“You’re always going to be better if you’re painting your own picture” -Matt Thornton

Kids Martial Arts and Fundamentals

I’m always looking for ways to encourage my daughter to engage in her kids martial arts class and make mistakes.

I want her to be able to learn something and be able to try and find her own way and the best way to go about that is for her to make mistakes and learn. It’s not always about what you do but how you do it and I want her to realize that there are always different ways to learn-what works for one child may not work for her. Whether it’s something in school, in her kids martial arts class, or her sports she will have her own distinct signature or style to learn and do that activity.

Click here for more info on Kids Martial Arts at SBGi in Portland

This is also true of me as a parent.

I find that sometimes I get caught up in doing things my own way and I have to realize and be open to the fact that when I show or teach my daughter something she will see me do it and try to do it her own way. I have coached and played lacrosse for 20+ years and there are 2 tenets I adhere to when I coach: fundamentals and scrimmaging. When I coached I wanted kids to learn the basics, the fundamentals of what was being taught. They needed to learn these so they could play the game. Scrimmaging was important because they needed to be able to learn timing to use the skill in a live setting, to understand the speed of the game. One coach I worked with espoused that if you take one team and only do drills for 1 month and another team and only scrimmage for a month the team that scrimmages will beat the team that drills. There are obviously degrees to this because they need to learn fundamental skills and then apply them to the game, but the idea that the skill is best when applied, as opposed to isolated, is there.

 This is true of almost any endeavor including kids martial arts

One of the reasons I chose to enroll my child in kids martial arts is because I want her to be able to have fun. What I wanted to do was to find a program that she would be able to work hard and hopefully flourish in her capacity to learn.

Since starting at SBG she has been teaching me what she has learned in her kid martial arts class. She’s also learning to be patient with me. The environment of learning in her kids martial arts class at SBG: the openness to work hard, make mistakes and learn from them, to see them as a tool is helping her in a way beyond just learning Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Below is founder of SBG Matt Thornton (@aliveness_ape on twitter) talking about fundamentals in their programs. I love how he says “…it’s like teaching someone to paint by numbers as opposed to just giving them some base colors and letting them paint their own picture. You’re always going to be better if you’re painting your own picture.”

I’m giving my daughter the colors and letting her paint her picture.

Click here for more info on Kids Martial Arts at SBGi in Portland