@MetalBoar, my third attempt at video learning was after I had been away from kenpo for some years, training capoeira. I wanted to reconnect with my kenpo but had forgotten things. I had a set of the Tracy instructional videos from my instructors, and used them to brush up.
For this kind of thing, I think video can be an ok approach. If it is something you have already learned and need it for reminder on the specifics, I think that can be ok.
However, I had video of the material up through godan, which was well beyond what I had previously learned, so I worked through that material as well.
Again, it was just memorizing movement. None of it was functional and could not become so from that way of learning. There was little in the way of detail in the instruction.
Of course I no longer practice any of the stuff that I had attempted to learn through video. It was junk, plain and simple. There is just no other way to describe the experience.
I did make one attempt at learning from a book. This was before I had any formal martial arts training, so I must have been around 11-12 years old.
I was fascinated by the sai, was pleased that my parents allowed me to buy a pair from a supplier, and I bought Fumio Demura’s book, “Sai, Karate weapon of Self Defense”. I had a fantasy of studying the book in minute detail and working diligently to master the weapon. I noted and subsequently ignored the author’s advice that a student below the level of brown belt should not undertake the sai.
Of course it was a failure. I learned to flip the sai back and forth from a point-forward to an inverted grip. That is it. The book contained combinations of defense with sai against bo, and some other stuff, but I realized quickly there was no way I was going to be able to work through all that stuff. It was really just pointless.
Maybe if I was older and had some legitimate training in martial arts, I might have been more successful. Maybe, but I doubt it.
In the end, learning in this way makes me feel like a fraud. For me, that is a problem. Maybe other people don’t even consider it, maybe it does not matter to them, does not bother them, or they have never even considered it on that level. I dunno. But I have a real problem with it.
We live in a society where use of the sai in fighting and defense is extremely unlikely, so there is zero chance that I would ever build experience by using it in the world. Proper instruction is the only way to understand the weapon, and trying to piece it together from a book is jus pointless.
So that kind of summarizes my experiences with learning from video and books. In the end, none of it was fruitful. It is just a bad approach to learning this stuff. That’s my take on it.
I realize my experience did not include some of the more interactive tools available today, like real-time video connections and such. Yes, that could be an improvemement over the experiences that I had. But I still feel that being in the presence of a good teacher is critical for this stuff. The student needs the repeated hands-on correction and discussion of the details in a way that does not translate well over long distance.
On top of context in the instruction, the student cannot reliably self-correct until he has reached some level of skill and understanding. There is just no good way around it.
