I have been told a couple of 'rules of thumb' that have helped me clarify how much training Kareteka (practitioners of karate) need to do. Rules of thumb are not absolutely certain rules but are good rough measures of action and effect: if something happens, then by applying a rule of thumb you will be able to understand roughly what will be the result. The first one goes like this:
"To maintain a skill at least 1 hour of training in that skill needs to be done each week. Any less and the proficiency in that skill will decrease."
Therefore if you do less than 1 hour of Karate a week you will begin to forget it! I have experienced that this is true, for example after school holidays when we have a break from training any students who have not kept up training have forgotten things. I have even seen black belts forget basic kata because they haven't practiced it for a long time!
The good news is that learning something for the second time is easier than the first time that it was learnt. Further, the more times that something is learnt the easier it is to re-learn it. This can be seen easily in anaerobic skill (that is, how fit they are) of Kareteka. The first time fitness is built up, it is really hard to get. Running, jumping, push-ups etc are all really hard to build up. If someone doesn't train for a while then they will lose their fitness, and they wont be able to do the things they did before (e.g. number of push-ups). But getting fit for the second time is easier than the first time (e.g. it will take less time to get back to the number of push-ups done before). And it will be even easier the third time, and so on.
However, ideally, students will not lose their skill and have to train to regain it. Therefore you will do at least 1 hour of training a week. But what if you want to increase your skill in karate? How much training will you need to do? This brings us to the second rule of thumb:
"To increase a skill at least 2 hours of training in that skill needs to be done each week."
Immediately I think of how this applies to the students who only train in karate once a week! Can they never progress? I have noticed that students who train only once a week, and do no other training in karate, do not improve very much. They progress very slowly through the ranks, and will often forget the things they have previously learned. They might learn a new Kata , but at the same time forget other ones!
Does this mean that training once a week is bad? Or not worthwhile? Absolutely not! What it means is that the extra time to make up the 2 hours will need to be done outside class, at home. Therefore if you train for 1 hour a week at the Dojo, you will need to do 1 hour a week training at home (see below).
What about instructors? They spend their time instructing people in karate, and often this will mean that they don't do training themselves. Does this mean that their skills will deteriorate? Yes it does!
The skills instructors learn while they are teaching students (this includes students teaching students) is that of instructing. If an instructor only instructs during class, they will need to do 2 hours of training outside class to improve their skills. This may be fine if the instructor has plenty of time to train, but there is a temptation to count the time spent instructing as time spent training. Counting the time spent instructing as training time will be false, unless the instructor uses the third rule of thumb, the "2/3rds rule", which goes like this:
"Instructors should do 2/3rds of the training that they ask their students to do in class."
Therefore instructors should aim to do 2/3rds of the exercises that they get students to do. The rest of the time (1/3rd) they can spend evaluating the students and offering feedback. A good way of meeting the 2/3rds rule is to demonstrate the technique out the front of the class as the students do it, so that the students can adjust what they are doing to do it the came way as the instructor.
This rule of thumb can even apply to penalties given to the students, such as impositions of push-ups and sit-ups when students aren't paying attention or are dithering on an instruction. I find that this can be a good gauge of how harsh the penalties are (if you can't do the 100 push-ups you told the students to do, chances are they can't either), is a good way to keep humility (so the instructor is not ordering people to do things they wouldn't/can't do), and helps students realize that the penalty is actually beneficial for them (such as building strength from doing push-ups).
By applying the rules of thumb I can see that when I took a break from karate for two years I lost much of my skill. I had to regain my fitness, but picking things up was much easier than the first time round. It took me about 6 months of training to regain what I had lost even though it took me 4 years to reach that level the first time around.
Before I was an instructor I was training 3 times a week, for 1 1/2 hours, making a total of 4 1/2 hours training, and so was improving (quite quickly). However when I became an instructor I wasn't improving nearly as fast, and in fact in some things (like fitness) went down. This also applied to the assistant instructors in the class. I realize now that I wasn't doing enough training to increase my skill, even though I was still going to the same amount of classes. I started trying to join in more in training last year, and limited the amount of instructing I delegated to assistant instructors (incidentally I said they can do a maximum of 1/2 hour in a 1 1/2 hour class).
Since learning of the 2/3rds rule a few months ago have tried to use that to guide my participation level in class. It is important for instructors to maintain and improve their level of skill so that they can continue to teach skills to students (and not forget to teach things that they were taught) and so that the skills they teach are progressively getting better. This will ensure that when students progress in rank they will still be able to learn things from the instructor, and will keep the instructor happy: most instructors (myself included) teach because they enjoy training and learning in karate, and start teaching because they want to share that joy of training and learning with others.
Training at home: 1 hour
Some easy ways to do training at home for 1 hour are:
6 minutes, 10 times. This is a very easy way to train at home. 6 minutes is about the length of an ad-break between TV programs. During the ad-break you might stand in horse stance and do traditional punches, or lie of the floor and do leg lifts, or do a Kata a couple of times, or shadow-spar against an imaginary opponent etc.
10 minutes every morning. This is enough time to do a warm-up and stretch, or as many push-ups and sit-ups as possible (keep going until you cant do any more), 3 sprints of 100 metres and jogging back to the start, or 10 minutes repetition of techniques. Have a break from training once a week. I currently train 10 minutes every morning.
30 minutes two times a week. You could go for a jog around a few blocks or go through a more structured session which might include weights, Kata, punching bags, skipping etc.
Visualization of techniques is also very good. You might sit on the bus to school or work and go through a Kata or other techniques in your head. Picture watching someone else doing the technique, again and again, and look at every part of what is being done by the person you are picturing. Imagine them doing the technique perfectly (and think as they do it, what exactly is the perfect way to do the technique), and if necessary picture the person redoing things that were not done right. Once you have pictured another person doing the technique correctly several times, imagine yourself doing the technique, repeating it in the same way in your mind as before.
