The mugger charges out of the alley and throws a whole, darned garbage can at you! Do you ask him to wait because you’re only on your tenth Karate lesson and haven’t reached the beating up the mugger section? Or do you ask him to hold off because, here it comes, you forgot to renew your contract after the fourth year at the local dojo?

There is a question in all this silliness, why does it take so long to learn the martial arts? You can teach a guy to fly a fighter jet, go to war and get shot down, spend time in a concentration camp, come home and run for political office, and win that office, and retire, in the time it takes to learn some systems of the martial arts. It takes seventeen years to get to Black Belt in one system that I heard of.

Some people will make the excuse that you’re learning more than self defense. You’re solving martial mysteries and its all about the lifestyle and you need to invest in your old age, you know? But you’re still lying under that trash can and the guy is pulling out a knife, and no matter how many lessons you’ve taken, you have to do something!

One of the old saying that I heard, long time ago, is garbage in, garbage out. The sad fact of the matter is that if something is hard to put into your head, then it might not be easily accessed and used. Maybe it would be appropriate to find an art that is as easily absorbed as track, or boxing.

It is true that the Martial Arts are not a sport, they are an art, but they can still be learned easily and quickly. They just have to be taught not by one mystical technique after another, but rather by understanding concepts behind them. Those endles techniques that you memorize, to be truthful, are random data, and, often as not, they don’t really relate to one another.

That is a problem, to be sure, even if you learn a thousand techniques, you might not have enough data to be able to make sense out of the whole thing until you reach one thousand and one. And, let’s face it, a hundred years is to long to become competent. And then go to heaven.

Teaching the martial arts on a conceptual basis is the solution. Have a fellow learn concepts, instead of memorizing endless strings of tricks. Have him learn in this manner and he’s suddenly going to be able to figure out those thousand techniques on his own.

Give him an acorn and throw in the watering pot, that’s what I believe, and then watch the oak shoot upwards. Most martial artists, and I don’t mean to be mean in this observation, are lost in the limbs of the trees. The real way to teach, however, is to show the guy the principles, then have use those principles, and, faster than a rabbit on steroids, you’ve got yourself a fast and competent martial artist.

Tags: Self Defence