Progress, progress, progress!  We are always working to progress in our martial arts training (or any other training you may be doing).  But do you ever feel like you take huge steps backwards?  Don’t worry, its normal!  I see it with all of my students, especially when learning a new technique or attempting to fine-tune an old one.  It’s inevitable; you have to take a step back (or two or three) from time to time to move forward in your training.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost a handful of students over the years due to this ebb and flow of progress.  They get better and better, then take a step backwards, get frustrated, then quit.  It’s not the intermediate progress that one should look at, it’s the overall progress.  Don’t get frustrated with the back steps, be excited that they will lead to your next big step forward!

You have to understand on a deeper level how the body learns physical movements and skills.  Essentially, it’s trial and error.  Everyones speed at which they go through trial and error is different.  For the average person, maybe practicing a skill 300 times is enough to get good at it.  For someone else, maybe someone known as a little less coordinated or less naturally skilled, it may take 1000 times to get good at a physical movement.  And yet for others such as elite athletes, maybe it takes 10 or less.  The point being, that trial and error process going on in the body is always there, the variable is how long it takes.  Some pick things up so fast that they never seem to struggle or go backwards while others seem to constantly be in flux.  For every movement learned there needs to be a neurological connection made for the brain to understand how to most efficiently move the muscles to create the action required.  Ever feel like you know exactly what needs to be done, and can even envision yourself doing it in your head, but still can’t seem to do it?  That’s because it doesn’t matter how well you know what to do, the body still needs to figure out how to use its muscles correctly to perform the action.  For example, maybe you know how to stand on one leg without falling over.  And you have a great punch.  Now try standing on one leg and throwing that great punch.  If you’ve never done it before, you may find yourself struggling a bit.  Now try standing on one foot while punching with your eyes closed.  You know how to stand on one foot, you know how to throw a punch, you know how not to fall down when your eyes are closed…yet doing it all at the same time may put you on your butt!  It doesn’t matter that you can do all of those things separately, if you’ve never combined them before, the body isn’t going to be at its most efficient at doing that action until it’s gone through trial and error to find the best path to success to accomplish the action.  Yes, some people can pick up those skills and perform them the first time, but that doesn’t mean the body has found the most efficient way of doing it.  It still takes practice for that to happen.

So what about fine-tuning a technique?  Let’s take a basic round kick for instance.  Your round kick is quite good, good enough to pass your first belt testing.  Flash forward a few months and suddenly your instructor tells you to make a seemingly small adjustment to give you more power, or speed or control while throwing that kick.  Now suddenly you’re falling down, missing your target, tweaking your hips and you now feel like you’ve digressed with your technique and it is no longer good.  This is completely normal.  The body can’t simply make a small tweak, while it may retain that trial and error info from before, that one little tweak has the ability to throw a wrench into the entire motion.  So it feels like you’re starting all over again!  Fear not though, as you are not starting over, when it finds that correct connection, your new and improved round kick awaits!  And there is your progress.

Just remember, the positive wouldn’t exist without the negative.  You have to experience what doesn’t work to truly understand and perfect what does work.