Martial arts / How I make mistakes

[haggholm]

Lately I’ve found it interesting to contemplate how I make mistakes—that is, in a very broad view, what type of mistakes I make—in martial arts. It’s interesting (to me; it may be interesting to no one else) because it is slightly surprising, and because it seems remarkably consistent, holding equally true in BJJ, judo, and fencing.

The way I see it, when I make mistakes—execute a technique the wrong way, use poor footwork or bad posture, whatever—there could be two reasons why I do so. First, I might have the wrong idea of how it is supposed to be done, and perhaps perfectly execute the technique according to my mistaken impression of how it should be done. Second, I might know how it should be done, but fail to do it.

For some reason or other, my mistakes are almost invariably of the second type. With three days of martial arts practice per week (=five classes…oh, plus occasional fight nights at Academie Duello) I make an awful lot of mistakes and get a substantial number of corrections, but rarely if ever do any of those corrections teach me how a technique should be done.¹ Rather, I generally seem to restrict myself to techniques I know², and corrections very frequently seem to produce exchanges liberally paraphrased as

Instructor: OK, when you do X, you should be doing it like this, and remember to do Y and avoid Z.

Me: …Well, duh, of course that’s how X is done. Who in the wide world doesn’t know that? What I want to know is, since I was trying to do X, what the hell was I doing?

Instructor: You were doing it like this; also you were doing Z but forgetting to do Y.

Me: Really? Um, wow. Wow. I’ll, er, I’ll try to fix that…

This musing has no conclusion as such. I just find it interesting that, given that of course I make mistakes³, they are so consistently of this type rather than the other, across three different martial arts (of two fundamentally very different types). I wonder whether this experience is typical, or characteristic of how I personally function?

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¹ Of course I have inconceivably vast realms of knowledge left to learn. I’m not saying that I know everything, just that (1) I tend to stick with techniques I have a fairly good idea how to do, and (2) when I gain knowledge of how to properly perform new techniques it tends to be during technique demonstrations and/or drilling, not corrections during sparring.

² This helps explain why my repertoir of techniques I actually use is so tiny. I’m not too bothered by this; if I end up sticking with a small but solid core of techniques, that’s fine by me.

³ Just like everyone else, of course. I tend to think that I make mistakes more often and consistently than most in the martial arts, having an astonishing lack of talent, but by and large that’s OK. I have talent in other areas. In martial arts, I have fun, and slowly progress over the years by dint of sheer persistence, entirely in spite of pathological lack of talent. This, too, is a form of accomplishment—and accomplishment not available in areas where I am talented.

Comments

[sheepykins.livejournal.com]

In my experience, when trying to learn any kind of physical maneuver (whether parkour, flying a kite.. hell, walking up stairs), I don't actually do it right until I stop thinking about it. And even once I've learned it, if I suddenly find myself thinking about the execution, I mess up.

So in essence, you're thinking "this is what I need to do, this is what I need to do, this is what I need to do.." and so you think you've done it, when in reality you've trailed off the page, if that makes sense.

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

It makes a lot of sense. Though I do not believe that this is really the problem I tend to have.

[sheepykins.livejournal.com]

I didn't either (or at least, didn't really recognize it) til the saga of the parkour roll.