Something is wrong. I should not be this injured after 6 sessions of jujitsu, just a week and a half into the class. At first I thought it was just me. Today I had to skip my lunch workout because my entire right side is tweaked. Right knee joint is painful, pain on the right side of my lower back, right wrist is bruised on the outside and the joint hurts, tightness on the right side of my neck. My left arm has bruising all the way from the wrist to mid-forearm, and a bruise on the inside of the left wrist. I have bruising, abrasion burns and scratches on the inside of my left shoulder from other students grabbing me too hard through the gi. All of these were from yesterday. And yesterday I was wearing the full garb so it’s not like they just went thru a t-shirt.
I went to lunch with my blackbelt coworker. We talked about my class (he’d taught martial arts before, too), and he wanted to see me demonstrate some of the blocks, hits and sweeps. “Okay, line it up,” he said.
My response was, “Huh?”
“You don’t even know how to line up? Just show me your fighting stance.”
I was lost. Didn’t know how far apart to put my feet, where my toes were to be pointing, where to place my hands, how high up, what angle, closed-fist or open-palm. My coworker was horrified. He did a tutorial for me and explained the basics, and throughout the demos I’d say, “Oh, I saw them do that.” But I didn’t know how to do it myself, when to apply it, why I would apply it. I didn’t even know what part of my hand/arm was supposed to make contact for a block. I explained we just went thru the motions by imitating someone else showing us the motion, and the instructor would walk around correcting us and kinda fine-tuning. “Hands farther out. Good. Quicker, like a snap. Good. Turn your hip more. Forward. No, forward. There.” That means nothing to a beginner! It’s not like learning to dance where the position is just for aesthetics. My coworker is scared that I’m gonna get killed because I don’t know how to do anything properly or which leg to use to sweep or why and how to manipulate the move so that I could still do a sweep if someone’s lined up with me on the opposite leg. We’re all formless masses of dough and this instructor doesn’t seem to remember how to form raw dough into a pastry, he only knows how to fine-tune, like making the edges really pretty and crispy and giving it that nice brown glaze.
My coworker told me to get out of the class now before I really injure myself. I’m not learning the basics of the techniques and I’m not being protected from someone hitting me or throwing me too hard. If I wanted to be more serious about my training, I’d have to unlearn the bad habits I pick up now from not knowing how to do it correctly from the beginning. “You can’t tell an illiterate person to just copy a sentence in calligraphy. First you have to teach them how to use a pen, and teach them the alphabet.” I should’ve picked up on this myself, the way the instructor teaches abs. It’s rather a messy teaching, so when I stepped in to lead on abs instruction, I corrected the students on proper form, ab isolation, and explained why I wanted their chin up, how high I wanted up, how they can achieve it. I’m going to talk to the instructor next week and explain this to him. He probably doesn’t even realize we’re so lost.