Learning Without An Instructor.

[Cirdan]

I like to go back to the original grandmasters of any given style. They had no teacher yet they were able to come up with founding principles that were taught and improved upon.

An interesting point, but can you name a grandmaster who did not have a teacher of some kind? Most of them had several and kept learning from others.

 

[whitetiger2001]

I would also like to throw in my two cents here. While I think books and vdeos a can be a good tool to augment traditional training, they lack one thing that cannot be gained anywhere else, personal interaction. A book or video cannot asnwer questions, make the subtle corrections your sensei can. He/she can look at you, at your stance and make a subtle adjustment that will make the dofference between a proper piece of material or poor one. It can give you generalizations, steps to take etc. but can it answer your questions and we all have them, especially when learning a new piece.
I would say that media martial arts formats are good to supliment but shouldn't be the sole source of training. I've used them myseelf, as a reminder for something I already knew but was fuzzy on but never to learn a new form or technique.

 

[qi-tah]

To my way of thinking, Mark has nailed the problem right here. People who learn from videos cannot possibly have that deep, solid confidence in what they've acquired that way because there's an upper limit on how secure they can be about just what it is they have acquired. It's not all that easy to learn complex moves from a video—you think it's going to be, but it isn't; there's too much going on in any sequence of movements, and often very small and subtle point make the difference. I was reminded of this at the seminar on Combat Hapkido I went to over the weekend. One of the component techs involves countering a grab, to wrist or shirt, by covering the gripping hand with your own, folding it and twisting it, and then rotating it in at a particular direction corresponding to an angle where the wrist has almost no rotational freedom. There's no way uke can stay on his feet when significant pressure is appied to the wrist in this way, but you either actually have to be there to see what that angle is, or the video would have to spend a good deal of time and footage emphasizing the point. But the latter possibility is pretty much ruled out by the amount of other stuff that the video will cover. A good instructor, however, will make it clear with just a word or two if you're not getting it right; s/he'll see what you're doing and if it's ineffective, will correct it by showing you how it's done, in just a few seconds of instruction time. And then you'll know just what it is you're supposed to be doing. With a video, you're never going to be able to be quite sure, as Mark points out.

I happen to have a serious problem processing complex spatial relationships, or even simple ones for that matter. And a surprising number of people I've talked to have the same problem, though maybe to a lesser degree. For me, watching moves on a DVD that I don't already pretty much know is just baffling for the first half hour or so until I can work out what the people are actually doing, and even then, I'm none too sure about what I'm seeing. With an instructor physically present, it's a totally different ball game, and worth any amount of time and money, I think, if you're really serious about getting it right.

Glad to know that it's not just me!

I'm reminded by this thread of a basic ba gua DVD that i bought from my teacher when i started with him 2 and a half years ago. At first i found the DVD useful only for remembering the order of the gross movements and what they were called. After a year of training with him, i started to appreciate some of the finer points of the apps contained within the forms, and only 6 months ago i went back to it again to brush up for my grading and found yet more subtleties in pacing and body postioning. At the same time i also started to gain an understanding into how the material was presented in the DVD... it was very clearly meant to be an adjunct to my teacher's classes. It was also made with the constraints of the medium upon it... tight circles to stay in frame etc. I couldn't imagine just picking it up in China books and going home to learn Ba gua on my own. For a start, i wouldn't even know what i was missing out on by not taking classes, and that would be a shame.

For this reason, i don't know that i would feel comfy just picking up a DVD of an art, or even a form that i hadn't studied or was intending to take classes in. I just don't think i would get enough out of it. Maybe this will change as i gain more experience, who knows?