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 look at a couple of things. Really, you have to toss out the wrong notions that people have about the fighting disciplines. If you can toss out the trash, the answer is quite easily arrived at.

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 instructs you must be able to impart the data. It is important that he know the real reasons for the forms and the bunkai and all that, but he must be able to get that data to you. A martial arts teacher must actually be able to get the concepts across to you.

Third, you must practice an art that includes all the other arts. Well, that messes everything up. You see, with but few exceptions, there aren't any arts that includes all other 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 methodology. Drilling as a class is fine, but only for school children. Somewhere along the line you are going to have to actually learn what is really going on when you do a martial arts technique.

Fifth, and this is the most important, and 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 mindless drilling, and the belief is that if you drill long enough you will see the reason for what you are doing. Unfortunately, this is probably one of the core reasons why people drop out of such arts as Shaolin, 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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