My senior student sent me an email this past week that was interesting. He has been a student with me since 1984.

He said that he had a black belt show up for practice that had been doing some research on Daito Ryu techniques and was curious at how the koshi waza techniques had developed. As his questions were asked, my student told him why one thing was done and then another, based on the body mechanics of both the uke and the nage. The guy seemed delighted to learn how that had happened, and said that he had a completely new understanding of the techniques that made sense.

In his next sentence, my student told me "I had never really thought about it, but I never knew what I knew because nobody ever asked me those questions". Clearly, what I've taught him and the understanding he now has is very functional in training, and his ability to help others to understand what they're doing is "passing it on", as I was instructed to do by my teachers.

Having been involved in training for as long as I have, I feel confident in anything I've taught over the past twenty years because it is "field tested" and I've spent a lot of time correlating the body mechanics of what I do to other systems and arts. Where that shows up in training is in what your students find out they know by their experiences in teaching and training with others.

It made me wonder if you've ever had that epiphany where you suddenly understood that you knew something that you didn't really think about knowing until someone questioned you about it? Most questions in Jujutsu and Aikido are answered with a throw, a fall, or a pin, complete with pain or dynamic force applications, and if you're training correctly, you won't conciously think about a lot of things, you'll just do them... and with any luck, you'll do them correctly.

I think this is common with many instructors. I had quite a problem explaining simple concepts to beginners when I was starting to teach. I could do a decent punch, and I knew a bad one when I saw it, but the difference was......?

It took a while for me to really break down in detail the mechanics of what I was doing, so I would be able to analyze what other people were NOT doing.

And that sort of thing kind of works it's way up in complexity until you really know what you are doing. At this point many other techniques that seemed hard before are now more easily understood, since you have a better conceptual base upon which to analyze them.

A lot of practice helps, too.