Everyone talks about the end product, sometimes about the journey to get there. But rarely anyone talks about what it takes to maintain your level of success, and keep it growing. This comes up a lot in martial arts; you work really hard to get your black belt, or second or third degree black belt, and then you have a handful of years to wait until your next test. Or maybe even your next belt test isn’t guaranteed, so you don’t have a tangible goal or timeline for it. Now that you don’t have a test on the near horizon, do you slow down your training? Take a break? The answer seems obvious, but in reality it’s very difficult to continue to keep working as hard as you did to achieve your goals.
Let’s take the example of the goal to have above face height kicks. You see the end product, but you don’t see what had to be done in order to achieve this. Hours of stretching, strengthening exercises, building your muscles needed to hold your leg in the air, overall balance, etc. It’s a long and laborious process, but if you want it and are willing to put in the work, you’ll get it.
Once you do get it, it will become very tempting to stop your training regiment since you’ve reached your end result. If you give in to this, you’ll begin to notice after a while that those kicks get lower, or you have to compromise for the loss of strength you built and the technique becomes sloppy. If you feel that you’re finished after you’ve reached your goal, it’s almost as if you wasted your time building something that you’re just going to throw away. Maybe you don’t have to work as hard to maintain the skill, but you should at least continue your routine at a base level in order to keep your skills sharp. Additionally, you can begin to hone the skill you achieved to make it even better.
My instructor would talk about the concept of “Ryun Ma”, or refining your skills. He would explain, “each student comes to us as a gemstone. We can’t change the gemstone you are, but overtime, we can polish it until it’s completely smooth.” Looking at our example above, it’s great to achieve high kicks above face height, but there’s always more to refine. Posture, power, control, etc. Don’t become complacent when you feel like you’ve already gotten good at a technique. Keep practicing it, making it better, and maintaining it!
