Welcome to Episode #111 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work.”

You see a move. You learn a move. You try a move…

…but it doesn’t work! ARGH! So frustrating.

The truth is, sooner or later, we all hit a wall in our training. We all get to the point where we have to decide whether a technique is possible or impossible. But what if we’re wrong?

Before you give up on those so-called “fancy” moves, let me give you some advice—no technique works in the beginning! Heck—forget the beginning, even if you drill a technique over and over for years, you still might have a problem pulling it off for real.

But don’t give up! In this episode, I will share the six stages of learning that you must pass through to truly master a technique. No, it’s not an easy path to follow, but it’s the only way to get you where you want to go.

To LISTEN to “How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work,” you can either:

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To WATCH the video version or READ the transcript, scroll down below.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

How to Make Martial Arts Techniques Work

Here’s the video. If the player doesn’t work, click this direct link.

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As always, if you’d like to keep the conversation going, feel free to leave a comment here or through my Contact Page.

TRANSCRIPT

Howdy, and welcome to episode #111 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

My name is Ando of Happy Life Martial Arts, and I’m here today to tell you a story– a story about the very first question I ever asked in a martial arts class.

I had trained on my own in my garage for a couple of years, but when I finally ventured out and signed up for a formal martial arts class, this was the first question that came to my mind. And it’s a question that I kept repeating for several years. And it’s all on the topic of–

How do you make a martial arts technique really work?

Perhaps you’ve had a similar question in your mind. You go to class, you see a cool technique, maybe a fancy technique. Your instructor seems to be able to do it, but you can’t and you want to.

What’s up with that?

Well, let me get to the story and then I think I can give you a solution, a pathway at least, to making your techniques work.

So the story, and I believe this was probably the first class, literally, the first class that I was standing in the Dojang, Taekwondo school. The teacher, a nice guy, and a very skillful guy, I believe it was probably his normal routine when a new student comes in to demonstrate some of his skill, to impress upon the student, Here’s why I’m the teacher.

In this case, the teacher would either take another student, or in this case me, and turn them into a puppet. He took my hand and grabbed my fingers, grabbed the palm and twisted my wrist, made me go down, flipped it over, goose neck, chicken wing, finger lock, arm lock.

He just had me going up and down, up and down like a puppet. And of course, it was all very cool. It was impressive and skillful. And when he let me go, he had that look on his face like, Impressive, huh?

Now, I was not trying to be a wise guy. Well, maybe 10% being a wise guy, but 90% actual interest. I just had to ask, Yeah, but how did you get my hand? I understand that if you’re grabbing my fingers and you twist them around multiple ways, I’m going to react to that. I got that.

But if I’m punching you, how did you catch my hand to begin with? And he looked at me with a very straight face and he just said… That comes later. Someday I’ll show you. That was his answer.

Now, in fairness, I’m a brand new student, so if there is a secret to catching someone’s hand out of mid-air in a real fight, why show me? Earn trust, pay your dues. I’m on board with that. So okay, that’ll come later, I just have to have a little bit of faith.

Now as it happens, my time in the Taekwondo school came to an end before I ever learned how to catch somebody’s hand out of mid-air to then turn them into a puppet. I ended up eventually in a Kung Fu school and I ran into the same problem. Loads of difficult, dare I say, fancy moves in the Kung Fu school. All the things that people say don’t work in real fights.

Wrist locks, sweeps, lockups of various kinds, hip throws. And I couldn’t get any of them to work, right? And, as a matter of fact, perhaps this was being a bit of a wise guy, but I was older. I even at some point put up a challenge to my classmates and I said, If any one of you can get a hip throw on me, a legitimate hip throw, while we’re free sparring, I’ll give you $100.

I believe it’s also the case I raised that to $1000 at some point. $1000 to anyone who can drop me with a hip throw. Now, to be fair, I wasn’t hip throwing anybody either. I couldn’t do it either. But that didn’t change the fact that we were being taught hip throws and we were expected to be able to do hip throws.

I’ve mentioned before that early on in my martial arts journey, I was a bit of a technique collector. I had notebooks full of techniques, cool moves, the stuff I wanted to do. But I couldn’t and it was very frustrating.

I’m sure for you too, if you have a similar problem, you show up, you do what you’re supposed to do, you work hard, you practice, you ask questions, but it’s not enough. You still can’t get the moves to work. And for me, the real slap in the face came when I was working with kids.

Maybe when you’re working with adults, you can get away with saying, Well, this guy’s bigger and that guy’s stronger, that guy’s a higher rank. So of course I can’t get these things to work. But when I worked out with kids, and I would kind of slip in an attempt to throw them and surprise them, maybe delight them with something a little fancier, I would also be fumbling around to try to get that hand or get to that right position.

So even with kids, I couldn’t do it. And that infuriated me.

At some point, that came out as anger, like I’m resenting this whole training methodology because none of this stuff you say it works, works. My Kung Fu teacher said something that I believe he said many times, but the first time I really heard it was on this one particular occasion where he told me–

First you learn how to work Kung Fu, then you learn how to make Kung Fu work.

Ah, this to me was the exact same advice or sentiment from my Taekwondo teacher when he said, that comes later. Which now told me that there are two separate projects when it comes to making your techniques work. Two completely different projects–

One project is collecting some moves, get some techniques. The second project is how to apply them, to make them work.

One does not necessarily lead to the other. Just because you keep learning techniques doesn’t mean you can do them. At some point, you have to shift your mental gears from learning what to do to learning how to do it. It’s a big shift. But if you do it, I think there are rewards.

I know I’m only speaking from my own personal experience, of course, but I did change my mentality. I stopped writing techniques down. I already knew I had too many. I had thousands of techniques written down, but who cares? I couldn’t do any of them. Not really.

So I dedicated myself then to the second project, to making the Kung Fu work. And how do you do that? Experimenting. You have to fail. You have to make yourself vulnerable, put yourself back into a beginner’s mindset, just like you did the first time you walked in and said, What do I do? To starting over and saying, Well, now how do I do it? So you in effect become a white belt again