Eyes Up! Minds On!

The biggest piece of any self defense program: awareness.  If you don’t see what’s coming, all the techniques in the world can’t save you.  How do you practice awareness?

Today in kid’s class, we started with a simple physical idea – keep your eyes on your partner.  To keep things exciting, if a student let their eyes wander off of their partner, they had to do five burpees.

The physical is a start but awareness is more than keeping your eyes on someone.  Most high school students have learned the trick of looking at their teacher but daydreaming about the newest zombie apocalypse movie.  How do we move beyond the physical?

The way we did it today was to have the students do some harmony sparring.  If they began to think about anything besides the sparring that they were engaged in, they had to do one burpee.  Why only one?  Because it was meant to be like a cold splash of water to the face when one is dozing off.