Different martial arts and every school or club within styles have different standards as far as what is expected from their students. If the students are not willing to give, perhaps the particular martial art is not for them. You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't make them absorb it.

One of the things that differentiates a "real" martial artist from a "want to be" martial artist is the level of commitment they have to their training. To be a martial artist you don't have to give up your life and spend every waking moment meditating, doing forms (katas) or hitting a punching bag. But you do have to have a drive to improve yourself, to constantly be better. This is one of the qualities of the martial artists that crosses over into their everyday lives.

To fulfill this drive means that you must push yourself. And pushing yourself does mean enduring pain. It means enduring slightly more muscle fatigue and exhaustion today than you did yesterday by forcing your pain tolerance a bit higher. If you are whimpering because you are tired, you have one of three options. You can either leave the class and try again next time. You can leave the class and give up all together or you can suck it up and dig deep down inside and struggle through the class or sash grading. Everyone in the class has been there including the instructors. I never make my student go through something that I haven't experienced myself before. If I push my students it's because I care for them a great deal and I want them to succeed in Kung Fu and in life.

What possible benefits can training like this have? Well, very few if you train to exhaustion all the time. You'd be so tired that you'd never have a chance to reap the benefits of the training. We all need "downtime" to recover. But what you do get from hard classes and gradings like these is the realization that you survived. Everything else aside, you made it through and that's what matters. This is the only way that we can improve, by pushing ourselves to just past the point where you thought you could go. We almost all underestimate our ability and pushing ourselves is an invaluable, eye-opening experience.

The thing I care about most when I'm teaching is whether or not my students want to be there. Not everyone is going to be a world champion, but as long as they push themselves and they allow me to push them, as long as there's that fire burning inside them that signifies that they want to succeed, a good instructor can fan those flames to overcome any obstacle in their development to make a good martial artist out of them. But when a student doesn't care, no one can make them care.

Written By Sifu Rino Côté