Book review: How to Sequence the Teaching of Technique and Tactics, by Luis Preto

A new feature of the Dynamo blog is launched with this blog post, the reviews of martial arts training and instructional resources. Please bear in mind that you will not find any negative reviews in this section, since we'll be dealing exclusively with products that have proved helpful in the Dynamo training methodology and practice, so in a sense we recommend them, or better yet, the resources we'll be writing about have been "Dynamo approved". We'll be starting from the book Fencing Martial Arts: How to Sequence the Teaching of Techniques and Tactics, by Luis Preto.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luis Franco Preto holds a Master's Degree in Sports Science. He has been practicing and teaching martial arts for the past 25 years. He is an instructor in Lusitan Fencing, aka Jogo do Pau. He holds a dan grading in Wado Ryu Karate and is a certified self-defense instructor under Geoff Thompson. You can find more info on him at www.pretomartialarts.com. 

ABOUT THE BOOK 

First and foremost, this book is targeted mostly towards martial arts instructors and not so much the average practitioners, since its subject is teaching methodology, and namely teaching skills and organizing the training contents into an effective curriculum by having each training stage being a natural consequence of the previous training stages. In a few words, the subject of the book is teaching fencing martial arts and understanding:

• what to teach
• in which order
• and how to go about teaching it.

This is achieved through the extremely meticulous progression of drills which is presented in the book, designed to guide the fencing arts student from the beginner stages of practice up to free sparring, while building solid technical skills and developing tactical knowledge at the same time. The drill descriptions are more or less generic, but specific examples are provided for each, so the reader can easily come up with different versions of the drills.

What is even more interesting about this book is that Preto approaches his subject from a 'clean slate' perspective, i.e. not as a Jogo do Pau instructor, but as a scientist who first defines the problem he'll be dealing with, then breaks iτ down in smaller sub-problems and proceeds to gradually solve it, making sure that he always explains the 'why' before the 'how'. In this sense, the book is not about presenting a specific martial style, so it is valuable to all instructors of blade/stick arts. If we take it one step further, the thought process followed here by Preto can be a most useful model to those who aspire to develop a more modern and effective curriculum even for empty-hand martial arts or combat sports. All in all, this appears to be a very important book for martial arts instructors, especially given the poverty of the English-language martial arts bibliography in books focused on pedagogy. 



ABOUT THE LAYOUT AND PRINTING QUALITY
The font used in the book is rather 'noisy' and I personally could do with a much simpler one, the quality of the pictures is very good and the layout could benefit from bigger margins, to make noting and marking the book easier - but that might be just me...

HOW TO GET THE BOOK
You can purchease it from Amazon.com.