He's been off living in Mexico for a while, and has a lot of time to think. All of it seems to be aimed at our advanced class.
So far, it has to do with warm-ups, drills, teaching method, class organization, and quantity of sparring. In other words, just about everything.
The first is my least favourite; warm-up exercise. This is where the group does a bunch of running, stretching, and strength exercise stuff in order to prepare their bodies to train, and to promote fitness.
Usually, half of our group will have just been training at the prior White Belt Combatives class. Do we need to really prepare our bodies to train? Ten seconds before the advanced group starts, we were just rolling around on the ground training.
Jiu-Jitsu also doesn't have muscle-tearing types of activities. There are no head-high kicks or things of that ilk. A little light loosening up might not be a problem, if anything is needed at all.
The last argument for pre-class exercising it that it would make us more fit. I find this kind of funny. The best fitness promoting activity have ever done is Jiu-Jitsu free-rolling. Instead of 5 minutes of jogging around before class, it would work much better to have 5 more minutes of rolling at the end.
Anyhow, warm-ups are not a big deal.
The next thing he wants to introduce is a warm-up drill time on most nights. This is not the same as warm-up exercise, and I'm all in favour of this.
In these drills, a real Jiu-Jitsu move is rapidly repeated over and over. Besides getting the heart pumping, the idea is to improve on the exact movements contained in the drill. I am a huge fan of this type of thing.
When training in class, I like to get every possible repetition into practice time. At least twice a week I am at open-mat doing precisely this type of activity all on my own.
The benefits are huge. Down in Los Angeles, Ryron Gracie sometimes has students do drills of this nature. One I recall is shooting triangle chokes from guard. Partners take turns doing sets of 20 shots; punch in the opponent's hand and fire the triangle from hip-level guard to neck level in one movement. Each partner would usually end up doing maybe three sets of this, or 60 full-speed triangle-from-guard shots. When I tried to explain the drill back home, nobody even knew what I meant by shooting the guard, whereas I was pretty good at it.
Don't confuse these warm-up drills as being the same as a bunch of exercise. They are direct Jiu-Jitsu skill development.
As to teaching method, I've been whining a lot lately in this blog about how we are getting flooded with too much information during class. Shawn wants to simplify what we are covering.
Our curriculum is divided into 7 chapters, which are in turn split into up to a half-dozen topics, which each contain several techniques, which are further divided into slices, and which often have a number of variations.
We would still do all 7 chapters, and all the topics, and techniques. We would perhaps lose some slices, and certainly drop most variations. I am secretly hoping that a few entire techniques would go as well, to be picked up the next time we return to that chapter.
He also wants to do faster demo/explanations to give us more practice time. Our demo-to-practice ratio is currently quite out of kilter due to how much is trying to be taught.
I am fully in favour of the cutting away of information and more practice.
He also wants to change the class's structure for at least part of our training. Currently, we are all lumped together in the Master Cycle class, with everybody working on the exact same material. Shawn wants us to sometimes split apart to work on levels of material.
This could work sometimes, but not always. We are a very small group, and sometimes smaller still. On a good night, there will be maybe 3 Purple Belts, 3 or 4 Blue Belts, and perhaps a White Belt who has permission to attend. On a night like that, we could certainly be split for some activities, with the White Belt being merged in with the Blues.
At other times, there might be 2 Purple, and 3 Blues. As one of the Purples would be teaching, they really can't make a group with the other guy their level, so there could only be one group.
I don't have an issue with occasional class slitting, but am saying there are practical issues.
Another change he wants is to have our classes start precisely on time. This is an obvious way to "create" more minutes of every activity, and has been slipping lately.
Shawn also feels we don't spar enough, and he is absolutely right. Our push to plow through all of the curriculum has shoved sparring onto the back burner.
Let's give an example. Our class is supposed to start at 7:00pm, but it never gets going until 7:10. We jump right into the night's instruction, and this will go until about 8pm. In that time we we be watching for perhaps 40 minutes, and practicing for 10. We might roll after that for 5 minutes, or on a good night for 10.
Let's call it 60 minutes in total, of which 40 is watching, 10 is practicing, and 10 rolling.
Shawn's ideas would see us start right at 7 o'clock. There would be warm-up exercises or drills for 10 minutes, and then instruction and practice. As he wants more practice, let's say it is 25 minutes of instruction and 25 minutes of practice. After that we roll until 8:30.
In this example there are 90 minutes in total, of which 10 is warm-up exercise or drill, 25 is instruction, and 25 practice, and 30 minutes of rolling.
This is a huge improvement, especially if the majority of the warm-up activity is actually JJ drilling. If so, the evening would really be 25 minutes of being instructed, and 35 minutes of actually working on skills, followed by 30 minutes of applying them.
Shawn wants us rolling more, which his changes will certainly make possible. He doesn't mean the type of sparring which can lead to injury. He means sparring of every type, from intense, to light, to flowing, to instructional.
Put this all together, and I don't see how we could fail to improve significantly.
None of the steps to achieve this are insignificantly difficult. They are; starting on time, doing warm-up activity, shortening instruction, increasing practice time, rolling more, not ending class until 8:30pm every night.
I have tried hard to come up with further improvements on the overall concepts that Shawn wants to introduce. The only area I've found is in the curriculum
My suggestion is to not teach to a fixed schedule. The full cycle of material should not have a predetermined length, nor should any chapter, topic, or technique.
Instruction should be given in waves each evening, followed by generous practice time, followed by the next bit of instruction, and more practice. It should be done at a natural learning pace. When the clock approaches whatever time is designated for the rolling to begin, the instructor should either just stop teaching where ever they are, or do one more slice/variant, and then end. If we are in mid-technique, that's just fine. Pick it up again at the next class.
The feeling should never be to cram anything in, especially at the expense of students actually practicing skills or rolling.
In any case, it's all very interesting and exciting
No comments:
Post a Comment