Facebook reminded me that just over year ago, in April 2019, I had been at a taekwondo tournament with the kids I coach. I love my kids. I’ve known some of these athletes for about 4 years now, which, I sometimes forget, is quite a lot of their lives. We kick at each other, I make them do pushups, fill their water bottles and tie their chest guards. I get plenty of hugs. They sidle up to me regularly to either check if they’ve outgrown me yet, or tease me about the fact that they outgrew me a year ago. Or at least they did until mid-March.
For a little over a month, I’ve been teaching all my taekwondo classes online. The whole studio moved to online classes for our members over Instagram Live and Zoom. It’s definitely not optimal to teach fitness remotely in general, but teaching a contact sport when you’re not allowed within 6 feet of anyone else is a whole other challenge altogether.
We’ve been focusing a lot on footwork drills, and shadow sparring (basically the kicking equivalent of shadow boxing). There’s a lot of standard kicking combinations, and it never hurts to review the basics. Some of the kids even have parents or siblings who can hold targets for them. But even though I’ve been trying to find creative ways to do partner-style drills over Zoom, using its Spotlight feature, nothing virtual really quite replicates the feeling of someone else’s foot about to hit you. Not to mention the bodily sense of what you have to do to avoid it and counter.
Still, what makes it worthwhile for me at least, isn’t so much that my athletes are maintaining some of their abilities (though I’m happy they are). It’s that I still get to work with them as a team, and that we’re all still engaged in trying to get through a tough time together.
I’m interested to hear from other people who are teaching fitness (especially martial arts!) remotely right now. What kinds of creative things are you doing to help everyone with their training? Or even just to feel like you’re still connected as a community?
