You’re not getting worse, your knowledge is improving!

Sometimes training can seem like an uphill struggle, and the air seems thinner the higher you get. But at least you're getting higher!

In every dojo, you’ll never be far away from talking to someone who says that they feel as though their karate has stagnated, or is getting worse. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling as though hard-earned knowledge is losing its value, but the feeling is an illusion. Just as body-builders who spend every day working out may find it hard to recognise the gradual, but continuous improvements in their physique, so too, do martial artists fail to recognise how far they’ve improved.

It’s certainly true that you lose the edge disappointingly quickly if you stop training for a couple of weeks, but by the same token, you can restore yourself to full effectiveness in just a couple of training sessions if you work hard.

However, when it comes to your overall rate of improvement, there are so many factors at work that stop you from appreciating your true level of improvement. For starters, as your knowledge improves, you realise how much more you have to achieve. Thus it often seems as though the road ahead is getting longer. That’s one of the reasons why we say that karate is a journey, not a destination. You should aspire for continuing improvement, rather than setting an arbitrary target by which you will, in your mind, have made it. The road ahead will always move away as fast as you move along it – that’s how it should be, because as you learn more, you take on more challenges.

It’s one of our most popular sayings in GKR – “There are many 1st katas. There’s a white belt 1st kata – there’s a red belt 1st kata – there’s a black belt first kata – and there’s more beyond...” In other words, you perform karate according to the level that you’re at.

Another thing that often frustrates people is the fact that combinations, especially in kumite situations, still cause them difficulty. Well join the club, because it’s the same for most of us. Unless you practice your combinations on a weekly basis, you’re unlikely to ever develop sufficient mastery of any but the most basic ones to ever feel natural. It’s the same for everyone. You have two solutions – practice them more, or accept that without regular practice, you’ll always feel awkward.

And then of course, there are the times that you train and everything you do seems wrong. I had a night like that last night! I kept forgetting my kata, and my balance sucked, and my kumite was quite ordinary, and my concentration was not up to scratch. To make matters worse, it seemed as if I made the biggest mistakes just when my sensei was watching me. But am I despondent? Am I heck! I’ve had nights like that before and I’ll have them again I expect. Maybe I ate the wrong food earlier so I was lethargic, maybe I was a little tired from working so hard during the early part of the session, maybe it was the wrong phase of the moon an I was turning into a werewolf – who knows?! The thing is, the more experience I achieve, the more able I am able to accurately critique my own performance. I beat 10 out of 15 people I sparred, but I know, that I didn’t really use my best kumite skills to beat them. I also know that I should have been more tactical against the other 5, and maybe beat some of them too.

Sensei Jason told us about the stages of learning – there are four: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. Here’s how it works:-

• Unconscious incompetence – You suck at something, but you don’t even know it. It’s like a white belt first kata; they don’t do hip turns or timing or focus or straight wrists, but they don’t even know that those things are issues, so they’re blissfully ignorant.
• Conscious incompetence – You know you suck, but you haven’t managed to become good at it yet. An orange belt may know all the things to do in first kata, but there’s no way they can do them all.
• Conscious competence – You can do it okay, but it takes concentration. A brown belt first kata – where they know and are capable of all the issues, and can do them, but you better not distract them while they’re doing it!
• Unconscious competence – You’ve become so adept that it no longer takes any concentration. Nukes can be going off behind you, lions could be mating in front of you, aliens could be landing on your head, and you still do a fantastic first kata. It no longer requires any conscious thought at all.

Most of us are somewhere in the first three stages, and the only way to achieve stage 4 is lots of intelligent practice. Repetition, repetition, repetition. You didn’t achieve unconscious competence at tying your shoelaces by reading a book on it, or doing it once – you achieved it by endless repeated attempts. But remember, practice is not enough – it must be correct practice. Practice makes permanent – perfect practice makes perfect!

In conclusion, I turn to sensei Joe Estrada’s words to help you past any difficult times. He talks about the “Circle of Karate”. It represents the things that are important in your karate – kumite, kata, basics, etiquette, hard work. You arrange them in a circle, and then work on each thing for a while – for a couple of classes, a couple of months, whatever. The principle is that by working on one, you improve all of the others by osmosis; the skills filter across into other areas. You also distract yourself from feelings of inadequacy in one area because you’re making achievements in others.

So be grateful that your knowledge has improved, you’re on the way to achieving unconscious competence!

Article from an idea suggested by Sensei Dave Fox