Don’t Let Your Students Develop Training Scars
A training scar is a bad habit that students build in the off-moments of their workouts, their perceived downtimes, the seconds that fall between drill iterations.
Let’s start with a definition. For the purposes of this column, the term “training scar” does not refer to a casual wound incurred by martial arts students during their regular workouts. Those bumps, bruises, scrapes and abrasions are collateral damage, the results of accidents — and often things the students point to for bragging rights.
In contrast, a training scar is what often develops because of a cognitive quirk of the human brain. Also called “path dependence,” it’s a
