moments of doubt..?

[taitsechien]

sometimes i feel like my martial arts training is going nowhere... and i get all sad... Then suddenly something will happen... something little... like i'll fall... and land on my feet... or someone will throw something at me and i'll dodge it on reflex alone... or in a completely relaxed situation i'll block an awkward attack... is it just me or does our martial arts show up in the strangest of situations..?

 

[chinto]

sometimes i feel like my martial arts training is going nowhere... and i get all sad... Then suddenly something will happen... something little... like i'll fall... and land on my feet... or someone will throw something at me and i'll dodge it on reflex alone... or in a completely relaxed situation i'll block an awkward attack... is it just me or does our martial arts show up in the strangest of situations..?

if you train hard, well then it just happens.. it works very very well... that is not just you, but how it is intended to work.

 

[theletch1]

The "Plateau" effect. Everyone has them. I generally hit one plateau per rank and others that I've spoken to are generally the same. I've gone for months with the feeling that you describe and then suddenly, one night, BOOM, everything starts to click. The thing is though, that it's not that one night where everything suddenly clicked at all. During the plateau period your brain and body are fine tuning the techniques and theories that are being force fed to it. When you have that boom moment is just where all the stuff you've been learning just come together. The biggest trick is to keep on keeping on. Takes a deep devotion to your art and yourself to do this sometimes but knowing that others have gone and will go through the same thing in the past and future may help you somewhat. Keep on training. Keep on posting here with us. Just keep on keeping on.

 

[Xue Sheng]

is it just me or does our martial arts show up in the strangest of situations..?

Nah... It's just you :uhyeah:

It does show up when you least expect it and generally you don't even realize it until it is over.

 

[Guardian]

The "Plateau" effect. Everyone has them. I generally hit one plateau per rank and others that I've spoken to are generally the same. I've gone for months with the feeling that you describe and then suddenly, one night, BOOM, everything starts to click. The thing is though, that it's not that one night where everything suddenly clicked at all. During the plateau period your brain and body are fine tuning the techniques and theories that are being force fed to it. When you have that boom moment is just where all the stuff you've been learning just come together. The biggest trick is to keep on keeping on. Takes a deep devotion to your art and yourself to do this sometimes but knowing that others have gone and will go through the same thing in the past and future may help you somewhat. Keep on training. Keep on posting here with us. Just keep on keeping on.

Just about says it all right here. Keep training, keep that positive outlook no matter how hard it is sometimes.

As stated here, everyone goes through it. I've had many times like that, then one day or night, you in a confrontation maybe small or big and that training just takes over and afterwards, you find that all hard work was worth it all the way.

 

[kidswarrior]

Looking at your profile, I'd say especially in your art there will be plateaus followed by sudden realizations of how far you've come. As has been said, 1000 times slow, 1 time fast. Or, 1000 times practiced, 1 Aha! moment. Now stop and think, how long does it take to practice something one thousand times? 2000? 3000? But each of those breakpoints takes you to a new peak. Just hard to see that peak when we're looking down putting one foot in front of the other at step 763, or 1204, or...well, you get it.

How do you succeed? Just don't quit.

 

[MJS]

The "Plateau" effect. Everyone has them. I generally hit one plateau per rank and others that I've spoken to are generally the same. I've gone for months with the feeling that you describe and then suddenly, one night, BOOM, everything starts to click. The thing is though, that it's not that one night where everything suddenly clicked at all. During the plateau period your brain and body are fine tuning the techniques and theories that are being force fed to it. When you have that boom moment is just where all the stuff you've been learning just come together. The biggest trick is to keep on keeping on. Takes a deep devotion to your art and yourself to do this sometimes but knowing that others have gone and will go through the same thing in the past and future may help you somewhat. Keep on training. Keep on posting here with us. Just keep on keeping on.

Great post!! I think that no matter how long we've been training, we still have those moments. But I agree...keep training and perhaps make a small change in the way we train. Its amazing how a small change can turn things around and give us a new outlook!

 

[Sanchin-J]

I've had periods in my training where I've felt as if I was being held back or was in a state of stagnancy in my training if that's what you mean, it wasn't until I started to finally see how the training system works that I began to truly understand why I was where I was. As for reminders, to make a long story short, today I had to take a trip into town to get some thread from a local arts/crafts store to sew my patches onto my new uniform, as I walk into this place I'm immediately faced with the fact that I'm not only lost in this store, but I have no idea what "MERC" thread is.

So, again making the long story short, I ask a sales rep, she says she can't help, ask a second, third and on the fourth I started to get annoyed. I tell this guy that I can't believe that out of 4 sales reps, not one of them could tell me where to get this thread at, its not only an royal headache but its nearly inconceivable. This guy gets extremely defensive and rude almost immediately, and begins flapping his gums at me like I'm some little kid and he demands that I leave the store. I tell him to go get his manager and start towards the front of the store where the customer service desk is and I wait. The manager and employee come to the front desk, I explain to the manager what happened and about how aggressive his employee was to me and the employee starts running his mouth and pokes me in the chest. I inform the employee NOT to touch me again, turn my attention back to the manager and finish explaining that I came in for 2 spools of mercenized thread. Apparantly the employee took my warning as some sort of challenge and lunged at me attempting to push me towards the door and that's when it happened.

*click* defense mode on, trap the hand, sweep the legs, send attacker down hard on the store floor. *click* defense mode off.

Not even 15 seconds after I put the employee down, the police walked in, turns out the employee called them before getting the manager. So the police officers pull me off the employee who's now on the floor, subdued, with my knee pinning him down like a stuck pig and are about to slap the cuffs on me when the manager and a few customers begin to make objections to it. Luckily, there were about 10 customers at the registers near where we were, along with the manager who verified that the employee attacked me after being warned not to touch my person. So, after that mess is all straightened out, I show the manager my Gi uniform patches and the police and manager get quite a chuckle out of the fact that I'm a martial artist and we discover that the thread I need is out of stock atm in his particular store lol.

I didn't press charges on the employee although he was fired on the spot in front of all of us, I almost got arrested for 4 dollars and 96 cents worth of thread lol. My wife says she's never gonna let me go shopping by myself again lol.

 

[searcher]

The "Plateau" effect. Everyone has them. I generally hit one plateau per rank and others that I've spoken to are generally the same. I've gone for months with the feeling that you describe and then suddenly, one night, BOOM, everything starts to click. The thing is though, that it's not that one night where everything suddenly clicked at all. During the plateau period your brain and body are fine tuning the techniques and theories that are being force fed to it. When you have that boom moment is just where all the stuff you've been learning just come together. The biggest trick is to keep on keeping on. Takes a deep devotion to your art and yourself to do this sometimes but knowing that others have gone and will go through the same thing in the past and future may help you somewhat. Keep on training. Keep on posting here with us. Just keep on keeping on.

Well put.

 

[taitsechien]

Looking at your profile, I'd say especially in your art there will be plateaus followed by sudden realizations of how far you've come. As has been said, 1000 times slow, 1 time fast. Or, 1000 times practiced, 1 Aha! moment. Now stop and think, how long does it take to practice something one thousand times? 2000? 3000? But each of those breakpoints takes you to a new peak. Just hard to see that peak when we're looking down putting one foot in front of the other at step 763, or 1204, or...well, you get it.

How do you succeed? Just don't quit.

I agree with you one hundred percent... some days i just find myself hitting a wall with my forms... but if i don't practice i always kick myself during actual classes... i've been doing martial arts my whole life... i'm only 21 but i've been training since i was five... its a part of my life... and to anyone that ever feels the way i feel sometimes (which is just pure laziness on my part) you gotta practice practice practice... a good martial artist knows there will be brick walls and you just gotta keep pushing through...

 

[chinto]

ya I have had the plateau thing happen a few times.... but you are improving even when it does not feel like it...

 

[MA-Caver]

sometimes i feel like my martial arts training is going nowhere... and i get all sad... Then suddenly something will happen... something little... like i'll fall... and land on my feet... or someone will throw something at me and i'll dodge it on reflex alone... or in a completely relaxed situation i'll block an awkward attack... is it just me or does our martial arts show up in the strangest of situations..?

Yep. Repetition leads to habit, habit leads to (self-developed) instinct, which in turns leads to you staying alive.
Happens to me all the time, sometimes I'm aware of it (afterwards) or sometimes not.

 

[Drac]

Yep. Repetition leads to habit, habit leads to (self-developed) instinct, which in turns leads to you staying alive.
Happens to me all the time, sometimes I'm aware of it (afterwards) or sometimes not.

Yep..reps, reps and more reps...In a crisis situation you will respond how you trained...

 

[terryl965]

Yep. Repetition leads to habit, habit leads to (self-developed) instinct, which in turns leads to you staying alive.
Happens to me all the time, sometimes I'm aware of it (afterwards) or sometimes not.

this is so true, when I work out sometimes I feel it is not clicking and I have been doing this for over 45 years. What I have found out in many occasion is when I needed the training it came to me at that time. Sometime practice we cannot see what others see and most of the time what you practice will kick in when you need it.

 

[Darth F.Takeda]

Everyone in almost everything has times that everything seems FUBAR, it's life.

The body mechanics of MA has helped me in many different settings.
It made me more efficient with my movements when I was in construction, because I understood bringing force up from the legs into the hips, rotational power, rooting and relaxed force as oppossed to tensing up.
And breakfalls have saved me from more potental injuries than I can count.