Foreword
Welcome to my first martial arts post! What follows is the essay I completed as part of the testing process to earn my I Dan in ITF Taekwon-Do on August 1, 2020.
To give a little context, I was a student at The Edge Taekwon-Do Academy in Orleans, Ontario, which was owned and operated by Sabum Joel Denis (VI Dan). This dojang and the community within it will always remain dear to my heart: from the moment we first became members at The Edge, my family and I felt welcomed and valued. While the circumstances of the pandemic made it impossible to continue to train in the building The Edge once called home, the community ties remain. Many of us have continued to train, both individually and in new dojangs, and we remain in touch with one another. This art and the people who practice it are incredible, and they have helped me forever change myself in body, heart and mind.
This essay was written with a panel of black belt instructors in mind, so for those who are new to or unfamiliar with martial arts, it might be a little heavy going: however, if you're an adult reading this and have any interest in learning a martial art, it's worth a read - after all, it's about folks like you. Should you have any questions or comments, they are most welcomed. You can also find me at https://spoutible.com/ALoken, where I would be happy to chat.
Mrs. Andrea Loken, I Dan
Change My Mind: Neuroplasticity and the Mature Taekwon-Do Practitioner
This essay considers strategies to help the mature martial arts student successfully navigate the path to black belt. Just as students of many ages and stages in life come to martial arts for fun, fitness, community and self-development, so too do adults have many reasons for studying a martial art. I will explore a few possible situations that stem from observations of students (from both The Edge Taekwon-Do Academy as well as other dojangs met during my tournament travels) and from my personal experience as a student. In exploring these examples, I will discuss three points: that there are different kinds of mature students whose previous experience differentiates their brains and, therefore, their skills, level, and style of learning; that there are examples of success for each of these different kinds of students; and, that there are strategies to round out their skills and overcome the barriers they face.
Martial arts is a practice that few adults are willing to try and that even fewer consistently follow to higher levels. To most people, it is a mystery as to why and how anyone over the age of 30 would undertake it. The reasons for not doing so range from “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” to “My old injury won’t allow me to do that” and “Why would I do anything that involves testing? I’ve done enough of that in my life already and I don’t need the stress.” All in all, students wishing to incorporate martial arts into their lives have one internal battle in common: changing their minds. The challenge that martial arts instructors face is to learn what kind of minds they’re working with, and to help students develop the tools to improve their learning and create a fulfilling, long-term martial arts practice.
While General Choi saw few barriers to Taekwon-Do and advocated for a scientific approach, the science of the time indicated that the mind had a fixed structure, and that it was difficult, if not impossible, for adults to successfully undertake challenging activities and philosophies such as Taekwon-Do. However, the work of martial arts practitioners says otherwise. Canadian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher Dr. Norman Doidge outlines the work of Feldenkrais Method inventor, Moshe Feldenkrais. In The Brain’s Way of Healing, Doidge describes how Feldenkrais, a master in the art of Judo, developed his method of awareness through movement to cope with a severe knee injury. Interestingly enough, Feldenkrais’ work on improving movement through body awareness began within a few years of General Choi’s undertaking to create Taekwon-Do. Based on examples such as these, it seems martial artists have used neuroplasticity in their practices long before this field of study became part of mainstream science.
Sorting it all out - commonalities and dissimilarities in mature students
Before discussing the different kinds of students we may see in a martial arts practice, it is important to acknowledge some of the things that mature students have in common:
Internal motivation. There is no one forcing them to be there: they may be curious about martial arts, or they might have it on their “bucket list”
Self-regulation. Mature students’ life experience tends to grant them greater understanding than younger students about how to pace themselves and regulate how they train
Higher cognitive load. Mature students have jobs, families, and other concerns that may cause stress, fragment their attention and make it difficult to attend classes consistently
Transferable skills. While this essay will show that the kinds of skills will vary depending on the kind of student, each mature student has skills that they can use to their advantage in a martial arts practice.
This is where we branch out into the different kinds of students who come to martial arts as adults. In my own (non-rigorous) manner, I have determined that there are three broader categories into which mature students can be placed:
1. The student who is returning to martial arts after having studied as a child/youth;
2. The student who is coming from another sport or an art such as dance; and
3. The student who is coming in with little to no experience in sports or a similar practice.
These delineations are important, as the brains of each of these kinds of students are different from one another in specific ways.
The first kind of student has practiced martial arts as a child or youth, and is returning to their practice. This student will have skills acquired at an age when the brain is still in development, and are, therefore, entrenched in the brain’s white matter: unless damaged or lost because of injury or illness, they can be accessed and applied in various situations. For martial arts, this student should, therefore, have a good sense of proprioception. They will likely have some fairly immediate recall of previous martial arts learning (patterns, breaking, etc.) and should be easily prompted and able to advance more quickly in their practice than students who have no prior experience. An example of this kind of student is Mr. Dillon Parmer, who returned to martial arts after having studied in childhood. Mr. Parmer’s experience started at the grade school level, and he progressed up to the level of red stripe. Additionally, he credits his musical training in part for how he approaches various aspects of the learning. The transferable skill of being able to perceive smaller “chunks” within larger musical forms or of having to memorize long and complex works, or of training for performances was something he applied to learning patterns, tournament team training, and tournament participation.
Interestingly, Mr. Parmer reported that the work needed to memorize Korean terms posed challenges: while he had had exposure to multiple languages (mostly European), he had not learnt any language whose roots resembled Korean. This new language was clearly not located on the information superhighway in the larger part of his white matter, leaving him to forge new connections in the frontal part of the brain, where logic and reason are most centrally-located, and where mature adults tend to forge new neural connections. So, it can be argued that even for the returning student whose brain has been wired for success in some areas of a martial arts practice, it is still important for instructors to be aware of areas where that student may need greater support.
As noted above, it is not only the first kind of student who can utilize previous connections to advance: the second kind of student, of which I am an example, has participated in some other form of sport or art at a younger age, and has created pathways in their brain that can then be appropriated for use within a martial arts practice. While my music and dance experience proved immediately useful in some regards, the nature of movement in martial arts, and the method of learning meant that I had neuroplastic work to do. To illustrate: in dance, the body is often moved and held differently than in a martial art. The importance of the efficiency and power of movement meant that I had to, amongst other things, learn how to turn differently (other examples of unaccustomed movements would be backwards motion and hip twist). For me, this meant working to learn techniques correctly the first time, and then being careful to avoid dance-related habits creeping in and rendering my technique incorrect.
As someone appropriating previous, similar connections to this new purpose, it wasn’t as hard for me to learn and advance as it might be for the third kind of student who has no similar experience. But I’m getting ahead of myself: the other significant difference, which was in memorization, has proven far more difficult. My music background differed greatly from Mr. Parmer’s in that I was not formally trained in music theory until I was much older, so the analytical skills, such as discerning the smaller “chunks”, were largely absent in my case. My dance background enabled me to mimic movements, but having worked primarily as an older student in a studio that emphasized improvisation, I had not learnt the process of analyzing and performing strictly-choreographed pieces. So the danger here was that my particular skills meant that I looked better at doing Taekwon-Do than I actually was at doing it. When following others, I did well, but when faced with even a small change, such as facing a different side of the Dojang to perform a pattern, I would have trouble orienting myself and recalling my pattern diagram. It was not until I reached my blue belt that I felt confident in my memorization and recall abilities.
Students who perhaps face the greatest difficulty in learning Taekwon-Do are those who fall into the third category: students who have no similar practice in their past. Someone in this category may face greater challenges in that their mind-body connection may not be very strong. It may be necessary to help them develop basic coordination and proprioception. These new connections, which will be made primarily in the frontal part of the brain, may require greater time and repetition before becoming easily accessible. Within this category, I could not find anyone who had continued their practice and progressed to higher belt levels: granted, my travelling circle within martial arts is not wide, but I expected that I might find at least one person within our Dojang who had undertaken a martial art and continued their practice. For a while, I questioned how this could be, and the only reasonable explanations I could fathom were that I had either not travelled in wide enough circles to meet this particular kind of student, or that there is another apparent trend worth exploring in another essay - that there is something missing in the training for these students to encourage them to continue their practice as martial artists.
Overcoming obstacles - changing our pathways to keep following the path
Another question that recurred in my research is “what about students who have a brain disorder or injury?” It turns out that this can affect students in any of the three categories above. Students can overcome incredible odds to become and remain successful martial artists. Just as Dr. Norman Doidge shares multiple examples in his books (The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing) of patients who overcame serious brain trauma such as strokes and the symptoms of such degenerative disorders as Parkinson’s Disease, so too are there examples within our Dojang of students who live and practice successfully with a variety of different conditions. Outside The Edge, in my travels to tournaments, for example, I encountered a mom (a green belt with blue stripe) who had suffered a stroke, and found that her prescribed physiotherapy was not sufficiently challenging and comprehensive. The question then changed to “What, exactly, have students such as this overcome?”
The first thing is learned nonuse: there can be many reasons why students learn to not fully use their bodies (hands, limbs, etc.), including brain disorders, strokes, injuries to the body, and even social pressure/self-talk. A couple of examples of how this can affect martial arts students include:
Someone who has had a stroke may have limited use of a limb or may have balance issues.
Physical injuries from previous practices (e.g. a “bum knee”) can affect the student’s ability to learn patterns and progress up the ranks
Science points to people with learned nonuse being able in many cases to recover the use of their unused limbs or digits through diligent therapeutic work. Within the martial arts context, I have observed something similar in my work at Black Belt Club, namely during kicking drills. One of these drills involved being placed next to a wall so that the knee had to be brought around - without touching the wall - to complete the kick. This meant that I had to use a very specific group of muscles to complete it correctly. I find that this resonates with Doidge’s writings about neuroplastician Edward Taub’s Constraint Therapy. While our students do not have casts placed on their preferred or dominant limb in order to force the use of the weaker one, the principle of the kicking drill was the same: to place specific physical constraints that would require the brain to prompt the correct muscles to fire. This approach could be of significant value for mature students who have, over time, or due to injury, developed a pattern of nonuse.
The next concern is something Dr. Doidge calls the “noisy brain,” sometimes jokingly referred to by Edge students and instructors as “grocery-shopping Taekwon-Do.” It has been found recently that it is more than just strokes that cause the brain to have trouble firing normal signals and to distinguish them from background noise: it turns out that aging brains, along with injured brains and brains of those suffering sleep disorders, learning and cognitive disorders, and even environmental sensitivities can struggle with the same issue. Students within all three groups may face this, and it is important for instructors to be able to identify and support these students. The instructor team at The Edge has already done significant practical work to identify students who can benefit from extra support, by offering additional instruction through the weekly Focus Class and extra tutorials, by being available to check in with students who have questions or who wish to map out a specific plan for their training, and by offering a Community Class to students with special needs.
To further combat noisy brains, there are some strategies that may resonate well in a class setting. When I assisted in the Community Class, one of my strategies was to demonstrate movements and to have students mimic them slowly whenever possible, in order to encourage more accurate movement and better memory recall. In my own training, I have also often found that I enjoy doing “slow-mo” patterns. As it turns out, slower movement is a strategy supported by both Doidge and Feldenkrais’ research. As Doidge writes: “slower movement leads to more subtle observation and [neural] map differentiation, so that more change is possible,” and it could be of value to those mature students whose mind-body connections are weak, or who are dealing with noisy brains. While Taekwon-Do in particular is predicated on being able to offer a swift defence or counter toward an opponent or attacker, science points to there being a potential advantage to training slowly some of the time, in order to speed mature students’ progress and build those lightning-fast reflexes.
While there are many factors that can offer potential advantages and pose possible difficulties within a student’s chosen martial arts practice, it is my feeling that the culture of the school they attend is crucial. The examples above and their close alignment with the work of neuroplasticians such as Dr. Norman Doidge and Moshe Feldenkrais demonstrate that martial arts instruction can be of great value to all students. The Edge Taekwon-Do Academy sets an example of how effectively neuroplastic work can be applied within a martial arts setting - in this case, in an informal and organic manner. This became clear to me as I wrote the survey below: while researching potential questions at the beginning of my work on this topic, I realized that the questions had all come up in my various discussions with instructors over the course of my own Taekwon-Do practice. These conversations had helped me to uncover and address my learning concerns, and it was clear that such conversations are the norm for The Edge instructor team.
Conclusion
There are undoubtedly more potential learning strategies to explore (perhaps in future essays), but in my view, instructors such as members of the Edge instructor team are already practicing neuroplasticity, and helping equip students (of all ages) to change their minds, their lives, and, perhaps even the larger world around them for the better. Even and especially in uncertain times, the willingness and commitment to do just this is what helps the seeds of innovation and transformation to grow.
Annex
What follows is a survey that mature students could opt to complete when entering the Dojang. The aim of this survey is to assess each incoming student’s health, and to allow the instructor team to create the most focused plan possible to help students succeed.
Optional Survey for Mature Students
Age:
Gender:
Family: please check all that apply
Single
Single with kids
Single empty nester
Single with family duties (elders, other relatives)
Married/committed
Married/committed with kids
Married/committed empty nester
Married/committed with family duties (elders, other relatives)
Prefer not to say
Your health and fitness history:
Other sports or practices (e.g. dance, music) you have done or still do
How long have you done these activities?
Have you, at any point in the past, suffered any head injury/injuries?
If so, how old were you at the time?
Do you feel your cognitive abilities have been adversely affected by your injury/injuries?
Do you have any formally diagnosed learning disorders or cognitive conditions (e.g. depression, anxiety, ADHD)?
Have you had a heart attack and/or a stroke?
How long ago did this event occur?
In your view, how successful has your rehabilitation been?
Is physical exercise part of your program for recovery and prevention?
Do you have any hearing loss, visual impairment or concerns about your mobility?
If so, to what degree do you feel this might affect your overall ability to learn?
Feel free to describe here any other factors you think might have an effect on your training
Comments