Maths, Punishment and Martial Arts

These are my thoughts on dishing out punishment in the dojo and in life…

I see a lot of Martial Art Teachers using Push Ups as a form of punishment and it makes me really angry.  How can making someone do something beneficial be a punishment?  If your kids misbehave do you tell them to eat a healthy meal and get a good nights sleep.If they are well behaved do you pump them full of fast food treats and make them play video games all night till the sun comes up?… Maybe you do but I hope not.

Push-Ups are a great exercise and it makes me furious to see people threatening to use them as a form of punishment.  I wonder if this comes from old army and football training routines.  If the guys do something wrong the Sergeant/Coach makes them “drop and give me twenty!”.

I want to share a story with you about my time at school (way back then) when teachers could actually tell students what to do and kids had to do it…

When I was 15 years old I had a maths teacher who was a very smart man and he was also a solid 240lbs (115kgs) of muscle.  He competed at the Commonwealth Games in Power Lifting. After the normal School day he ran the weightlifting group which was open to anyone brave enough to join in.  He was a great guy and taught me a lot about how to lift weights properly.

In his class we quickly realised that any misbehaviour such as talking in class, not doing your home work, getting a C or lower in any test, etc was dealt with by issuing a certain number of push ups to be done on the spot.  I wasn’t a genius but I managed to get through the weeks without hitting the floor to do 20 or more push ups for one reason or another.

As the school year progressed the same guys kept doing the same stupid things and kept getting punished the same way.The biggest difference was that these guys got stronger and fitter.The maths teacher being a smart man realised that they completed them too easily so he simply raised the number of push ups required.  Some of the guys would have to do 50, 80 or 100 push ups every time, and sometimes that was 2 or 3 times in a single lesson.

I realised a couple of things in that year: 

1.       The guys that were the worst behaved were generally the bullies of the school.

2.The more they disrupted the class to impress their friends the more push ups they had to do.

3.The more push ups they did, the prouder they were.

4.Push Ups were not considered by the bullies as a punishment, they completed them with great pride.

That year the smarter kids learned maths while the trouble makers stayed dumb but got a lot stronger physically.With hindsight I can see that he would have been better off punishing them with more mathematical home work which they would have hated (but would have learned from) and rewarded the smart kids with push ups so they wouldn’t get bullied so easily.

My main point in this article is that I want Instructors to stop using push ups as a punishment and start using it as a reward.  There are an infinite number of push up variations for you to teach your students.Show them some new ones and get them to come up with some of their own.Have a push up contest to see which students can do the most of the different

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