Martial arts bring focus

First, focus your eyes. Second, focus your mind. Third, focus your body.

These are the three laws of concentration and they're part of taekwondo Master Reza Ghasry's program to help children experiencing difficulty paying attention at school and in their social lives. He's been using martial arts to help these children focus their minds and build the confidence they need to be successful in their everyday lives.

"Some of these kids are extremely smart but they just don't fit the normal format for students," Ghasry said. "They are not so different and they can excel extremely well given the chance."

The children Ghasry teaches at Champion Spirit Martial Arts, his third-floor studio at 3300 Yonge St., are often classic cases of what used to be referred to as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Without realizing it, Ghasry had been teaching children with attention difficulties for many years. It wasn't until after many of his students received their black belts that he realized his training seemed to have a great deal of therapeutic value for children struggling with focus.

"Their parents came to me and said: You know, my child had ADHD and they were prescribed all these types of drugs. We decided to not have them take it and put them in your program instead,' " Ghasry said.

Where many other sports did not cater to these children, taekwondo seemed a perfect fit. Ghasry began to develop a specialized one-on-one program that catered to a child's unique needs and learning style.

"I'm putting them in a very challenging but very structured program," he said. "They know what to expect from the beginning to the end and they got praise if they did something good."

By using verbal cues, easy to follow commands and special attention to concentration exercises, Ghasry's program appears successful in accomplishing its goals.

One such success story is 25-year-old Elliot Morrison-Reed. He struggled with school at a young age and doctors identified him as having attention difficulties. At 11 years old, he started taking Ritalin.

"Ritalin is supposed to help a person focus," Morrison-Reed said. "But rather than helping me focus, it made me not have curiosity towards other things. I felt like it was a bit of a fog on my mind."

He signed up to train with Ghasry at age 12 and decided to stop taking the Ritalin when he was 13. He stuck with the program, eventually earned his second-degree black belt and became a teacher himself.

Now an academic success he holds a masters degree in engineering Morrison-Reed is much more disciplined than he was as a child, he said, and knows he owes part of his success to what he learned from Ghasry.

"It was a huge part of my development," Morrison-Reed said. "It was really fortunate that I stopped taking (Ritalin) and found other ways of dealing with my lack of interest in school."

Ghasry is admittedly "very anti-taking drugs" and many of his students do manage to kick the pills, so to speak. Still, he stresses the decision to stop medication is a serious one and completely up to parents.

Taekwondo can certainly help some children with attention difficulties, Dr. Till Davy says.

"Where I would be careful is not to set up the medication versus the educational intervention because they can both be different pieces of the puzzle," he said.

The combination of physical exercise and discipline offered in taekwondo can be helpful for children who have a hard time concentrating, but sometimes difficulties in concentration are a result of biological factors in a child's brain, Davy said.

"I probably hate medication more than the master does," Davy admitted. "The reason why I use it is that I see some children where the medication really changes their life."

Davy and Ghasry may differ in method but both share the same broader goal.

"The goal is to pursue whatever is in the child's best interest with as open a mind as possible," Davy said.

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