Holidays are great. I love holidays. I love to see friends and family, spend time relaxing, and eat delicious food.
There is one thing that I don’t like about holidays, and that’s the lack of structure.
I find it hard to keep up motivation for training and improving myself without the regularity of classes. I find myself drifting aimlessly, not sure what I’m doing from one day to the next. I intend to do all sorts of things, but somehow they never quite happen.
I recently came to a realisation.
It’s not the holidays that are the problem. It’s me.
If you want to make progress at anything in an unstructured environment, you need to create some structure. I have a list of things I’d like to get to, but no plan.
How to Create a (Martial Arts) Study Plan
There are a million ways to create a study plan. Just google it and you’ll see what I mean. The important thing to remember is that your study plan should work for you. You are not the same person as the random you-tuber that you decided to copy, so if their method doesn’t work it just means you need to try a different way.
The same applies here, of course. This method works for me, but your mileage may vary.
I’ve been using this method for years for various topics, but I didn’t realise until recently that it actually has a name: a retrospective study plan.
Step 1: List your topics
For the martial arts, this is likely to be things like “footwork”, “basic attacks”, “basic defences”, “kata”, “techniques” and so on.
Remember this is broad topics, not specifics; so maybe “goho techniques” and “juho techniques”, but not “uchi uke zuki”.
Step 2: Identify your resources
Your syllabus should list the types of things in each category. Your teacher might also have recommended specific you tube videos (e.g. for kata), or web pages (e.g. pictures of stances or vocab lists), or books (e.g. philosophy).
Make sure you know what resources go with which topics, and have them available in the same place as you will be studying. Reduce the friction to starting by having everything right there ready to go.
Step 3: What does “study” look like?
Is it flashcards to memorise vocab? Is it physical practice in front of a mirror? Is it recording yourself doing things and then watching it back to look for areas of improvement? Is it testing yourself on the names of techniques?
Write your answer down so you always know what it is you should be doing when you come to study each topic.
Step 4: Block out some time
What time do you have to do this in? If you don’t decide when to do this, you’ll suddenly find that you’ve wasted a whole day and done nothing. This is the part where I often fall down.
Don’t be tempted to over-schedule though. It is the holidays and you do need some time to relax and recharge! Just make sure you’re doing a little bit every day – even ten minutes is better than nothing.
Maybe schedule one or two longer sessions in your week. If you don’t have specific plans for the holiday weeks you could use the time slots that you normally use for class, but if you’ve got visitors some days you might have to pick another time.
And don’t schedule specific topics – just block out “study time”. You’ll see why in a minute!
Step 5: Do some study
Yes, this step is necessary. All the planning in the world won’t help if you don’t actually follow through.
To start with, just pick the first topic on your list and do the things you listed in Step 3.
When you’re done, rate yourself on how well you did. On your study plan, write down the date and your rating (colour coding is great for this!).
Step 6: Iterate
Once you’ve cycled through all your topics once, the next thing to study is the thing you rated yourself worst at the first time around. Your aim is to get all your topics to three “good” ratings in a row.
If everything is green, pick the thing you last studied longest ago, but try to add a new dimension to it. If you were practicing punching, find something (or someone!) you can punch to improve your aim. If you were practicing kata, try describing what you are doing just before you do it.
If you were doing vocab drills to recognise Japanese words, try pronouncing them, or putting them into “sentences” (for example, instead of just zuki = punch, try constructing a phrase like “mae chidori ashi, jun zuki jodan”. And then follow your own instructions!
Why I love retrospective study plans
I find this works better than forward-planning. If you plan in advance which topics you are going to study, then one of two things will very likely happen:
- You miss a session, and your whole plan gets out of whack. Now you have to sit down and re-jig everything and you lose more time to planning and worrying about planning, and spend less time on the value-add activities.
- You find yourself studying things you know really well the same amount as your weak spots. That’s no good, because you want to improve the weak spots so you should be spending more time on them! Not only that, but studying things you find easy is boring, so you lose motivation and give up on the whole enterprise.
What’s your plan?
Do you have a plan for studying while classes aren’t on? Do you have a plan for studying in general? What’s your favourite study method? Leave a comment below!
Bristol Shorinji Kempo 