2025-03-25

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

Tonight’s adult class repeated the drills I talked about last time, starting with yakusoku ippon kumite and proceeding up to a sort of “1-time free-sparring” where the defender’s job is to position himself where it’d be difficult for the attacker to press the attack.

More interesting (to me, anyway) was the conversation we had at the end of class about the tyranny of diminishing returns when it comes to one’s rate of learning over time. I let the brown belts know that they were at a frustrating stage of their development where each incremental step of learning seems to take longer and longer than it did in the beginning. Like “leveling up” in a game, going from 10th level to 11th level takes much more experience than going from 1st level to 2nd level does.

Being a white belt can be intimidating, but showing improvement is easy because you’re awful at everything. Learning gets a bit slower at the mid-kyu grades. Your improvement on lunge punch may slow down, but you just learned back kick and you’re awful at it so there’s plenty of room for rapid improvement there.

As you continue, karate is less and less about learning “new” things and more and more about polishing the “old” things. This can be discouraging, and this is when many people quit to find a new hobby - one where they can get that rapid “awful to okay” development again.

But we’re not just teaching techniques, are we? We’re also teaching patience, perseverance, and discipline, and those things need to be practiced too. This is often the stage where students are asked to start helping with instruction and learn that doing a thing and teaching a thing are two overlapping, but very different, skills.

In the end, I encouraged the brown belts to push through this period of their development. It can feel like a grind sometimes, but it can also be very rewarding.