http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYF_hL7ude4

Ilya Goldman BJJ Ezekiel Choke Instructional Video - YouTube

John Lennon - Imagine - YouTube

Instant Karma - John lennon - YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfI22dZ979A

Sometimes, my students just don’t get the subtlety of the forms. They run through the motions, but both sides don’t “listen” or “feel” the other side’s body movements and rhythm. One of my senior students is a lot blunter about correcting their mistakes than I am. I try to talk my students through their errors. My senior sometimes won’t budge if the technique doesn’t work, and since he’s north of 250 pounds, it’s pretty darned hard to move him if he doesn’t want to go, and if he’s still in balance. ------------------------- I sighed. Well, guys, back to the basic kata. See, basics are important. You have got to have your stances, grips, body movement nailed. Describing this incident, I don’t mean to embarrass my students. I want to illustrate that the goals of kata training is to reach a level of competency and speed that mimics actual combative situations. The basic forms teach the foundations. If you don’t master the foundations, then doing the advanced forms is not going to make you any better. You’re just going to be doing them as badly as your crappy basic forms. And again, in order to reach that level, a junior student needs to work with not just people at his level, but with seniors who can push him to reach a higher level of competency. There needs to be a constant upping of the ante until you reach a high level of technical ability. Being satisfied with mediocrity is not an option. In the teaching of a kata, you will see in aikido dojo the oft-used training regime of show-and-do. A sensei will demonstrate the technique. You see his form and try to imprint how he does it into your psyche, then you pair off and try to do what he showed. There’s nothing wrong with this system. You need to see the best example of a form before you can execute it yourself. How does the importance of being a good uke fit into this? As teachers of educational pedagogy will tell you, this is actually a pretty complex operation, fraught with possible dangers. For one thing, some aikido dojo (and I’m only using aikido as an example because it’s the first that came to my mind…I can just as well use a karate school, or a koryu school) will take the “show” part to great lengths, but not any “explain” part. So you see it happening, but in some dojo, a junior may have no idea conceptually what’s going on. That, educators would say, doesn’t address learners who learn by logical, mental processing, and so this only works well with students who are kinetic learners. These students are the ones who can watch a movement, internalize it and repeat it with their bodies without having to consciously think about it too much. All of us are spread out across a wide spectrum between being kinetic and mental learners. ----------------------- This may seem to be a bit of a digression, but the important thing is, in the typical “show and do” kata training, the teacher demonstrating has the advantage of usually demonstrating with a high-ranking student, who knows how to be uke. So the form looks good. It’s not because “uke” fakes it. Far from it. It’s that a good uke knows the meaning of the kata, can play the right role, and is able to elicit the proper defensive response to the proper attack. When a junior tries to repeat the performance, he/she is at a disadvantage, therefore, because he not only is trying to figure out how his own body has to move, he sometimes is working with an uke whose movements and attacks and responses are less than optimal for learning the kata properly. If you manage to work with a higher ranked partner, you will probably find that your technique will improve faster. Your partner will be able to point out corrections and steer you in the proper direction.