Episode 365 - Make it Fun
Make it Fun
On today's episode, Jeremy talks about how martial arts classes can be much more interesting, make it fun!
Make it Fun - Episode 365
Most of us may agree that one martial arts class may be much more interesting than the other. One can be dead serious and the other can be much more fun. On this episode, Jeremy talks about his experience in having fun and interesting class and how to create such a fun atmosphere on a martial arts class.
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download here.
Hey how's it going everybody, welcome. This is whistlekick martial arts radio, my name is Jeremy and I’m in the car, that's right this is a video episode, throw these out every once in a while and honestly I just feel like mixing up. And that is the topic of today’s show, mixing it up, we'll come back to that in a moment. Of course if you want to see the video you could head on over to YouTube, youtube.com/whistlekick and if you want to find the show notes, you can find those at whistlekick martial arts radio.com and don’t forget use the code podcast15 podcast 1 5 at whistlekick.com and save 15 percent off of everything we have over there, everything, all of it, the whole shebang. Even stuff that’s new, stuffs that’s on clearance , doesn’t matter its 15 percent off.Alright, so, mixing it up, in fact let's put a twist on that and call it making it fun. I had a great tae kwon do class last night and as I thought back I miss that episode, why was that class so much fun, it was fun because it was different. And it was different because it was fun. Now don’t get me wrong, I love martial arts, I love classes in all the places I trained but, I think we can all agree some classes are more fun than others. And to me what makes a class fun, is that it’s different but also it's the atmosphere. So let me tell you about last night and why this class was more fun. It was a pretty standard class in fact it started out as a fairly hard class, it was some conditioning, and some combinations, and some basics and things like that. And then we ended up with some partner drills and those partner drills involved kicking paddles and start with some difficult kick combinations and then turned into some even more difficult kicking techniques including jumping over things. We started by jumping over some kicking shields and kicking the paddles, which turn into jumping over a chair. Which turned into jumping over two chairs for some of us and people had a blast. Even the people that weren’t able to participate at that highest level, still had a lot of fun. The instructor had fun, I had fun. As far as I can tell all the other students had fun regardless of their ability to achieve at that high level because we were trying things. We were doing things that we're new and different, things that most people hadn’t done before. I don’t know that anybody there had jumped over to chairs. But it worked. What worked about it? People were engaged, they were fired up, they were supporting each other, they were smiling. And here's the thing about having fun and smiling, if you've ever worked with children you know this, if nobody'd having fun, they're not learning, the best laid someone up and get them ready to learn is to entertain them, to put them in a place where they're enjoying what they’re going. And that was the secret from last night's class. It wasn’t a secret but that was the difference, is that the instructor kinda let go of the reins, let us do I don’t wanna say what we wanted, but here’s the thing it was only the last ten minutes of class of a 90 minute class. And I will promise you, every single person walked out of that class feeling great, smiling, happy and they will look back on that class as a great class.If you're an instructor, you probably know the most important parts of a class are the beginning and the end. You open the class well, you close the class well, and make sure people are going out on a high note, you're more likely to get them to come back. They're more likely to show up ready to train, ready to engage and they're more likely to have fun through that entire process. You've probably been in classes where people don’t seem to be having fun, nobody wants to be there. That doesn't do anything for anyone's education, but it also doesn’t do anything for their personal development or for the student enrollment. If you want more people to show up to something, it gotta be fun. And if that's the priority, the rest of the stuff can happen. It doesn’t matter how good your curriculum is, it doesn’t matter how good of an instructor you are teaching technical things, if you can’t make it fun, nobody's gonna learn. And I think, this might be part of the whole, mcdojo thing. What episode was that? 359? Talked about mcdojos, got some support got some hate for it, that's okay! But when I look at those schools that a lot of people would term as a mcdojos, they tend to have a lot of fun. The schools that are tied to their tradition that they will consider that things can be fun, and they drill, drill, drill and they're making it difficult hard and the way that they determine the quality of a class is by how sore or tired or even bloody they are? There tend to be as many people at those classes. So here's what I think, I think you've got to mix it up in your own training, and the training you do with others, in life. I've got to say, that when you do something, you should make it 15% different than what you’ve done before. And if you do that, you're constantly iterating, you're constantly making things better, but you're not taking so much risk that if everything you try go South that you'll ruin what you're doing. If you take something this tried-and-true, keep it 85% the same, make15% of it different, you'll probably still get a 90 and even 95% on some kind of subjective scale. And then later, take the stuff that work, you incorporate that and try another 15 percent. And then over time, the quality of what you're doing is through the roof. And when all else fails, the lesson plans going out the window, if you've got chaotic children in the class, if your families going nuts, find something that’s fun. Bring it back to that foundation and everything else can stem from that.So, that's it, that’s what I got. Don’t forget podcast15 at whistlekick.com 15% off everything, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com for the show notes including the audio version of this, link to the YouTube version, transcript. What else we got over there, a whole bunch of other episodes. And if you wanna follow us on social media, we are whistlekick, @whistlekick on YouTube Instagram twitter Facebook. If you wanna email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com. Keep it easy. Thank you for your time today, thanks for listening or watching whatever the case may be. Until next time. Train hard, smile, and have a great day.