Learning Styles

People learn in different ways, and how they learn is called their learning style. There are a number of ways in which learning styles can be identified, and there are different categories depending on who you read about.

An individual's learning style is very useful to know about, because then you can adopt your coaching or teaching to fit the student's way of working. For example, someone who has strong visual perception might not be good at receiving verbal instruction. They're better off with a diagram.

In the Dojo you can improve the way a student learns if you understand learning styles.

A Visual student will learn quicker by watching a demonstration of a technique.
An auditory student will be more responsive to the details you talk about.
A kinaesthetic student works on feel, so they might pick up something better if you use them as uke or if you guide them through a technique using touch.

Interestingly, in the Chinese martial arts in particular touch is an important training skill for fine-tuning a student's posture. Push hands training is also very hands-on.

There are other ways of using learning styles. Are you active or reflective, for instance? An active person would rather get on with it and analyse things later; while a reflective students prefers to mull things over first.

A logical or sequential learner likes to follow a step-by-step approach, while an intuitive or global learner prefers to see an overview of the whole picture and learning it in smaller chunks. They may appear to flit around randomly, but their approach is more like completing a jigsaw puzzle than following a recipe.

It's worth getting into learning styles. There are plenty of online questionnaires and quizzes you can try to determine how you learn. Useful for both students and instructors. Here's a few links to get you started:

http://www.businessballs.com/kolblearningstyles.htm
http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm
http://www.learning-styles-online.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

I did some learning style work as part of my management qualification at work. My sensory learning style is quite balanced with a slight bias towards Visual. In another test I was strongly intuitive/global learning style - the complete opposite of my visual-logical team members!!

It'll be interesting to apply some of these ideas into the Karate classes and I encourage my students to have a go at one or two quizzes.

"Training for Enjoyment"

I came across this timely article:

http://themartialarchive.com/Chinese-Arts/Training-for-Enjoyment.html

The basic idea of the story can apply to all martial arts. Whatever happened to simply being, and just doing your martial art? In the karate world a lot of people worry about politics, the demise of tradition, being beaten up by cage fighters, or what the "bunkai" is to every tiny movement. It's enough to stress you out!

(So don't listen!)

Just Training

I read a great article in Martial Arts Illustrated magazine. It was a column written by veteran martial artists and writer, Chris Parker (who used to write for Fighting Arts International back in the day.

In the article he wrote about his 35 years' training, and how it was unlikely that he'd win a cage fight with an MMA student. Which is fine, because he has no plans to get into the cage!

Over the years it's easy to be taking in by trends, and its easy to look for everything that's "missing" in your art. Students' minds develop extremely unlikely scenarios in which their martial arts skills could never work. They worry because their karate (or whatever) could never beat Chuck Liddell or someone of that standing.

Crazy!

What's wrong with just enjoying your martial art because you like doing it. It's a social activity, or a means of exploring another culture, or you enjoy the challenges of your training. Maybe you're over 35 years old and don't really care about competitions, and you're not all that worried about being attacked by a team of ninjas lurking around the corner.

If you enjoy your karate for whatever reason there is absolutelyno need to justify it to yourself, or others - especially the keyboard tigers who populate the forums these days. So you're not into kyusho, grappling, bunkai, "street effective", or whatever. So you're just a person who enjoys traditional karate for its own sake.

As long as you're honest with your training it doesn't matter. Good training is healthy, interesting, and it gets you away from the TV. Offload all those mental hangups about your training and just get on with it.

I have to say its been a long time since I've enjoyed my own training so much. It's been a good year so far. Don't give up!

Kiba Dachi or Shiko Dachi?

Feet apart, bend your knees and sink your weight down through the legs and connect to the floor pressing the soles of your feet down.

Feet forward, or slightly turned inwards, and you have horse stance, or kiba dachi. Turn the feet out 30 to 45 degrees from the front and you have shiko dachi - straddle stance, or wrestling stance.

I noticed some old footage of Ohtsuka doing his pinan kata almost exclusively in shiko dachi rather than the "usual" kiba dachi. Not only that, there's no mention of the traditional kiba dachi in his book.

Further research suggests that in wado ryu there is no real distinction between the two - both terms apply to the same stance, so it seems kiba dachi/shiko dachi are interchangeable. In all cases the feet-outward approach is used.

So it seems that traditional wado uses only what we usually call shiko dachi, but the term kiba dachi is also used. Certainly the feet-outward stance is more "wado" feeling than feet-forward.

Let's bring in another stance, this time naihanchi-dachi. In many styles naihanchi kata is done from horse stance (look at Shotokan's tekki kata). However the correct approach is to use a higher stance with feet forward (or slightly turned inward - not too much). Naihanchi stance looks more horse-like than kiba dachi. Imagine standing on your horse, knees gripping the horse's flanks while you aim a shot with your bow and arrow, or wield your naginata!

The feet outward stance of shikodachi is preferred because it allows quicker movement, which is in keeping with the wado ethos. Even in naihanchi stance the feet shouldn't be turned too far inward.