The Small Things

[red5angel]

How are you guys going about training the small things? What I mean is all those little things, the little alignments and tweaks you need to make to make yourself more precise in your art,your striking or grappling or kicking or whatever.

[Oso]

I am a martial machine and those things just come naturally to me.

[dezhen2001]

day by day i strip away at the un-essentials :p

dawood

[Golden Arms]

Work all of my techniques on either a heavy bag or a training partner/dummy, and feel my alignment or places where it breaks as I push against their weight...If I am doing things right, it usually feels like the force just goes straight from the ground into them, and I am just the vehicle, if I break alignment then I feel it pulling my body in a direction towards off balance.

[GunnedDownAtrocity]

slow down.

[David Jamieson]

Breaking apart forms after they have been learned and setting to figure out the applications and their viability piece by piece is one of the really cool things about martial arts practice.

Then take that to your training partner and exchange to find out if they will work in a variety of ways against various levels of resistance.

That's how I work out the 'little' things :)

cheers

[FatherDog]

Drill, drill, drill, drill.

Spar, spar, spar, spar.

Each time you spar, you look at every technique you failed to pull off, and figure out what little things about it you need to work on to pull it off next time. (Ideally, your coach/sifu/sensei/guru/etc is helping you with this part). Then, to work on those specific little things...

Drill, drill, drill, drill.

Repeat cycle. There's always more to work on.

[joedoe]

I find what works for me is trying to get things to work on a partner and figuring it out from there.

[SevenStar]

exactly what fatherdog said. I'll usually integrate the drilling and sparring a tad more closely though - whatever I drill that night, even if it's something new, I will try to pull it off several times while rolling/randori. I'll evaluate afterwards the number of times I tried it, how many were successful, etc. if I was fairly unsuccessful at it, then I have to drill that technique more. Training that way makes the learning process alot slower, but I end up having a better understanding of the techniques I'm doing in the long run.

[Becca]

Also agreeing with FatherDog.

My current pet peeve is San Chin. My ankles are killing me.:mad: Trying to get it where I can move/turn right back into it. Right now I can turn left, but when I turn right it looks more like a wierd forward facing bow stance.