Some thoughts about teaching the fundamentals

Every martial arts instructor needs to teach the fundamentals in some fashion. This may depend greatly on the art in question, or on the flavour and focus of the club, or on a variety of other factors. However, everyone should probably agree that the fundamentals are important and that instructors need to teach them in some fashion!

In my 20+ years of experience with martial arts, I have taught (and have been taught) the fundamentals of different arts in lots of different ways. Some of these were very effective, some were not. Sometimes it was my own peculiarities that caused a method to be effective or not. Sometimes it was the way that the instructor was framing, describing, and teaching the material.

In this article, I would like to share two thoughts that I have been having recently about the issue of teaching fundamentals. I have many other thoughts on the matter but I would like to keep the article concise!

What are the fundamentals?

It might seem like a silly question to ask of an instructor – but do you know what the fundamentals actually are for your system?

And if you do, then how are you talking about them and framing them to your students?

That second question is probably more interesting than the first. You might glibly say that footwork is fundamental, and so is defence, and so is attack. Well then. The entire system is apparently just fundamentals, and should therefore be quick and easy to learn. Right? Probably not.

If you refer to anything and everything as “the fundamentals”, or describe everything as being basic, then your beginners don’t have a discrete set of fundamentals to learn and train.

Footwork is crucially important, sure. But is every single possible footwork technique a fundamental? Probably not. There are probably some footwork techniques that beginners simply don’t need to know and that only become useful in relatively rare circumstances. There are probably some footwork techniques and concepts that are more important and more frequently required than others, so these are probably better candidates to be the actual fundamentals.

I have been at so many clubs and lessons over the years where this is described as a fundamental, and so is this, and so is this as well, and actually so are these things too. And at the end of the lesson, every single thing was apparently part of “the basics”. Except that some of those things were significantly more complicated than others, and often comprised multiple component pieces.

As an instructor, it might be tempting to describe everything as fundamental, because everything you do probably feeds into everything else and it all underpins and supports your art. But for a beginner, who doesn’t have “the fundamentals” yet, what are the (few) most important things they need to learn? It will probably serve them better to work on these things specifically and to know that these are the most important elements of the system.

As a general rule of thumb, I try to say that things are simple only if my newest students can pick them up quickly. If it takes longer, and is more complicated than that, then I try not to trivialise the action or concept, because clearly it isn’t as simple for other people as it might have become for me as the instructor.

How to do the fundamentals?

Do you teach people what the fundamentals are?

Do you teach people how to do the fundamentals?

These are two quite different questions. I have had the experience of training in lessons where the instructor happily told us what the fundamentals were, or happily went from technique to technique while saying that they were all basic or simple or fundamental – and yet, they never quite managed to teach how to do these techniques in any detail. I left these lessons, perhaps knowing what the fundamentals were, but knowing or understanding little about how to do them.

It is doubtless easy for you as an instructor (or as a more advanced student) to show a fundamental action to a newer student. And it may seem slow or overly pedantic to you to describe in detail how these things are done. After all, if you show it a few times, your student can pick it up, right?

Not true in every case. Perhaps some people will learn things that way, but others will not. People need an appropriate amount of detail, and need to learn how to do the fundamentals. And maybe, as you teach how to do the thing in a bit more detail, you might realise that there are still-deeper concepts at play, and perhaps those are the things that need to be trained across the board.

For example, two skills that are fundamental to being able to kick at head height are remaining stable and balanced on the leg that remains on the ground, and lifting the knee sufficiently to allow the foot to launch to the head.

If people cannot balance on the leg that stays on the ground, then they wobble, and the kicking leg has to come back down sooner in order to regain that balance, so the high kick fails.

If people don’t set up the kick properly with their body, and just try to flick the foot to head height, then the high kick fails, because people don’t usually have that kind of flexibility – and even if they do, there may not be the necessary support behind the kick for it to hit the target effectively or usefully. There are exceptions to these statements, of course, because there are always exceptions, but I’m happy to say that I believe them to hold true in the vast majority of situations.

Therefore, when teaching high kicks, I might focus more on balance and stability, and on opening the hips better mid-action by positioning the knee properly beforehand. These are two of the fundamentals of kicking. I don’t think kicking is fundamental.

Conclusions

In the art that you train or teach, precisely what are the “very fundamentals”, the things that you need to have in place to be able to do the simple techniques? What words do you use to describe the other things that are pretty simple but aren’t quite so fundamental, and is there a better way to talk about these?

And when you are teaching the fundamentals, in just how much (useful and appropriate) detail are you are able to go in order to help your students understand how to do these things?

It can be all too easy to address “the fundamentals” briefly and then skip past them, or otherwise to address them but only at a superficial level.

If you would like some help with how you understand and train the basics in your historical fencing discipline, please feel welcome to contact me and arrange some online coaching. I would be delighted to share what experience and knowledge I have to help you improve your skills and performance.