular movement.

Speed and Power

Speed and power are often held up as markers of skill or mastery. They aren’t. At least, not until they accompany accuracy.

Speed without accuracy is hit-or-miss. We may be able to respond quickly, but that doesn’t mean our technique will be effective. We may have power, but if that power misses the target, it doesn’t do anything.

Accuracy is the key. Accuracy leads to precision, and precision leads to control. If we can control our techniques, increasing speed is just a matter of doing the same things at a faster rate. Once we have speed, power comes from directing the kick or punch to the target with proper alignment (which requires accuracy).

If you really want to get good at any physical skill, focus on accuracy first. Then come precision, control, speed, and power.

Accuracy is Goal Number One

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or have been doing Taido for over twenty years. You have to focus on accuracy. Make a point over the next two weeks to focus your attention on performing each technique as accurately as possible.

Avoid any muri or muda in your movements and strive to hit the same target each time. You’ll find that every technique you decide to practice in this manner will improve.

I hope you’re putting these tips to good use and beginning to see results in your training. This time, I want to give you a little advice on stretching that you can apply in every practice.

As in the last tip on balance, I mentioned this one in my warm-up article. I’m repeating it here because it’s important on it’s own. It also complements the last tip in improving your kicking skills.

Building Dynamic Flexibility For Kicks

Dynamic flexibility is the ability of muscle tissue to allow a particular range of motion in a dynamic fashion. Taido is a dynamic martial art, and kicks especially require muscles to release quickly.

The common method of dynamic stretching is the swing kick. Most students have done this. Before I describe the technique, allow me to emphasize that swing kicks should only be done after the muscles are warm. They can be a component of the overall warm-up routine, but take extra care not to force the muscles into these stretches without adequate preparation.

The stretch is very simple. Stand as if about to execute a front kick. Swing the rear leg forward as if kicking, but do not bend the knee. Start out low – about knee height – and gradually increase the amplitude (height) of the swing for five or ten repetitions. Then switch legs and do the other side.

I recommend doing at least two sets per side. You should also do leg swings to the side and back. I’ll let you figure out the specific technique for these on your own, as they are both “easier done than said.”

If you’re unsure of how to do dynamic stretching in a particular direction, ask your instructor. I tend to do swing kicks after doing my slow kicks or 4CBD for balance. So my warm-up usually includes a sequence that looks like this:

1. balance work
2. swing kicks
3. basic kicks

Of course, I do other things, too, but that should give you an idea of how to plug these in to your training.

Other Dynamic Stretches

Swing kicks are not the only way to stretch the body for dynamic action. Not all dynamic stretches target the legs. However, these are the most basic and important dynamic stretches to make sure you include at every practice (and even between practices if you want to dramatically increase your kicking ability).

If you have the time and space, I recommend doing these three movements (front, back, and side leg swings) every day after warming up the body and working on your balance. If you can’t do it every day, at least take about two minutes during your Taido practice to fit them it.

Resources

For more information of dynamic stretching and overall flexibility, check out Tricks Tutorials:

I recommend incorporating these techniques into your training gradually. Doing too much too soon will certainly cause you more harm than good. Begin with building the habit and build your abilities from that base.

Finally, don’t forget to keep a training journal. It was the first tip for a reason – it’s probably the most important- if you’re doing it, you’ve probably already seen why. If you don’t try it, you’ll never know how much it can help.