The tips below are an excerpt from a work in progress that may well become an ebook, available here in the not too distant future. Check out Gill’s post on some of her travel experiences here.
Maybe not the best place to visit.
A Few Tips for the Wandering Martial Artist
When you’re working with new people as a visitor to a school or at an open seminar, the following practices can help people get to know you, and give you an opportunity to gauge attitudes:
- When you visit other places or attend seminars, this is your mantra: “I am not here to impress anyone. I’m here to learn and to let others do the same.”
- Look for cues and customs in the group and respect them: where shoes, clothes or equipment are stored, water bottles are placed, phones turned off, food on the floor or off, etc.
- Offer to help set up, and offer to help tear down. A lot of folks are content to mill around and watch a few folks do the work. When everyone is tired after a day of training, extra help is greatly appreciated.
- Introduce yourself to the other students before training begins. Avoid going into lengthy expositions of your background and lineage. If asked, keep it to a sentence or two, and don’t try to impress anyone with the details.
- If there’s time to warm up before sessions, just do your normal routine. Don’t take up the middle of the floor, try to jazz it up, or do it half-assed. Just do what you need to do.
- If you are in a group that bows, don’t get into exaggerated bowing displays. If not, a good firm handshake never hurts.
- Don’t get competitive or take things personally. If someone is more skilled than you, learn from it; if you are more skilled, don’t be a dick about it. Over-correcting or “coaching” someone else to death falls under this heading.
- Don’t get over-awed by higher ranks/belts, or reputations. Do what you do, do it well, and do your best to adapt when an instructor wants you to try something different. Likewise, don’t expect that your rank/belt or reputation is going to be important to anyone else.
- If you need to ask questions, ask questions, but don’t monopolize training time with ad infinitum what-ifs, or lengthy explanations about how something is done in your group. Both come off as a passive-aggressive criticism. Sometimes it’s best to ask the instructor for further clarification once things are underway to avoid cutting into everyone else’s training time.
- Communicate about boundaries. All martial arts training carries some inherent risks, and it’s reasonable to expect that you’ll accumulate some bruises, broken toes, a black eye or two, and maybe a broken rib at some point in your training career. However, there is a big difference between acceptable risk and unacceptable risk. Before engaging in training with a person who is new to you:
- Establish mutually agreeable levels of force and speed. If you both agree that it’s time to go hard, go hard. If it’s time to go soft, go soft. Don’t be “that guy” who comes out of the gates at 110% when everyone else has agreed to 50%.
- Establish safety signals, such as tapping on any available surface
- Identify vulnerable areas that should be avoided or treated carefully, such as weak joints or recently healed injuries, and return the favor
- The moment that a partner ignores or “forgets” one of these points, there is absolutely no reason that you can’t excuse yourself from working with him or her. If an instructor or seniors criticize you for this, leave
11. Thank people. If you can spend a few hours throwing relative strangers into the floor, grabbing throats, cranking joints and rolling around on the ground, a sincere thanks and a handshake shouldn’t be difficult to offer.
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Great post Randy. I hope every martial artist in the world reads it!
Absolutely. And on a related note (though put much less gracefully): http://tkri.net/blog/?p=1388
One thing I love about visiting other clubs is how steep the learning curve can be. Sometimes you get more from a couple of hours somewhere new than you do from weeks of plugging away at the old ideas.
I don’t mean to dismiss the value of working with a group of experienced people you know well; that’s essential and it allows you to do things that you can’t do with strangers, or beginners, or people who don’t communicate well.
But especially if you’ve only done one martial art before, if you get a chance go and be a beginner again elsewhere – in say judo or aikido or BJJ or boxing or wrestling or eskrima or whatever, all that matters is that it is new – you can learn SO much in the first few hours, it’s fantastic.
I think you can get that in your own dojo a bit when someone new arrives as well. It kind of shakes everyone out of their comfort zone and suddenly doing familiar stuff has a whole new edge of possibility and unpredictability.
Gill, I share that observation. Some of the big “ah hah” moments over the years have come from working with different groups or people from outside of my usual training partners. Sometimes it has been through watching someone do something really well and realizing that I could do it that way too, other times it’s been through being reminded of something that I had already been working on from a different angle. When we used to have the camps with all of the outside instructors and their students, I would walk away from the weekend with two or three things that I ended up working on for the next year or so, which almost always mutated into other stuff that yielded it’s own rewards. Working with people from another style is especially useful, I’m always amazed at how much stuff one can learn that way in a short amount of time. Here’s to cross pollination!
“I am not here to impress anyone. I’m here to learn and to let others do the same.”
This should be EVERYONE’S mantra…everywhere.
Great post! “…or lengthy explanations about how something is done in your group.” Unfortunately, I see this in seminars outside of the martial arts as well all the time. I never understood this type of attention seeking behavior. What’s the point of learning something new if it never competes with what you learned somewhere else?