By: Jason Kraus
It is an excellent time, when, after an especially good practice or seminar or a breakthrough in understanding of a technique to pause for a moment.
Write a short paragraph if you enjoy words. Make a drawing or a diagram if you learn better through visuals. Record a voice note or short phone video, if that is the best way you process knowledge.
Whatever method you choose, the point is to draw special attention to the new understanding your hard work has gained you.
Because even though improvements are constant as you continue to practice, they are still hard-earned.
Take time to recognize your “Level Up” moments.
Most of the time we understand techniques intellectually far faster than we can actually do them physically.
If Sensei explains how to do a technique then demonstrates the technique and corrects your movements, you’ve used three senses (hearing, sight, touch) to understand something new, which is great.
You probably have a pretty good understanding of what you need your body to do. But the only way to transfer that intellectual knowledge to actual physical understanding is through repetition and practice.
So begins the hundreds and even thousands of repetitions one must do to internalize the action to truly understand it.
Some may look at this as a grind. Something they can avoid or find a shortcut for. Or even as homework, and who likes homework?
When you make a breakthrough and you want to really ingrain the evolution into your mind, body, and spirit (the karate way), practice and don’t think of it as homework.
Make it ‘honework’.
Focus on your technique like a surgeon would, removing extra movement. Refine like an Olympic runner practicing their start. Sharpen your skill like a skilled swordsmith would sharpen a blade.
Refine and refine and ingrain and ingrain until your new knowledge is so woven into you as to be automatic.
This process never stops as long as you keep practicing. Some find that challenging and frankly, at times it can be. But life, like karate, is this way.
Learn, practice, evolve.
Learn more, practice more, evolve more.
Take that new knowledge and apply it to everything that came before (hello again, my old friend Heian Shodan…).
By doing the honework, you will find that you never stop improving. This is true in karate, and it is true in life.
Related: The First as The Last
Jason Kraus is a lifelong martial artist. Jason spent decades in various martial arts including traveling to and living in both Japan and Korea. He has most recently returned to his first love, Shotokan Karate.
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