Good Martial Arts Training Habits

Yesterday in class, Master Dinoto helped me improve my round house kick! First of all, thank you Master Dinoto. You would think that after 38 years of training I would have a "perfect" round kick. Well, with my body maturing (getting old!) and my natural instinct to take my natural abilities for granted, my technique has wavered a bit.

This is why I thought that it was a good idea to start the bootcamp at DKC! I found that I needed to set a new goal and create a plan to reach it. (visit our Boot Camp Blog to read what my goal is).

A good habit to get into is to incorporate some martial arts training outside of the karate school.

Incorporating martial arts training outside the dojang (karate school), is a really easy and a good idea if you would like to build your self defense ability, physical fitness level and your progression rate toward black belt mastery will be far greater than those who only attend class once or twice a week. At first ten minutes is good time to start with. It’s no time at all and everyone can spare ten minutes each day, even if it means putting on the electronic brain reducer (tv) a little later!

Practice all areas of skills and mix your training, shadow spar, bag work and partner work.
Fit you training in with goals, so decide where you want to be “begin with the end in mind”, which is called personal Leadership and then begin to marry your goals with your daily actions which is called personal management. Remember it’s foolish to want something and do nothing about it. So if you want to increase your kicking abilities start putting a plan of actions together, regular sparring, pad sessions, conditioning, weight training and so on.

Remember martial arts are about self discipline - which is, having the ability to teach yourself to do what must be done to accomplish what must be accomplished! - so be strong and stick to your goals, don’t fall into the trap of “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Remember practice doesn’t make perfect it makes improvement, never get to the stage where you feel that you’ve got it and it can’t improve. If you get to this then there is no room for improvement. There’s always space to practice, there is always room for improvement. After all even the undefeated world champion practices, so why not you?

If you need a little help getting started, contact me and we can schedule a short private lesson (15 minutes). Within that time I can create a realistic plan of action for you. Just email me at masterliciaga@dinotokarate.com . See you on the training floor!