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For those of you who takes notes or keep a MA diary.
What kinds of things do you write down? Do you try and document each technique into a "database" of technique notes? or do you document each class in a more diary format? For techniques, what kind of format do you write the technique down in? do you use pictures at all? do you find this process useful and make use of these notes later?
I've found a distinct difference between my note-taking habits at judo and my note-taking habits when dabbling in Brazilian jiu-jitsu or boxing. I think my method makes sense, though I could certainly be rationalizing.
(Remember--I'm not accomplished in any of these disciplines, so taking the opposite of my approach might be called for!)
I rarely take notes for my twice-weekly judo classes. I used to, but it seemed to be a distraction from just buckling down and doing the work. (That was true even if I took notes after class instead of during.) My note-taking tended to devolve into either "this is a way to do X" or "this is the way to do X", both of which were less helpful than just visualizing the technique and how it felt.
I think a large component of this is that judo's actual syllabus is rather simple. I understand that the gokyo and list of official and non-offical but recognized techniques, including groundwork, makes the number close to two hundred. But over and over, we see that there are a few techniques that are wildly more successful than all others: osotogari, seoinage, kouchigari, uchimata, haraigoshi, pick-ups, jujigatame, kesagatame, sangakujime. Some others are common but clearly not in the same class, such as sasaetsurikomiashi, or ouchigari. The art is sublime and complex, but limiting one's practice almost entirely to this subset is a very successful and fairly common approach.
The real place that things get hairy is variations and gripping. There are thousands of these techniques, and in my case they don't seem to get names. "Billy's uchimata", "that grip break from camp", or "Bobby's kouchigari" is as close as we get. Hayward Nishioka emphasizes the importance of such unnamed techniques:
The problem with not having a name to tag a technique with is that it becomes less recognizable and hard to study. With out a name it’s sort of like meeting someone interesting but you didn’t get a name or a number. This happens more so with other means of overcoming an opponent other than throws, pins, chokes and arm bars. These areas include counter moves, combinations, advanced tactics, which include an area that is ever more important today than in the past, gripping skills.
You will most likely report to others, “[Teddy Riner] did a powerful osotogari,” when in fact he did much more. If you are a coach what will you be preparing your athlete for? Will it be the osotogari, or the gripping techniques leading to the one handed technique?
Since my instructor focuses on classic Japanese judo, these unnamed techniques remain unnamed. We practice set-ups, gripping, combinations and so on, but they are more transient than permanent techniques. We try them, play with them, then discard them if they don't fit into our game. I think this is because judo is so fluid and fuzzy. Things happen quickly in randori, and are hard to pin down with words or diagrams. The movements that distinguish Bobby's kouchigari from the kouchigari in the gokyo involve the whole body, but are subtle. Describing them in notes is hard.
If I come across a particularly stunning revelation, I might jot it down if it's confusing, or I've been doing it wrong for years. I'll put it in my training blog if I can make an interesting anecdote out of it. Usually just remembering that a possibility exists is plenty.
In contrast, BJJ is an art with a huge list of even basic techniques. Sweeps, passes, submissions, transitions, and hierarchies abound. Just getting your head around all the very different possibilities for each position takes a good chunk of brain space.
More importantly, BJJ techniques are easy to break down. The art is sublime and complex, like judo, but it is much more sequential. "Take this grip. Pivot your hips this way. Swing your leg this way. Roll on top. Make sure your leg goes over here during the transition. Slide the knee through. Establish the side control."
For me, BJJ lends itself to note-taking, so after class (never during), I jot down the steps of the technique and any sticking points that I ran into. Reviewing these notes has been fairly productive for remembering techniques.
I also find that the process of writing the notes is more productive than the process (often omitted) of reviewing the notes.
Using the axes of simple/complex or sequential/diffuse discussed above, one would expect my notes on boxing to be sparse. However, the other variable involved is simple training frequency.
I don't train in boxing at all. I occasionally do a session with a friend, and I'll hit the heavy bag once in a while. Training this is not.
Because I box so infrequently, I feel the need to cement the information more formally. So after my friend shows me a couple defensive head movements, I'll write them down. I don't train or test my boxing frequently enough to know if this is helpful, however. (NB: my BJJ is fairly infrequent as well, which is another factor in notes being useful in my practice of it.)
I take notes when learning a new technique. I'm on my 4th (of 10) belt now in the American Kempo system. Whenever I learn a new technique, either the first night, or sometimes the second night (for more complex ones) working on that technique, I will go home and write down the technique step by step.
Personally I find this useful, not so much for studying necessarily, but for cementing. I've always been the type of person who once I write something down, it sticks it in my head better,.. even if I never look at the notes again.
As an example, here are my notes for our technique Combination 8:
Outside block, stepping back with opposite foot,
Keep weight on the front foot.
Back foot snap kick, followed by a roundhouse kick.
Cross and cover.
I absolutely take notes. Our school actively encourages it, even during class--it's important to capture the information while it's still fresh. It's even more important to actually use those notes.
The more senses engaged during learning the better you'll tend to retain that information.
I also have some shorthand I use to help writing it down, for eaxmple, "LH" for left-hand, O and I with circles around them for "outside" and "inside", etc. The techniques of a specific art might also get their own shorthand. I might try to sketch particularly-tricky things, although I can't really draw :(
I return to those notes, or write down notes if I didn't take any during class, as soon after class as possible. During that time I visualize what we did in class, expand the notes, re-write them in a martial arts journal, and so on. I'm currently re-structuring that information in a variety of ways, including adding more meta-data so I can find "similar" techniques, group things in ways that make sense to me, associate them with any supplemental info I have (books, videos, etc.) and so on.
I've also found that even just an audio recording of the class session can help me remember info I either didn't write down, wrote down poorly, or just plain forgot. It's not great audio since the device is in my gear bag at the side of the room, but it still helps.
I'm nearly 50 and my originally bad memory is getting worse.
We don't have note-taking in class so I want to get things down as quickly as possible as I leave. I use Evernote on my mobile and record audio notes as I'm walking away and driving. I later transcribe them but retain the originals - I find the mixture of spoken and written helps recall the context. Transcribing a few days later also seems to help me relive the experience.
Using a cloud-service like Evernote means I have the notes on both my phone and other computers without having to think about copying (I used to use a digital recorder and even an old analogue tape one before that - I've been an audio noter for a long time!)
I only take notes if I'm dealing with something bigger than my mind can process and store at once. Sometimes this works against me, as I usually expect to be able to store everything that's handed to me, so when I get a buffer overflow, I'm not prepared to dump what I already got.
My mind works pretty well when it comes to storing things and retrieving them later. I'm also very good at connecting the dots, and I don't need to be able to connect information to prior knowledge to store it - I make the connection later. I can also remember things by connecting one element to its successor. For instance, I may not know off the top of my head an entire sequence but, given the first element, I'll remember the next, and so on until the end.
It is also worth noting that I am always training in some way, shape or form. I may not be in a uniform and working up a sweat, but there's usually an element of training to what I'm doing - whether it's walking, standing, trying something in the air while I have a few seconds, or even just thinking about it.
I have an unusual mind and memory. I am not a representative sample of the population.
I have considered a martial arts diary, to keep track of thoughts and events. Hasn't been necessary yet. Again, it goes back to my memory. I'm vaguely aware that my memory may degrade as I age and I should write important stuff down now just in case. It's just not that important to me right now.
An example I've thought about expanding this article into a wiki and then further expanding with other kata. (I'm obsessed with Koryu Dai San right now because it is my grading kata.]
Some of the keys - for me - are to find meaningful terms. There are many ways to do "oshi taoshi", but within a kata, there is only 1 right way to do it. Even within the kata, there are specific grading points, and one of the points my sempai is emphasizing is that the attack has to be sincere and valid. I need to expand these notes to indicate the specific things the attacker needs to do to make sure that attack is valid and sincere - and the exercises to validate that attack. So we have dojo nicknames for many of the techniques; helps to remember variations.
The other themes in my notes are "things that sempai has told me more than once" - stuff I'm clearly having trouble integrating into muscular memory.
I record general concepts, specific techniques, and things trainers tell me I specifically need to work on. I also record competition results and string together game plans.
I used Google Docs for a while which is really good, but I needed a bit more structure as the 40 page doc grew, so I created an app which allows me to record all the same info (openmat.training), including my crude sketches I used to do. There are a couple of other sites like it.
I have found notes are very effective for mechanics, or generally any part of a MA which can be fully isolated and described on its own. I find it gets more difficult to take notes on subtle things because my word choices are often insufficient to actually capture the nuances I am picking up during training. It helps to have a lingo custom tailored to capture the particular subtleties your art focuses on ("shift you weight to the yin side of the leg" is an example of a phrasing in such a custom lingo), but in the end, some things are simply hard to capture in words.
I find notes are best for things which I believe I need to internalize, but have reason to believe that I will not do so immediately. For instance, I may learn a very subtle way to manipulate the lower spine, but I know that I'm planning on going to PT soon, and I'll lose all the subtlety I am working on when I overexert those muscles (which I totally do). In those cases, capturing the idea in intellectual words can serve as a scaffolding for me to try to recreate what I was working on later, and maybe succeed at internalizing it then. These notes, as mentioned elsewhere, are always taken after class, never during. During class, it is more valuable to focus on learning from your teacher than trying to capture a scaffolding for posterity.
I used to take copious notes. And they are useful, however now I take a lot less notes as I can either remember/internalize movements/techniques better or give myself much easier shorthand ("Like the 2nd form except from the inside") etc.
I often will use stick figures to figure out angles for deflection/entry, and grappling movements. For standing grappling, I found drawing combatants from above - noting head, shoulders and hand locations made it easier for me to track how it was working, supplemented with a note or two if the movement is complicated ("hook your elbow into their elbow crook here, then pull then head as you twist") and usually between the picture and the stick figures, I had it down.
That said, if you are at a regular school and not doing a one-off seminar, teachers and other students are usually pretty ok with you recording a short clip of something so you can watch and rewatch, and that has taken the place of a lot of note taking these days.
Sometime later, I reorganize my notes. I rewrite them clearer, grouped by technique or principle being studied, I type them up. I redo the drawings a little more clearly as well. It also helps when you're trying to share with another student on how to do something.
For me I found that a mixture of written notes and video are helpful. For say patterns in Karate, having someone perform it and taking a video allowed for a quick recap and replay in case you miss something in class.
For Judo and BJJ, taking quick words to describe the steps, ie: how to transition from mount to gaurd to a scissor armbar. Doing this after class and writing down anything you can remember will assist you when it comes to reviewing and practising later. Also having the name(s) of the technique will help as you could use Youtube to search for someone using it in a fight situation - different applications
Taking notes is absolutely a good idea. As general rule, the more ways you can format information in the brain, the better you will retain it. This is a psychological and neurological point of research and study with well documented results. Seeing information written down and reading it,stores the information in one part of the brain and writing it down stores it in another. The same is true for hearing the information told to you and speaking it aloud yourself. Doing the task physically and walking through it mentally. Even teaching another can reinforce and develop new pathways in the brain from which to retrieve such information.
Note taking is essential for increased capacity for and efficiency with learning a new skill.
On how to take the notes themselves I would suggest that you follow whatever form of note taking is most natural to you and then expanding upon it later. If simple pictures are easy and natural for you then I would start there and then later write down some notes describing the process of actions depicted there-in. If its more natural to write it down then I would start there.
The notes don't initially need to be overly detailed as you can adjust and expand upon them later.
I would separate things by category and leave space for alteration and notation later on down the line as you will find that continuing to train through these drills and techniques will bring to light new insights and inquiries as to the minutiae of the techniques themselves as well as how you personally can best incorporate them into you're individual style of application within the confines of that art and your particular body type.
Returning to these notes can be useful for at home training and ensuring that practicing older and partially forgotten drills can be done properly.
Additionally its important to note that the simple act of writing these things down is in itself a powerful tool for cementing the information in the brain and creating alternative neurological pathways from which to retrieve the information. While studying the notes may help improve your recall, creating these NEW pathways is a significantly stronger method for creating long term memory and reflexive knowledge of the information in question. So reinforce it in as many ways as possible by writing, reading, speaking, drawing AND doing whenever possible. Though the first few instances of each method will provide the biggest boost to information retention and recall speed. So continual study is good but not strictly necessary as it becomes a less effective use of your time with each instance (with the exception of doing which creates muscle memory and reflexive action through continual use)
In my experience I find it very useful when people take videos of famous fights and fights that I've participated in, and afterwards review them. There are certain aspects in mixed martial arts that you can't see for yourself when you face somebody else, and the more you watch the more you realize certain mistakes that are happening in front of you. Writing notes sure does help but of course only in theory; it's very easy to approach a fight to a pinpoint, but more difficult to react to counter measures that your opponent is doing against you. I'd suggest (wherever you are since it's been 10 years!) that you observe yourself and focus on semantics that aren't necessarily fight related, but more for techniques.
