Students have an opportunity to train and to learn every time they attend class. What makes a martial arts seminar worth the time, effort, and resources required for it to be successful? Why is it worthwhile to have a different face in the front, or maybe even the center, of the room? Why even consider hosting a martial arts seminar in the first place?
When many people picture training traditional martial arts in days gone by, they picture the student seeking out a mentor. The mentor resides either at home or at a place of spiritual significance such as a temple or a mountaintop. The student must travel to the mentor and often must overcome obstacles along the way. The journey serves as a demonstration of the student’s dedication and worthiness to learn from the mentor.
These days, situations are different. Between advancements in transportation like planes, trains, and automobiles and in communication via books, recorded video, and especially the internet, the potential student has many more options. One option that is becoming more common is that, instead of the student traveling to the mentor, the mentor travels to the student. When the mentor is the one traveling, multiple students can benefit simultaneously. While an extended time period, instructor in residence style program can provide a modern mountaintop, shorter seminars lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days provide excellent training opportunities.
Martial Arts Seminars Increase Enthusiasm and Engagement
One of the most notable benefits of hosting a martial arts seminar is an increased level of enthusiasm. This can occur before, during, and after the seminar. The seminar is something different, something unique, something outside the norm of a typical training session. This is NOT saying that your typical training session is boring. (If it is,there’s a bigger problem, and guess what? There are seminars that can help with that, too.) A seminar is a special event.
People look forward to special events simply because they are special and different, even if the event isn’t drastically different from their day to day. When students are looking forward to a martial arts seminar, they tend to prepare. They set time aside to attend the event. They think about the event and what they need to bring with them, both physically and mentally. If they are missing something, they try to get it before the start of the event. The event can become a short term motivational tool to help motivate students to push a little harder, to pay more attention, and to make better choices leading up to the seminar. What instructor wouldn’t want that from themself or their students?
Seminars Promote Learning
Seminars provide chances to explore and to exchange. Will attendees be taken on a deep dive of a single facet of your current style? Sometimes spotlighting the smallest details and modifications help attendees see and feel the difference. Or will the seminar instructor approach the typical material in an atypical way? Maybe this helps attendees that don’t yet get it to do it. Maybe this also helps attendees that already can do it to see the material from a different angle and make new connections. Later, attendees can apply the new connections to other things not covered during the seminar. Or are attendees introduced to something completely new, something outside of their current style, something they haven’t explored before? Could that something spark a new interest and a new area for growth? Positive experiences often lead to attendance in a future martial arts seminars with even more learning.
Seminars Aren’t Just for Students
Did you notice that the previous paragraph used the word attendee and not student? Seminars present an opportunity for everyone in your organization, regardless of rank or responsibilities, to learn something. Attendees have an opportunity to grow as a person and as a martial artist. If instructors pass down only what their instructors taught them and nothing else, our martial arts will stagnate and then decline further and further with each generation . Why? Because it is effectively impossible to pass down one hundred percent of what was taught. Details, explanations, techniques, and more will gradually disappear. As long as we as martial artists continue to learn, continue to grow, continue to share, our arts will continue to do the same.
Martial Arts Seminars Help the Martial Arts Community
If, and sometimes this is a big if, the host is willing and able to open the seminar experience to others outside of their own organization, additional benefits are possible. From a dollars and cents perspective, more people and more organizations can help reduce costs to any one person or organization by sharing the costs in whatever way is deemed appropriate. This may make the martial arts seminar possible when it otherwise would not be, especially for smaller groups. It also gives an opportunity to interact as a larger martial arts community, one that may not be defined by style or rank. Martial artists have the opportunity to make new friends with other open minded martial artists. New friendships help extend the learning and growth well beyond the end of the seminar.
We Would Like to Thank Our Host
Regardless of the style, the source, or the subject, seminars should help everyone involved become a better martial artist. Maybe the results are seen on the mat or in the training hall. Maybe the results are seen off the mat at home, at work, or among friends. Maybe the results are not seen but are internalized by the martial artist. Maybe the results reach the community as a whole and have an even bigger effect. In order to have results, there must first be a seminar, and before there can be a seminar, someone needs to be willing to host. Maybe that host should be you.
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