Martial Arts Social Media

We now living in the age of social media, youtube , facebook, twitters etc..... everyone now has access to everyone. We can follow their every movement, every thought and just like our multi channel tv's where we have 100's of channels, or thousands of songs on I- Tunes. If our needs are not satisfied instantly or the views being express, don't fit in with our needs, we simply just click a button on the remote or the mouse and hey presto another range of views. We living in the age of "Instant" access.

At the beginning this was a revolution for the good, it's now in my view become a disadvantage to Martial Arts teaching and the development of students. We as a generation surf and scan over information, not spending time or going deeply into learning. We want everything yesterday and believe we learn something as fast. The concept of spending time learning something correctly is alien to the vast social media generation. With the easy access to email, youtube, dvd, downloads etc.. we are bombarded with information from every angle, which has meant we have turn into "info junkies", constantly looking for the next fix.

Now I understand there always exceptions, and everyone believes they are the exceptions, but for 99% of students training, this form of social learning, is going to end up making you unhappy, frustrated with your training and the end product of this is you leave your training.

I posed this question to my students last week and asked them to think about it. Which would you rather have. 5000 different techniques for 20 street defences or 20 Defences that will answer all 5000 different types of Street Attacks. Your answer will depend on how much time you spend on social media! Have a think. Do you have the skill to learn 5000 techniques or even 500 techniques? Do you have the ability to give all your time to learning, for example say 1 technique takes a hour to learn? 5000 hours. Do you have the ability to make it work in real time, under pressure and your life or your love one at stake? Would you bet on giving the correct answer? Or by researching and developing 20 techniques to perfection be more suited for you?

Train hard and see you in class...