In my 2019 blog post 100 Lessons I emphasized the need for martial arts instructors to consider the importance of delivering self defense value to beginners quickly. In my one of my last blog posts Risk of Injury I reminded you that martial arts training isn't worth it if it injures you worse than being attacked on the street would. In this blog post I am calling out the very problematic difference in perspective between many martial arts instructors and their students.
Most serious martial artists - people who intend to use martial arts in self defense if they need to defend themselves - are "casual" martial artists, meaning they train martial arts without intention to compete in martial arts competitions or matches, nor do they study martial arts like it was a part-time (least bit full time) job. Casual martial artists do not train for long hours every day, and though they may be able to practice or train on their own a little each day, martial arts is not a primary focus of their lives. Such individuals include people with low risk jobs as well as police, security, bouncers, etc. and it makes no sense for them to risk injury through formal competition or rigorous daily training, nor do most of them want or need a high level of accomplisment in martial arts.
This means that martial arts instructor's expectations need to fit the lifestyle that their casual students actually have, and the best example is POSTURE. Most martial arts students make a living by sitting at a desk all day in front of a computer, and most of those that don't spend a lot of their time looking at a cell phone. If you dump a bunch of push ups and sit ups (or bench press for personal fitness coaches) on top of someone who already has compromised posture, you will further contract the muscles on the front side of their boddies and lead to worse posture, leading to a worse long-term ability to defend themselves than when they started training with you in the first place!
If you teach fitness or martial arts for a living, you are not spending most of your day wrecking your own posture. Your students are. You can't ask them to quit their jobs or they can't support you financially. Therefore you have to help them correct their posture as a very high priority in your training. Physical therapists I have talked to have emphasized what THEY call chin tucks, straight arm push ups, and chest stretches as an important part of correcting that posture.
I am sure this applies to numerous other things besides posture. I trained martial arts for 20 hours a week for about 18 months during my failed attempt at becoming a professional kick boxer and Choy Li Fut instructor in the 90s. To this day I still do 30 minutes of Tai Chi standing meditation every day (another exercise that helped me prevent damage from bad posture, and helped me recover from bad posture after two shoulder impingement since 2019,) but I have to keep in mind that people coming to me to learn Tai Chi didn't come expecting to have to engage with Tai Chi on that level in order to learn some useful amount of Tai Chi, and that they are never going to put in the kind of hours that I put in to learn how to fight.
I do the full splits every time I work out. I don't expect others I am working out with to do the full splits with me, that's crazy. What I do have to consider is "what is going to help them like the splits help me, considering their casual commitment to this training?" What opened my eyes to this issue of Casual Sustainability was recovering from my own injuries and talking to physical therapists while doing so. I highly recommend that professional fitness and martial arts instructors make a casual study of physical therapy, so that they can apply their knowledge to the challenges their students are facing from having a sedentary professional lifestyle.
