Ernest Cadorin

The Pillars of Practice

Be Spontaneous, Be Methodical

The study of martial arts, as with many endeavours, requires us to attend classes regularly and practice at home. During class time, our primary objectives are to learn, to interact, and to receive feedback. A certain amount of practice happens as part of this process, but it’s at home that the real work of correcting mistakes and assimilating new movements should happen.

I may be stating the obvious, but students who don’t practice at home severely limit their progress in the martial arts. Even if they attend classes regularly, they often have to relearn much of what they had learned in the previous class because they didn’t work on it in the interim. This is unfortunate, since even just a little bit of home practice can accelerate a student’s progress considerably.

I occasionally get asked about my own practice regimen. It’s pretty simple, I would say. Sometimes I’m spontaneous and sometimes I’m methodical. Here’s what I mean:

Spontaneous Practice

In a typical day, most of us have several moments when we find ourselves waiting for something to happen. We might be waiting for our tea to steep, for our family to come down to dinner, or even for our karate class to start. These are often the moments when we instinctively reach for our mobile devices, but they are also the perfect times to do a little spontaneous practice.

The next time you have a spare minute, why not use it to review a kata or to do a few reverse punches. You won’t need to warm up if you keep it light, and you won’t need any special equipment. A teacher of mine used to say that even five minutes of practice per day will do wonders for your technique. He also warned that those five minutes of practice can easily turn into fifteen or twenty (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I can attest to that because it sometimes happens to me!

Methodical Practice

The concept of methodical practice is also something I explain in my article about maximizing kata practice. This is practice that is done for a specific purpose with a well-defined agenda. The purpose, for example, could be to prepare for an upcoming tournament, and the corresponding agenda for each practice session could be to spend ten minutes working on your primary kata, five minutes working on your backup kata, and ten minutes working on sparring combinations.

Another aspect of our training we should approach methodically is something we all need to do from time to time: general kata review. I recommend keeping a comprehensive list of all the kata you know, and working through that list during your practice sessions so that no kata gets left behind.

One last thing worth mentioning about methodical practice is that these practice sessions can often be done at the intensity of a good cardiovascular workout. If you already do some regular cardiovascular activities as part of your fitness routine, you can occasionally swap in the karate practice without having to adjust your workout schedule.

Spontaneous practice and methodical practice are two training approaches that complement each other very well, and I recommend them to anyone who is serious about karate. They don’t necessarily require a lot of time, and you can often fit them into your day without even impacting your schedule. Ultimately, home practice is part of the discipline of martial arts, and disciplined training is a prerequisite for true artistic spontaneity.