Techniques or Concepts?

[SFC JeffJ]

What does your training emphasize?

In my training, my instructor really pushes techniques until he sees you are starting to get the concepts behind them, then it's all about the concepts. It's interesting to see the change when he notices this in a student. Also very interesting to see how so many people vary in getting the concepts behind the techniques.

Jeff

 

[morph4me]

I think most people teach technique first, to give the student something to work with and introduce concepts. Once you understand the principles that make the technique work, it's easier to learn other techniques using the same concepts, and adapt the techniques from different positions and attacks.

I like to get into the principles early, and work both ways, so that the people who don't get the concepts as easily can work the techniques, eventually they come together and you can see the light bulb come on:idea:. Also makes correcting it easier when you can point to a principle that's being overlooked.

 

[Darth F.Takeda]

It's like learning an instrument.
At one level, you learn sacles, chords and songs, by rote.
This gives you the basic techniques and principles.
Then you play with others, and things come at you from slightly different angles, so the techniques morph into something not in the textbook.
Soon, your improviseing, which is what a fight is, a jazz jam.

We use the technique to teach the principle, and then apply it at speed.

 

[bignick]

A good mixture...

The concepts were being taught to me all along, but it took me a few years to actually see them. Techniques are easier for beginners to understand, but just because they may not grasp all of it right away I don't feel it should be dumbed down or left out.

 

[exile]

I think most people teach technique first, to give the student something to work with and introduce concepts. Once you understand the principles that make the technique work, it's easier to learn other techniques using the same concepts, and adapt the techniques from different positions and attacks.

I like to get into the principles early, and work both ways, so that the people who don't get the concepts as easily can work the techniques, eventually they come together and you can see the light bulb come on:idea:. Also makes correcting it easier when you can point to a principle that's being overlooked.

We use the technique to teach the principle, and then apply it at speed.

A good mixture...

The concepts were being taught to me all along, but it took me a few years to actually see them. Techniques are easier for beginners to understand, but just because they may not grasp all of it right away I don't feel it should be dumbed down or left out.

Great points, everyone!

It's important to get people to understand the principle or concept, because those stay the same even though the particulars of the fight change. But it's really hard to make any sense of a generalization if you've no particular cases to use to get the sense of what the generalization is about. As everyone has observed, it makes sense to start from a concrete case and then nudge people to discover the generalization on their own.

So a fairly high-level strategic principle of karate or TKD could be statable as: `impose compliance on the attacker to set up the strike.' It's going to really help the average learner if you start them off with a nice specific instance, say a demonstration of hikite and hip rotation to lock the wrist, setting up an arm lock with elbow pressure, to drive the attacker's head lower and keep it there, where a very hard strike can be accurately directed at a weak point on the head to finish off the attacker (and you can always break the joint if you need to make sure it's all over). That's a very simple sequence that I've found most students, even quite young ones, absorb with little trouble (though I don't present it in quite those terms to kids). Once they get that one example, whole new conceptual dimensions open up for them—the movement from locking to striking/striking to throwing, and the transformation of the striking hand into a controlling hand, all become almost intuitively obvious. One picture is worth a thousand words...