Negative Transfer
There are two concepts that have an effect on progress in martial arts; positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is when something in your past has a direct correlation to a new experience, helping you to learn the positive lesson presented. Good basics are the most obvious example of positive transfer. Everything we do in karate requires good basics. If the you have good basics, you can learn anything.
Negative transfer occurs when something in your past comes into conflict with the lesson presented. A simple example of negative transfer might be between a dancer and a karateka. In the lunge or forward stance, the dancer will turn the front foot out, just as a physical therapist will teach it. The karateka in contrast, will turn the front foot to point directly ahead, if not slightly inward.
The dancer and the karateka share some positive transfer opportunities. Balance, flexibility, body mechanics, fine motor control, etc. In my experience, dancers make pretty good karate students, and martial artists make descent dancers. Even Bruce Lee was a dance contest winner. I knew a young karateka at the University. A classmate of his who was a dancer asked him to perform with her in a Modern Dance program that was coming up later in the semester. He said, “Okay.”
They worked on their routine using real parts of different kata, eventually breaking into a solo with nunchaku. The first dress rehearsal fell on a karate class night, so the karateka went to the rehearsal first. When it was their turn, they ran through their routine, the first time the routine had been seen by anyone. Then the karateka headed for the gym and his karate class.
The following day, the dancer told the karateka that all the other dancers wanted to know if he was actually a dancer who took up karate as a sideline. What they saw was all a result of his karate training. He had never been trained in dance. In fact, several people in his past had specifically asked him to stop whenever he tried to dance. He was definitely not a dancer turned karateka.
On the other hand, a great example of negative transfer illustrated itself when Fred Akers asked Sensei to teach his football team karate. The biggest problem group was comprised of some of the skill position players. They had always been the natural talents. They were used to physical skills coming naturally to them. When they started karate training, it was different. The way they stepped, the way the foot turned, the action of the hips, so many little details. Many of them could not handle it and they dropped out of the karate training.
One of the first football players I ever met who was also a karateka was a running back at Colorado State named Eugene Butler. He played behind one of the top running backs in the nation, Lawrence McCutcheon, whose NFL career started with the Rams, then Broncos, Seahawks and ended with the Bills. That meant Eugene did not get on the field very often. The one play I remember, because I had never seen anyone do it before, was when “EU”, as he was called by his friends, was going to be tackled at about the 10 yard line. He used the force of the contact to do a flip, landing on his feet and continuing on into the end zone for the score. I was impressed.
More recently, I have been reacquainted with negative transfer. This past year, 2020, has been spent doing very little. My home is small and has no yard, so, for about a year, I did nothing. The past month and a half, I have been getting back into things. It was going pretty good, so I decided to expand my workout. I had been concentrating mainly on 3 kata, one of them a weapons kata. It was a more advanced form of a kata I had previously (1976) learned. I started doing both of them and that was a mistake. There are many similarities between the kata, but there are subtle differences, too. I started doubting myself when doing the different forms of the weapons kata. I have decided I haven’t worked anywhere near hard enough on the advanced form yet. If you have to think about it, you don’t “know” it. You haven’t done it enough times. I have a lot of work to do.
Negative transfer can be overcome with diligent practice. It is also true in everyday life. We get into habits, happy with our routines. When something comes along that changes things we resist. Resistance to these changes might be the unease caused by negative transfer. If we can recognize what is happening rather than just automatically resisting the change, life might be a bit more satisfying. Just a thought.
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