Advice regarding potentially teaching needed

[CallMeLuke]

I admire your enthusiasm but you need to think carefully about how and in what order you're going to introduce all the stuff that you've mentioned. Don't overwhelm your new students with too many techniques or techniques that are too difficult.

As far as conditioning goes, if I attended one of your classes, I'd want to spend the majority of my time learning martial arts - not doing conditioning exercises that I can easily do outside of the dojo. This is just my opinion, of course.

It seems to me that you need to sit down and work on a structured curriculum. It's fine for very experienced teachers to wing it sometimes, but a new teacher shouldn't really be doing it. Again, this is just my opinion.

In short, if you overwhelm or confuse prospective students, they're not going to return for a second lesson. Lessons should be fun, informative, and pitched correctly to the level of the students (assume them to be unfit absolute beginners until you know otherwise.)

Again: good luck!

[JusticeZero]

The word of thumb is that each class, students will learn three things. If you hit them with 30 different things, they will come back having forgotten 90% of what you did last class.

In my experience, unless required to keep, update, and review a notebook (and they will forget every time, so you have to be on them every class), they will forget some of the things they know steadily.

[shotokanz]

Well here's how it went guys:

First off, class started like 20 minutes late (i knew only 2 people were coming to this first one, no big deal, more will come over time) because the one girl was running very late, not a big deal though as i am allowed to close the gym when i'm done so it worked out ok.

We stretched, i talked to them a bit, got the jitters out of my system. I explained the 3 stances (horse, front, back) that we'd be doing, showing each to them. We then got in horse stance, and i broke down the basic punch to them in as many steps as i could to help them understand it. Once they had it down, we picked up the pace a bit, and i had them throw several dozen of them, making sure to emphasize hip rotation, the draw hand, all the goodies lol.

After we did it for a while, i broke down all 4 of the basic blocks for them, my fiance was one of the girls there, she's trained with me a bit so she had a VERY minute understanding of it already, the other girl slowly started to get it, had a hard time getting her to understand about how her arms need to cross over each other during certain movements, and about keeping her palm up on rising blocks for example, but eventually she caught on. We worked on this for a good part of the hour actually, as it was what was giving them the most trouble.

We then moved on to kicks. We did snap kicks from front stance from the back leg, teep kicks (foot jabs or push kicks as you might call them), shotokan roundhouse kicks and muay thai roundhouse kicks. I made sure to show them all the subtle and big differences between the 2 types of kicks, explaining some of the more appropriate times to apply each kick. Took a while to get them to understand the difference between a snapping kick and a "push" type kick, eventually they got it once they were able to apply it to the blast bags (i could definitely feel the difference that 30 mins of practice made lol).

We worked on front stance a bit more, as far as where to have your feet, the distancing, hip rotation in that stance, etc.

After this we did a 25 minute conditioning routine (i'm also a personal trainer, and the one girl there is one of my clients, she wanted to join in this since it had the fitness work as well), that used a combo of bodyweight, light weights and alot of kicking on the bags in rapid succession (if you're familiar with K1 training, think about "foot sprints"), they loved it.

After we were ALL done with all of that, i had them review with me the basic punch, the 2 stances they just learned, and the 4 blocks, and the differences between the kicks and how to do them. They got about 95% of it without me having to remind them

I don't expect them to know all that next week perfectly, but if they retain 50% of what they learned tonight i will be happy, eventually it will start becoming second nature.

Don't get me wrong guys, the things i listed are not things i'm going to do EVERY class, those are the things i ultimately want them to be able to do, after they have a very good understanding and ability to perform small chunks of techniques, and eventually be able to reperform them even without practice for say a week, then and only then will i introduce new things

Not to mention this was sort of a "test run" class, for me to figure out how i want to approach it, and get comfortable doing this sort of thing with them. I will grow as a teacher as much as they do as students