It's Like Riding a Bike

Learning a martial art is like riding a bike.  Well, it's like learning to ride a bike.  When you're in your late 30's.  And you'd never ridden a bike before in your life.  And you self-proclaim to have a bad sense of balance.

I taught someone with all the parameters above how to ride a bike.  It was winter when she got her bike so going outside was out of the question.  So she learned how to ride in the basement, 20 feet at a time.

First, it was sitting on the bike and getting accustomed to what it felt like to be astride it and to get familiar with the controls.  Then came the hard part: learning to pedal.

I set the bike in granny gear and had her learn to push off from a stop while seated.  Needless to say there was a lot of veering off course.  Then I had her push off, get her other foot on the pedal, and try to get at least one full pedal revolution.  She worked on this for a few days, about 20-30 minutes each day.

Then I shifted the bike up a gear as she worked on developing her push off, establishing her feet on the pedals, and continuing the pedal stroke. Through all of this was a lot of course correcting, stepping off, etc.

But suddenly, she pushed off, got her feet on the pedals, and rode all the way across the basement.  At that moment she exclaimed, "Aha! Now I know what it feels like to balance!"

For the rest of the week, she continued repeating the exercise, 20 feet at a time.

A few weeks later, the weather had warmed up enough such that we could go outside.  I took her to the parking lot at Tri-C and told her to do exactly what she already had done.  I lined her up at the end of the parking lot and on her first try she rode all the way to the other end straight and true.

We spent another hour or two working on leaning and turning, but that's how she learned how to ride a bike: 20 feet at a time in the basement.

When you learn technique, you have to allow yourself to discover it incrementally.  More importantly, you have to understand what it feels like to do the technique correctly.  Equally important is to know and understand what it feels like to do the technique incorrectly.  When my friend was learning to balance, she would on occasion after have several good runs have a bad one and fall over.  But each time that happened, she could identify and understand why she lost her balance by over-correcting, leaning the wrong way, etc.  As you do your technique correctly and incorrectly, you will learn to know what goes into making it feel correct and what goes into making it feel incorrect.