Measuring Progress

Your own progress is not always easy to see. This becomes increasingly more difficult as you advance in the martial arts and progress is made incrementally while refining skill. The most common way to gauge progress is by observing those in class with you. Unfortunately this is one of the worst ways of recognizing improvement. It is learned as a beginner when you first join a class and look at everyone who is able to perform a basic or technique that you have trouble with. Over the first couple of months through this observation style, you will notice that you are not struggling as much (comparatively) and seem to be catching up as well. However, it is easy to forget that as you become more advanced, the students around you make progress as well thus masking the actual improvement you are accomplishing.

In this day and age, we have access to technology that allows us to record ourselves so that we can actually see with our own eyes, what our martial arts looks like. So take a minute and record yourself on a smartphone or tablet doing the best you can at your level, especially before a test when you have really been focusing on your material. Store it. You will not see much right away other than a few things your instructor corrects you on, but after long enough you can look back into the archives and see that you actually have been improving and with tangible evidence.

In the end, the only person you need to compare yourself to is yourself. Work hard so that you may be better than you were yesterday.