Where to?

Too often students throw punches and kicks the same place they throw an errant stick found in the park: anywhere. You can see it in their eyes, and you can see it in their body language. The difference between a student who is imagining a target and the one who is just going through the motions is huge.

A simple way to help students with this is to make them use each other as (safe) targets. In our style we call the drill street stages. One student stands still in a pre-determined stance while the other moves around them in a circle throwing strikes. You’d think that this would force a student to look at what they’re doing. Sometimes…

Often, especially with younger students, the tendency is to just treat their partner like a pole that they are swinging around. They march in a circle, throwing punches at nothing, happy to have someone to dance around. To force the issue, today at Lewis we had the students name the targets as they went around. “Nose.” “Knee.” “Shin.” The list goes on.

The lights came on in some of the student’s eyes. Sometimes it was while they were throwing strikes, other times it was while strikes were coming at them. The looks on their faces said “oh, these moves are meant for hitting people!” and then “hey, that could really hurt someone!” That’s when I knew we were getting somewhere, when everyone was starting to contemplate the consequences of their actions. To me, martial arts has always been about understanding and contemplating consequence in a safe environment.

The video above, shows you some of the “fun” things we get to throw at students when we’re not doing the “serious” stuff.

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