Chitika

Monday, August 8, 2011

How Many Years Does It Take to Become a Martial Arts Master?

By Al Case


How many decades does it take for one to become a Martial Arts Master? This is a great question. The good news is that there is an easy answer to this question, and it will apply to any art you study, be it taekwondo, aikido, pa kua chang, or whatever.

To get to this simple answer, however, you have to be willing to examine a couple of factors. Really, you have to get rid of the incorrect ideas that people have about the fighting disciplines. If you can take out the trash, the answer is pretty obvious.

First, it really matters who teaches you. You see, your teacher's history isn't what's important. What is important is whether the sensei you study with actually has the hard core information of what the arts really are.

Second, the fellow who teaches you must be able to teach. It is important that he know the real reasons for the katas and such, but he must be able to get that data to you. A martial arts teacher must actually be able to teach.

Third, you must study an art that includes all arts. Well, there goes the ballgame. You see, with very few exceptions, no art includes all arts.

All martial arts have held themselves apart, believing that they are superior, and the other fellow is inferior. This is rather ludicrous, as the most important factor of the eastern disciplines is that a fist is coming, or a throw is coming, and everything is grown from those two facts. Using those two facts as your yin and yang, you can actually figure out all martial arts, and even make them into one martial arts system that includes all the others.

Fourth you need a superior training concept. Drilling as a group is okay, but only for young children. Somewhere along the line you are going to have to actually learn what is actually occurring when you perform a martial arts technique.

Fifth, and this is one of the crucial yet most neglected of all the factors I have listed, you must understand what you are doing. In most Martial Art Dojos, you see, the students do endless repetitions of the drills, and the belief is that if you drill long enough you will see the reason for what you are doing. Unfortunately, this is why so many people drop out of such arts as Wing Chun, Tai Chi Chuan, or even Ninjitsu.

People don't want to do what they don't understand, you see. Would you like to run in a dark room filled with thrusting fists, lightening kicks, body slamming throws, and that sort of thing? Nobody would, and that is why so few people run the course and actually learn Karate, or kung fu, or kenpo, or whatever.




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