Welcome to Episode #117 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Bad Advice in the Martial Arts.”

You get a lot of advice as a martial arts student… you probably give a lot of advice, too! But is it possible that all of that good advice is actually bad advice?

In this episode, I’m examining five pieces of popular advice that might not be helping anyone. In fact, these teaching clichés might be making your life harder! Here are the five suspects—

• Relax.





• Don’t use so much muscle.





• Leave your ego at the door.





• Stop doing the same technique–try something different.





• Don’t give up.

Any of these sound familiar? 🙂

Don’t get me wrong—there are good intentions behind all of these training tips, so I’m not saying you’re a bad person for repeating them. But I am saying that there’s a right time to share these words of wisdom and a wrong time… it’s that crucial judgment that makes the difference.

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Thanks for listening! Keep fighting for a happy life!

Bad Advice in the Martial Arts

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, Ando here from Happy Life Martial Arts, back from a bit of a hiatus. First one in ten years, I don’t feel too bad about it.

Welcome to episode #117 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better.

Yeah, since you’ve seen me last, I moved from Raleigh, North Carolina back to Los Angeles. We lived there almost two years, about a year and three quarters. And don’t get me wrong, I have no hate for the East Coast. I’m from there. All of my family is there.

On this particular trip, I met some really great new people, some great new training partners. I learned a lot. I have nothing but nice things to say about the experience. But what can I say?

I love LA. So we are back. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

Today, I have five pieces of bad advice that you’ve probably heard in the martial arts.

And now that I can tell you, I’ve trained from coast to coast. I am sure no matter what your school is or who your teacher is, you’ve heard these pieces of advice.

Spoiler alert. The five pieces of advice I’m going to talk about today…

• Number one, relax.





• Number two, don’t use your muscle.





• Number three, leave your ego at the door.





• Number four, stop doing your favorite technique all the time. Do something else.





• And number five, don’t give up.

Those are the five pieces of advice that I’m going to call bad today. Now, here’s what I mean.

All advice, I think, is well-meaning, well-intended. But that doesn’t mean it’s always correct.

For example, very wise words, look before you leap. Have you ever heard that? But maybe you’ve also heard, he who hesitates is lost.

Now, those two pieces of advice are opposites. They have two different ideas. So which one is good and which one’s bad?

It all depends on your particular situation and when you hear the advice, right? The advice that you get today may not be so good tomorrow and vice versa.

So the advice that I’ve already listed here, the five pieces of advice, in some contexts is probably good advice. But not always. And I want to talk today about when that is bad advice and when you shouldn’t follow it at all.

All right, makes sense. So let’s get right to it.

Number one, relax.

Now, I have already ranted about how I think this is a terrible piece of advice in a separate video. So I’ll put that link below if you want to go into the full, full discourse, you can find it there. But in case you haven’t seen it, I’ll sum it up very quickly.

When people tell you to relax, they fail to see that your tension, if you’re tight, is a symptom of a problem. It’s not the problem itself.

If you are really a concerned teacher and you see someone is tense or you feel that you are tense yourself, the question is why? Why are you tense? Why are you not relaxed? That’s what you need to figure out.

I don’t think anybody walks around purposely trying to be tense. So when your teacher comes up or if you say to a student, relax, it’s like, well, no kidding, I would like to be relaxed. Why don’t you ask me why I’m not relaxed?

For instance, do you like getting hit in the face? Maybe you start martial arts and you don’t want to get hit in the face. So of course you’re tense.

Maybe you don’t like someone putting their arm around your neck and trying to choke you out and so you tighten up, you get tense. Those are natural reactions. So telling me to relax doesn’t help.

What is good advice? Well, the solution to tension is experience. You need to get better at what you’re doing. You need to get comfortable at what is making you so tense.

So as a teacher, you should be showing your students how to relax. Don’t just tell me to relax. Show me how.

If that means something simple like take a breath, that’s a great first step. Take a breath that does help me relax a little bit unless I’m being choked, then no, it’s futile.

Generally, it’s going to be introducing a skill, giving me a tip to show me why this isn’t so bad a situation, how to make it better, how to turn it around. And then the more you practice that, the more your tension will go away, the more comfortable you’ll feel, and suddenly, you just are relaxed.

It’s not something that you pursue directly. It’s something that happens as a reward for your practice. So, get more experience, and that should solve itself.

Number two, stop using your muscle. Stop using all your strength.

Recently, I was in a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, and there was a big guy. He’s a white belt, head taller than I am, at least 50 to 70 pounds, bigger than I am, and cut. This is a weight lifting kind of guy.

And when we rolled, I was moving all over him. I was tying him up. I was able to get out from under.

And after we rolled, I said, you know, it’s okay for you to fight back. It’s okay for you to use what you got there. Use your muscle.

And he said, oh, well, they told me not to. I answered, who told you not to? They’re just trying to make it easier on themselves, I think. With all respect to anyone who gave him that advice, you left him with nothing.

It’s like saying, hey, listen, don’t use your muscle. And you don’t use your speed. I see you’re very fast. Don’t use that.

Hey, I see you’re very flexible. Please don’t use that. Don’t kick me in the head. I don’t want you to use your flexibility right now.

What?

Hey, you seem to have really good cardio. Could you just hold your breath sometimes so we could even this out? Because I’d prefer if you were out of breath.

Hey, I noticed that your eyesight seems to be pretty good. Do you mind just closing one eye while we work out?

You wouldn’t say those things, right, typically? So why does muscle get such a bad rap? I don’t think that’s fair.

Particularly if you look at the heights of the sport, let’s say, of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, do you see people without muscle? No, I see people who are jacked up, people who admit to using steroids.

So they have mus