 In the landscape of a pandemic and school closings, training at home has become a common practice in martial arts these days. Especially with the technological advantages we have, there are many ways to access training material. But that being said, it is a double-edged sword. Today we're going to talk about the 10 mistakes martial artists make when training at home. We've talked about training at home in previous episodes as well as looked at the pros and cons of training through an online martial arts program. Training on your own at home is a great habit and often necessary to excel in the martial arts. However, if you find yourself training at home as the majority of your discipline, exceed caution and try not to fall into any of these traps that can actually hinder your martial arts progress. The first mistake many people make in the martial arts is trying to be their own instructor. Now the general consensus that we see regarding video or internet training at home is that while it can offer great advantages in your practice, but it cannot completely 100% replace live training with a qualified instructor. If you already have significant experience, then training on your own to perfect or hone your skills is one thing. But if you're just starting out or trying to teach yourself something new, then you may run into some issues. A live instructor can correct you, make small adjustments, keep you motivated, manage expectations, teach application, and pick up on any small details in your performance. Working with a live instructor through a video software can help, but there's still a limit to the detail that can be managed through a two-dimensional image. By trying to be your own instructor, you may be missing out on the smaller details that can make all the difference in your training. This is a direct consequence to being your own instructor. Managing a curriculum can be detrimental if you don't know what you're doing. Many people tend to get impatient or bored with current material and they try to move ahead and learn and advance the curriculum on their own. Many arts require a certain amount of time to become proficient at one aspect before moving on to another. If you try to teach yourself more advanced material, then you may be building a house on an unstable foundation. If you're trying to learn material that's advanced for your level, then how do you know you're even doing it correctly? That's why live instruction is important. And related to this is being selective in what you train. Try to balance out your focus. Even if you set your current material, it's very easy to spend more time on the drills that you want to spend on rather than the drills you need to spend on. Managing your own curriculum takes a lot of discipline and awareness, and if you train an unbalanced lesson plan, then your skills may be unbalanced as well. Continuing that training thought brings us to what happens when you do make a mistake in your practice. Bad habits in your training are not only going to compromise your skill, but breaking those habits are going to be much harder to do later. Even if you are following a lesson plan from a video, it may seem like you understand it perfectly, but you can still pick up wrong details or perhaps the source material may be incorrect. I caught a mistake with an online program right in the early stages of learning the basic stances. The basic forward stance was very uncomfortable and it had my feet just outside my shoulder lines. I found that I didn't feel very stable performing any of the basic strikes or blocks. So thankfully I was able to send a message to the instructor who runs the program and confirmed that if I was doing it correctly or not. His response was no, the feet should have been on the shoulder line and outside of it and he explained that he taught it slightly exaggerated because he found that people tended to narrow their stances. I'm not sure if that was entirely true or if he just performed it incorrectly in the video. Either way, without the feedback of that instructor, I would have faced my entire practice on a very incorrect stance. Bad habits also get cemented into your memory and it's much more difficult to unlearn something than it is to make sure it's correct when you learn it. Just as many people tend to favor their favorite drills or techniques, it's also easy to favor a side. Most techniques in the martial arts work whether you're right handed or left handed and it behooves you to learn how to do them on both sides. If you're not applying your techniques on the person, it can be hard to gauge your strikes and learn how to regulate your power. Now this is a little bit different than learning control because you can learn how to control your strikes and power on a heavy bag, but applying on another person is a different skill. You can hit a bag with any intensity, you're not going to hurt anyone. When working with a partner over time, you learn how to do light contact without hurting them or medium to heavy contact if you're conditioning or pressure testing. Acquiring the feel of applying techniques on another person is a small but critical detail and it can be very hard to develop if you're only training on your own. One of the more common mistakes martial artists make training at home is not staying hydrated. If you're not in a class schedule, it's very easy to become lost in the focus of what you're doing so it's crucial that you stop for water breaks, especially if you're working outside. You're training to be a machine. Keep it well oiled. One of the challenges of home training you may run into is finding an appropriate space to train in. Some have rooms in their home with adequate space to train or garages and basements can suffice as well. Sometimes it's not as easy to find a space large enough at home and train. Outside can be an option if the weather is favorable or at least a test and focus and conditioning if it's not. But if you have a small space to work with, well you just have to use what's available to you and in many cases you can adapt your techniques forms the drills to fit within the smaller area. Anyone who's taken the opportunity to run through a content during the bathroom break at work knows exactly what I mean. And that's fine if you can work to adapt in a smaller space but be careful about developing some bad habits. Some techniques or drills require the adequate space. I was learning some side drills on my own years back. My first mistake being my own instructor. But I didn't have a lot of room at home at the time to do a lot of the extended movements so I abbreviated a lot of the range and practice with smaller movements. I learned real quick it's not always such a great idea to spin weapons so close to your body didn't intend it. This is the term I use now as a result of a comment my instructor told me back in 2007 when he started teaching again. He had left for two years so I spent 2005 and 2006 on my own training at home. I reviewed all my material and I tried to make it as smooth as possible and as fast as I could. When he came back and he started reviewing my material again I was eager to show him on what a good job I did on my own. So I ran through my techniques. He wasn't impressed. He looked at me and said yeah you're as fast as a jackrabbit but you haven't done jack. I spent so much time trying to be fast that I wasn't really applying much force. He said instead of worrying about applying 10 moves fast focus on making the first couple hard. Yeah yeah yeah I know a couple guys talking about not doing long sequences who to thunker right but his point was correct. I was too absorbed in running through it quickly without realizing I wasn't doing much damage with each strike. That became one a bad habit that took me a long time to break and two it showed that I had lost the ability to regulate my strikes just from training on two years on my own. This is very prevalent when trying to learn fighting or self defense techniques as a strictly solo practice. When we do techniques in the air usually we imagine a person in front of us but sometimes when we're focusing on techniques especially ones we've just recently learned it's easy for those imaginary targets to drift. I saw this in training the kids they were supposed to be doing a strike to the face but they're throwing strikes in all directions and we had to remind them on how to visualize where the targets were. Show them on the partner and then make sure they practice it that way. Without training with anyone else it's easy for targets to drift in your practice and you can't expect to be effective if your calibration is off. Without having partners to work with it makes sense to spend a lot of time reading studying and focusing on the academic side of your martial art and honestly that's a good thing. The more we understand about our own arts the better and in many cases learning academic material can actually enhance practical application but it's very easy to get stuck in that mode. It's too easy to fall down that rabbit hole and obsess about deeper material. The thing is it feels good to learn more and by reading and studying academic information it feels like we're enhancing our own training and in a way you are but if not kept in check it's entirely possible to spend too much time on the academic side and neglect the actual application. This is something I'm personally wrestling with now with my Kempo training I'm reviewing on my own and I'm seeking out academic information I wasn't taught before. I personally love it but I have to keep myself disciplined to physically run through and apply what I'm learning and make sure that the balance is there. It's an easy rabbit hole to fall down into. Just make sure you have a rope of reason and a discipline to climb your way back to the surface to keep your training effective. So these are just some common mistakes martial artists make at home when they're training. I hope that these tips helped some of you out there. Home practice is as prevalent as it ever was and when you do that you are shouldering the responsibility for your own training. Now let me know in the comments if any of you have encountered these issues or any others that we didn't mention today. As a bonus tip try to keep a healthy schedule. It's way too easy to get excited about training but if you push yourself too hard or you over commit you may find yourself burning out. Make sure to space out your training get plenty of rest and keep your battery charged. If you over extend your commitment you're doing yourself a great service and you can find your enjoyment and enthusiasm for training and in the brothel.