What makes a good martial arts instructor

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The greater your journey as a student of your art, the more you will have to share as a teacher, the more connected you will stay to the experience of being a student, and thus the more you will connect effectively with your students. Think about the students you can inspire instead of the asses you can kick.

It is important to be an experienced practitioner but students will most respect your ability to make them better. Impart good values, not just good technique. Has your instructor been training for a long enough time to have the required knowledge to pass on to students? Or perhaps the relevant ring experience at the highest levels, in order to advise competitors accordingly. You need to double check their background and credentials in order to suss out how credible they truly are.

If you think about it, the best instructors you can learn from are those who inspire you. After all, you will have to be motivated to push your limits during training — and a good instructor will lead you to believe that you are capable of achieving much more than you think.

Also, they will continuously challenge you to do better and go further, simply because they have your best interests at heart.

No-one can train for you. Decent instructors are confident about what they teach, but wise and humble enough to understand that no-one has all the answers and every style has its strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who has really practiced anything for a long time knows how little they really know. Being qualified in a martial art does not automatically entitle you to criticise or talk with any authority about other disciplines. This is particularly hard to ascertain as a newbie.

How can you tell if a martial art would actually work in a real situation? Backflips and spinning kicks look great, but are likely to get you killed in a real confrontation. Do some research on the difference between martial arts and practical self-defence. There is a huge difference between studying traditional disciplines, sparring with a partner and fighting in competitions compared to applying what you learn against a knife wielding lunatic who wants your wallet in a dark alleyway.

Hint-give them the wallet. Be aware that violent confrontation rarely has a pre-determined outcome. Martial arts give you options, not guaranteed solutions, and remember; in real life no-one, including your teacher, is invincible. Every martial arts class has a mini-boss. Most Mini-Bosses mean well, and a good one will be carefully supervised by the teacher. Make sure the teacher is actually sane.

Eccentricity is a great thing, but check they have their feet, or at least a few toes, firmly planted on the ground. I knew of one guy who genuinely believed his Bruce Lee poster fell off his wall every time he smoked. Do they run their class like a sinister cult making unreasonable demands on their students in terms of money, attending courses and inflating their own egos?

In turn, are their students able to demonstrate any skill, or understanding? Do they respect their teacher, blindly idolise them, or worse, fear them? Do they claim to have mastered a suspiciously large amount of styles, have they invented an entirely new style, or offer a black-belt correspondence course online? Learning martial arts to a high level requires commitment to a single style. This is because they work on varying and sometimes entirely contradictory physical and mental principles which can cause confusion when studied in combination.

Yes, a good teacher will usually have some knowledge of other subjects, but rarely will they teach more than two or three at a push, particularly if they are unrelated. If your teacher claims to have 19 black-belts and intimate knowledge of all 36 chambers of Shaolin, be suspicious.

If they are claiming to have founded their own style then be extremely suspicious. This represents the absolute pinnacle of martial arts achievement reserved for the greatest masters of antiquity.

There is an obvious element of risk involved in learning to fight. Different martial arts have varying ideas of acceptable levels of contact. This ranges from light co-operative partner work, to an opponent actually trying to knock you out.