Gradings – Time IS important

I know how to do everything - can I quit now?

Occasionally I encounter a student who trains two or three times a week, and is well above average for the length of time that they’ve been training. They sometimes ask, “I know all my katas well, and I’ve done enough classes, why can’t I grade?”

I fully understand their point of view, and on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why they shouldn’t receive their next belt – after all, they can go into any class of equal grades and outperform the other students.

But there’s one vital area in which they are lacking, and it’s simply this – experience. Sure, they may have done twice as many lessons as their classmates, but it’s not enough.

I’ve encountered black belts who have got their belt in just three years, and whom I have great respect for, yet when you come to spar them, there’s something missing. They have a lack of creativity and inventiveness in the ring, and under pressure, they perform far worse than their peers. Of course, there will always be a difference in ability between students of the same grade. Some love kumite, and some shy away from it, but amongst those who enjoy it, there are still those who are clearly lacking.

To understand why, you have to look at the way the human brain works. Now I’m no expert by any means, and I’m trying to paraphrase something I heard a few years ago about memory. It goes something like this: “Practice an hour after, a day after, a week after, and a month after,  and you’ll remember for life.” What this mnemonic reminds us, is the best way to learn new information, and it’s basically a revision template. If I teach you a new concept, and you wait till the next time I teach it, you could be waiting months until I teach it again, and you'll almost certainly forget it by then. However, if you practice that concept according to the timetable in the saying, then you will remember forever.

It’s to do with the way that our brain passes information from short term to long term memory.

If I show you a difficult thing, then ask you the day after to duplicate it, there’s a chance that may already have forgotten it. However, if I show it to you and ask you to repeat it a few times right away, then you go home and practice a few times, that will lodge it in your medium term memory. If you then reinforce your new knowledge by practicing the following day, and the following week, and the following month, the skill passes into your long term memory. Why? Because by repeated practice, you make the skill significant, and you make it physically easier for your brain to access that memory in future. Things achieve far more significance in your brain when you have to work them out for yourself, rather than simply copying (that's why it's so important to practice kata on your own sometimes).

So, back to the students who train extra hard, and hope that it means they are good enough to grade. Physically, yes, I’m sure many of you guys are good enough, but mentally, no, you lack the experience that only time can bring. It’s about more than simply doing the same thing lots of times.

I’ll let you into a little secret, I was a first kyu for over two and a half years. I’d learned sepai and sanseru as a blue belt, which meant that I was performing those kata for something like four years! And you know what? I still feel even now, that I’m learning better ways to perform them, greater understanding of the katas, better ways to deliver power, and retain balance. The old martial artists, back in the 1800s before the birth of modern karate, often devoted their entire lives to the practice of a single kata (and its various bunkai). This wasn’t because they were bad martial artists – far from it – it’s because they understood that the superficial study of a kata only provided superficial benefits.

It always puts a grin on my face when an orange belt child quits saying, “I know all the moves now, I don’t need to keep training.” Then after I stop grinning, the veins on the side of my neck start throbbing, my eye starts twitching, and I have to go take some quiet time away from people for a while…