Going to the gym is no fun.
It’s not so bad at first, right? You sign up at some new place, you buy a bunch of workout clothes, maybe even buy yourself one of those fancy shaker bottles with the ball in it. Usually, when you sign up to a new gym, they also throw in a couple of free sessions with a personal trainer. So there you are with your new clothes, your new bottle, and a new workout buddy. Well, a temporary buddy, at least.
At some point, though, the free sessions run out, your new clothes are ratty and stained with sweat, and the inside of that bottle is caked with protein powder. And there you are, left to fend for yourself. It is almost inevitable that you will join the millions of people in this country who make monthly donations to a gym without ever setting foot in one again.
Why does this happen? How can you go from being excited about going to the gym to dreading it?
The answer is simple: fun.
When you had a trainer, you were making a connection with another person. They encouraged you to push the limits of what your body can do. They provided support when you weren’t feeling up to working out. You may have even started to feel like a friendship was developing.
You had a blast picking out new clothes and shoes to work out in. And how fun is it to shake up that bottle with the little ball in it?!
Simply put, if it’s not fun, people won’t do it. That’s why we make fun and play an extremely important part of Tae Kwon-Do training. If you can’t bring fun into whatever you’re doing – be it Tae Kwon-Do, Basketball, Soccer, etc. – you will never experience the full joy of that thing.
My son Charlie is at a point where he doesn’t like doing schoolwork. I don’t know why, but he just doesn’t enjoy it. I always tell him that if you don’t learn to love schoolwork, you will never be good at it. If you never get good at it, you will never learn. And once you stop learning, your life is over. So he needs to learn to love it. It needs to be fun.
Not surprisingly, my wife Tica is much better at helping him make schoolwork fun than I am.
We get it. Pushups aren’t inherently fun. So, how do you make them fun? One way is, instead of making students do pushups as punishment, – “reminder exercises,” we call them – we say that the students have earned 10 pushups, and we get everyone excited to do them. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it works. We all have a big laugh about it. But, we also drop and do the pushups.
This is a very different approach to how we used to train back in the day. Back then, training was hardcore. It was intense and violent, and there were no kids around. In fact, one of the downsides to teaching young kids martial arts these days, is when we run into someone from the old school and they have nothing but criticism for how we train vs. how they learned. To them, what we do is all fun and games, and can’t possibly help our students actually learn martial arts.
Take flag sparring, for instance. Flag sparring is how we train people who are not yet ready to spar. The old school Tae Kwon-Do guys make fun of it, saying that it’s “for sissies.” But what they don’t understand is that when you’re flag sparring, you’re learning ring generalship. You’re learning how to move on your feet. When your flag sparring partner shoots their arm in to grab your flag, you’re learning how to block. When you shoot your arm in to grab your opponent’s flag, you’re learning how to throw a punch. Just because it’s “fun,” doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.
The truth is, though, that we have found that creating an environment and attitude of fun around our training, and even injecting games into it, helps our students – young and old – to engage better with their training. It helps them find joy in the training itself.
When teaching kids, we want them to “play” Tae Kwon-Do. It’s not always about going home and practicing your pattern exactly the way we did it in class. We do different styles. So, when we do “ninja style,” we close our eyes. When we do it “superspeed style,” we go as fast as we can. When we do “sloth mode,” we do it as slow as we can.
The idea is to help them progress in their training through treating it like play.
I have this neighbor who is a young kid. He is constantly in his backyard, doing the strangest Tae Kwon-Do moves I have ever seen. He will go across his yard and back, and he must try 25 different moves. Some of the moves are really cool, others are just goofy. But he is truly playing Tae Kwon-Do.
We could all learn a thing or two from that kid. So, get out there and, whatever you’re doing, make it fun.
Master Gorino’s Tae Kwon-Do offers a trial program for individuals and families in Buffalo, NY and the surrounding areas that allows you to get a feel for the different classes, meet our instructors, and experience our dojang. It’s a great way to see if Tae Kwon-Do is right for you. To learn more or to sign up, visit the Contact Us page or call (716) 836-KICK (5425) and a member of our team will follow up with you on next steps. We look forward to helping you achieve your goals. Pil-Sung!
