The purpose of practicing karate

People really get tied up in knots over this one. Mostly because they feel like their actions are being questioned if someone doesn't believe or practice the same as they do. Karate dojo are more church than gym. Their confidence gets shattered if someone does it differently.

There are definitely many different and overlapping reasons to practice karate. The most important and long impacting one being health and fitness. The mental, tactical and puzzle aspects of it keep it fresh and enjoyable unlike 45 minutes on a treadmill.

It does come down to either form or function I believe, and I don't mean kata form, but aesthetics. Is it the costumes, ritual and tradition that you like, or is it the functional movement. There is definitely beauty in watching a person who has practiced a kata to the point of intense internalization, but this a result of his dedication to function and not the other way around. The costumes, rituals, ranks, and traditions for the most part are about as useful as drawing flames on your sneakers to run faster.

Regardless of my feelings on the matter karate is a personal practice. Personal means you practice the way that benefits you, and ignore what everyone else is doing. This is the way it should be, and you should cultivate the confidence to be proud of the way you practice. Physics, anatomy and physiology remain constant through all of the martial arts. It's only how we understand and achieve these things, which are different.

Isolate Sections of Kata

If you want to understand a movement in a kata, you have to play with it. You need to isolate it from the rest of the kata and focus singularly on that action. Maybe for a few minutes, maybe for an hour or maybe for a month. Practice your whole kata at the beginning of practice and then pick a section, which you are going to work on without any preconceived idea of what you'll find and let your thoughts develop naturally on the movement. Practice outside of the lines of performance, move freely, repeat the movement in place, flow, go slow, go fast and go too fast.

When we practice the whole kata, we only get a short glimpse of each little part. Here and gone, here and gone. There is no time to "meditate" on each movement. There is literally no time to focus on the more important parts of the kata. Structure, body mechanics, power generation, force vectors. The parts of a movement that make it useful. The template for function. Without intimate knowledge of these aspects application is made much harder.

Structure, body mechanics, power generation, force vectors equal function. The formula. When we plug in the context, the position of you, the position of the other person and the environment, we get the application. Function plus context equals application. If we know the context, but don't know the function of movements we will fail. If we know function without context, we fail.

Breakdown the kata, breakdown the movement and study these different aspects until you don't need to think about them. This will come naturally like any learned skill. You think, think, think, think, and then you don't think. Think now, so you don't need to think later.

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Plans for the Future

I've got a few projects going on at the same time. The blog is one. I'm trying to keep up with this thing. The book is the second, which is making progress. Life got in the way, but it's my daughter, so who cares. You mean I need to stop working to spend a few hours playing with a baby. Sounds terrible. Not. The third project will be videos, which I had almost abandoned. They won't be bunkai videos for the most part, because I don't have confidence in technique based training. It will be a ground up teaching and study of the Seisan kata, but the principles can be applied to all kata. I'm not promising video quality as good as Karate Culture, because their filming is just awesome.

I'm dedicated to spreading karate, so I think that putting out the most useful karate instructional videos for the average person who wants to learn something fun and physical is the way to go. If you read the blog you know that I think most of karate is essentially ego and monetarily driven, which creates a huge amount of artificial barriers to what is an awesome system for transmitting a martial art. I want karate practice to be as common and as varied as Yoga, where people think nothing of heading out to the park to practice a kata, they learned on the internet or from a library book.

I'm basically hitting the mind, body, soul in three mediums. Book, blog, and video. Three prong attack. I don't want to leave someone out because they learn visually, emotionally or logically.

If you don't live your values

If belts don't matter? Take off your belt.

If rank doesn't matter? Stop using your rank.

If the uniform doesn't matter? Take off the uniform.

If karate is humbling? Make yourself humble.

If you don't live your values than they are worthless to you. They are merely talking points.

Make Training a Part of Your Everyday Life

Ever since my daughter was born its been harder and harder to set aside a few hours of the day to practice. I now have minutes of practice scattered randomly throughout the day. It's one of the best things about single kata practice that I can take a minute and run through my form. One or two reps here and there, or practicing a section while cooking. This has led me to do all sorts of things to try and keep my physical fitness and karate level up.

Keep weights around the house.

I'll keep a pair of weights or kettle bells at different stations in the house and every time I walk by I make myself do a set. You could do the same thing with calisthenics.

Elastic bands

If you get bored of the weights I sometimes keep a bicycle inner tube slung across me and use it periodically as a resistance band. They take up very little space in a pocket as well.

Make everything harder!

If you do chores around your house or some other banal activity, make it more difficult. Practice stances while you clean. Practice the footwork of kata while moving around the house. Lately I've been sliding a five pound plate onto my brooms, mops and scrub brushes to make cleaning the floor a resistance exercises.

The basic idea is to Mr. Miyagi-hack your day to day. Turn everything into an exercise. It also makes doing the boring housework that comes with life a little more interesting.

The Artificial Barrier of Belts and Organization

Karate is an idea. No one owns karate and once you know a karate kata it can't be taken away from you. It's yours for as long as you remember it. This makes it open to everyone. It's not complex enough to hold a monopoly on the knowledge, because there just isn't that much to remember.

This can pose a problem if you want a monopoly on karate instruction, because nothing about karate necessitates a teacher. Remember kata was kept secret. Funakoshi recounts a person demonstrating a kata with all the windows blocked so no one could see him. Secrecy is one way to guard the knowledge, but now karate is everywhere. Every town, on youtube, it is open to the public. This means that other barriers of entry need to be put in place. This is where organizations and belts come into play. By making an argument to authority, and not skill, reason and experience, you force people to go to a dojo and get evaluated by your organization before granting titles etc. This creates an artificial barrier to practicing karate.

Technique is not the problem with kata

I'm writing a whole book about this so I'll be brief.

It is ludicrously easy to come up with a scenario for a particular kata movement to become a technique or series of techniques. I practice one kata and I probably had 30 different interpretations for the first movement set alone in Seisan. Think about that. One little movement with 30 different variations. I'm fairly convinced that there are infinite applications. It is easy to find technique, but when you use a technique based system of practice where you try to get to a point where you can ingrain an automatic response this becomes tricky.

Let's say you need a 1,000 repetitions to ingrain a technique. Thirty applications means 30,000 repetitions. Every different technique I discover is another 1,000. So if the interpretations are functionally infinite, how do you do 1,000 repetitions of infinite? It's impossible.

Technique is not the answer. It's a parlor trick for demonstration. Technique is the visible expression of the application of principles. The context changes, the technique changes, but the movement and the principles stay the same.

If you're trying to build a catalogue of techniques based on your kata practice, you are wasting your time.

Why Love Karate?

Hard question to answer. My journey in karate, like many people's, is almost purely circumstantial. I started because there was a dojo in my hometown, which was close by and I could afford the membership fees. A traditional dojo, whose curiculum mirrors programs designed to promote Japanese militarism and physical fitness rather than martial art study. People generally are also ferociously tribal for no real reason. Right now it's a hobby, which costs me absolutely no money.

The reason I love karate now is that it is democratic, meaning it can be practiced easily by everyone, and it can be used as an intuitive and instinctual form of physical combat. Anyone can learn a kata and start practicing at home. General principles can be followed, which make a kata a pretty brutal form of violence. We must remember that the kata survived till the modern period because they were easily transmittable, people were able to learn at night or travel abroad for a few years and become proficient. They also needed to work. All those, which practiced a bad kata, more than likely were either forgotten or lost because it got you killed. In violence, what doesn't work gets you killed. The kata we see are the survivors.

This is why I love karate, which is why I want to share it with people. You don't need a dojo, or a belt, or tradition or any of this stuff that decorates most places windows. You just need a little bit of space, some patience and a few minutes a day to play around with the kata.

Naihanchi vs Seisan

The biggest difference I've found between the structure of Seisan, which I practice regularly and Naihanchi is how they show the relationships between movements.

Seisan is grouped in clumps of roughly three repetitive movements. The kata demonstrates how to move continuously with a single movement. One can ignore the lines of performance and go on to infinity and never have a definitive break. "Block," punch, move for instance. What is not demonstrated is how the different movements relate to one another. Kata is linear merely for presentation. It is impossible to have a non linear sequence of presentation. Unless you're some sort of N dimensional space alien.

Naihanchi on the other hand ignores how movements can be used continuously and instead demonstrates how the individual power movements can be linked together. Take the back hand to elbow movement in shodan. It begins with a step and then carries forward into the movement. One merely has to shift their weight and step forward again with their left foot to carry the same movement forward again. Step forward again and you return to the original position. This is not shown, but soon starts to look like the crescent steps and weight shifts of more forward facing kata like Seisan. Instead it chooses to focus it's attention on the movements being related and linked to one another, hence a mirror. Left and right.

What does this mean? Nothing really. Just be aware that the kata does not demonstrate linear application and that a kata cannot demonstrate everything at once even if you should be able to respond with any kata movement at any time.

The idea that a 100 year-old kata can predict what a living thinking human being can do is ludicrous and suggests that we're are all merely automatons.

Thoughts on Analysis

My bachelor's degree is in English Literature. The degree taught me much and more about structure, narrative, rhetorical devices and language, but the over arching theme of all my classes was analysis. Analysis on the face of it seems rather simple. You're exposed to something and you give your opinion of it. This is what I thought analysis was, but it's more complicated than that.

Merely reading something and giving your own interpretation of the material is not analysis. Analysis is a tool. It is an activity to help you understand the material. It is not an end unto itself. Analysis is about looking at something through different lens, like putting a colored filter over a photograph. Some colors disappear, some are enhanced and this change in perspective brings attention to different aspects of it. In analysis these lens, are used to help shed bias, but also to take on the bias of another.

There is a theory of analysis in literature where you try and throw off all of your own bias, the bias of the author, the historical contexts of the work, or any outside factors and look at the work completely on it's own. It's an annoying and difficult prospect, but it helps you try and see things for what they are. There are other theories of analysis where you take on the bias of another person. My personal favorite is the Gay and Lesbian theory. I'm neither, but it's the only time I've read The Great Gatsby and enjoyed it by looking at it through these borrowed eyes. You borrow the eyes of another and you see what sticks, what changes and what fades away.

I try and use these same ideas to analyze my kata, and it's something to think about.

Thoughts

I don't really like bunkai videos anymore. I used to like them a lot, but they don't really do it for me anymore. It's not really that they're bad, or that the ideas wouldn't work, but that they don't teach people to come to their own conclusions. They don't really teach people how to analyze kata for themselves.

I kind of think of kata as a spring board now, a template for possibilities and not so much as even different techniques. It's like a spring that gives rise to many different streams. The kata is the spring and the streams are the techniques, but the stream is not the spring.

I can come up with a bunch of drills, and techniques and variations of techniques and drills, and then make a flow drill to tie all of them together, but I don't think that would help people understand what a kata is in a helpful manner. A kata helps you build the tools to become a navigator. It's not a set of directions. If the directions are bad, or something goes wrong than there is no room to adapt. If you know how to navigate than you can come up with your own directions. You learn to adapt.

Practicing kata should start with identifying the principles that give rise to all techniques. Teachers should give students the analytical tools they need to find these answers for themselves. This way they can surpass the teacher instead of just following.

Perspective

Noah Legel and the guys over at Karate Culture both put out some media on "fighting dirty." It's good stuff. There really isn't anything I disagree with in both their releases, but I think we all need a little bit of perspective. I kind of covered it in an earlier post, but I thought of a good example of what I'm talking about.

When I was in the Marines, there was a Wounded Warrior House on base, and I'd be assigned to cover events there. It was 2006 or 2007 and the house had just opened. There were two Marines there that had very traumatic brain injuries, so traumatic that they basically had half of their brain missing along with half of their skull. They walked and talked and were still basically functional though they needed some help. I also met those that lost limbs, were severely burned and blind.

I'm telling this story, because I've met several people that had very horrendous injuries in combat and survived. These are injuries where most people would have just died. This however isn't evidence against rifles, grenades and IEDs. These are highly effective and highly dangerous, but they don't work all the time. This is to say that if some people are so resilient that they can take a high powered round to the head and still live than what are the chances that your punches are going to work? It's not an argument against punches or any technique. It's just that some people are so tough that you're just screwed. It makes arguing about what's better having your hand open versus closed or whether hitting someone's skull is better than poking their neck rather moot, when you consider that even bombs don't work all the time.

Finding Strategy in Kata

As I practice it, kata is a collection of principles. These principles are largely concerned with generating force to do work in an efficient manner. In the most simple terms, it's teaching you how to move to achieve a goal. The goal generally being to keep yourself safe from harm by ending a conflict, which is not just pounding the crap out of someone but also escape. If you exit the conflict, you also end the conflict, physically at least. These principles however usually have a common theme. This theme usually pops up in different incarnations, but the result is generally the same. This is the strategy.

I'm going to give a sport example. Ronda Rousey is super awesome at arm bars, and she's super awesome at hip throws. They are her strengths. They work together to achieve the goal of winning the fight. She can slam someone with a hip throw and while they're dazed she can put them in the arm bar. An effective strategy for her would be movements that exploit these two strengths. Getting close, distraction, softening blows, etc. If she were to create a kata, it would most likely involve different ways to exploit these two strengths. It would have a theme. It would be a group of tactics that work toward her larger strategy.

The common theme that I see in my flavor of Seisan is the explosive use of linear body movement and unbalancing an opponent through what could be called opposing action to knock them down. There are other things that can be gleaned, but most if not all of the movements I practice have the potential to just drop someone on their butt. There are other types of movements or "techniques" that can be gleaned from the kata, but to me these are the major themes. All the movements either help me do this, or help me get in a position to do this. This is of course just my opinion.

In short if you find the theme, you can find the strategy. You'll find the themes by studying how the kata moves you to deliver energy and what that kinetic energy has the potential to do. It's sometimes better to figure out what the moves are not good for.

This is just how I've tried to analyze it, and what I've found useful to me.

Busting Logs

I've been spending a few hours each day splitting rounds of maple. They're from a tree we brought down in my front yard, and it's been a mission of mine to get it from fallen trunk to cords of wood for the last few months. All the rounds are finally sequestered in my driveway, so they're not an eye sore for the neighbors. I'm sure they're liking that. This activity has been my chief source of strength training for the last week, making it a point to spend a few hours on it each day. It was a thirty foot maple, so it's taking some time.

I'm using a sledgehammer, wedges and an axe to split the wood, though I have a chainsaw in my basement. I could get it done much more quickly with the gas-powered tool, but that's not the point. It's a challenge and a monster. Blisters, splinters, some blood and muscles so sore that sometimes it's hard to practice have been my rewards so far, plus dropping ten pounds. What I'll get in the end is more knowledge, more resilience, more strength and a ton of free fire wood. It's worth it to me for just the challenge and the accomplishment.

It seems simple enough on the face of it. Hammer wedge into stump, hit wedge with hammer and split wood. The logs don't know this though. Usually it's hammer, hammer, hammer, ping, and the wedge pops out like it was pushing against a spring. Probably user error along with lack of knowledge, but this is the kind of thing you have to figure out on your own. These are skill based tools. You don't just follow the instructions. These things build mental fortitude as well as physical. You need to work past the frustration, the pain and work toward progress. Swinging the hammer is the easy part. I know that sooner or later it will be routine. Once I've learned the weaknesses of the wood. It will take mindfulness and concentration.

I'm looking forward to what I'll learn.

Not a Warrior

I think it's important to say that the independent study of karate does not make you a fighter or a warrior. It makes you someone who studies karate. I know I dip my toe into self defense every so often, but this is more an encouragement for people to evaluate their own practices and not to unintentionally pick up bad habits. It's pointing out an alternative viewpoint. I try and practice my karate in such a way that it won't hinder me in a violent situation, but I'm definitely not relying on it. I try and focus on the fundamentals of my kata and how I can explore them. I work on what I can and try not to worry so much about the aspects that are out of my control. A parallel would be dry firing a pistol to work on fundamentals. It will help you improve your shooting, but it's not an answer to everything.

Independent study firmly places you in the recreational category of martial arts practice. There's overlap, but as I see it the only people who aren't playing around are force professionals. Police, military, prison guards and bouncers. The people who's safety depends on it routinely. Everyone myself included is just playing around. It's a serious issue, but it's also fun to explore.

Diligent, careful and thoughtful solo kata practice can help you build a solid foundation to work from. It's about building a tool out of your body. It doesn't mean you can apply it, but you can still study it. There are a lot more benefits from karate and single kata practice than just learning how to hurt people. This is okay. I believe this opens up a door for people to get interested and practice without feeling like it's necessary to engage in what is sometimes very time consuming and expensive training. It should be fun and thoughtful.

Showing My Own Bias

I definitely showed my bias in an earlier post on guards in karate. I've taken down the post, and I'm going to provide a little bit of clarification on the subject. I unintentionally skipped an idea that might have made things a little clearer.

Karate as I see it is an infighting system. It has a very particular range where many of the movements work best. This is chest to chest. It's much, much closer than many people practice their karate. In infighting there is no real guard. This is because offense and defense are not separated. They can't be because the distance is so close that a conventional guard no longer works. To stop an attack you have to break the person's balance and structure with your own attack. It's not about intercepting attacks, it's more about preventing them in the first place. It's not fool proof by any means, but neither is a conventional guard.

Infighting I believe is a better option for self defense. It's the range for which many predatory attacks take place, and a person is able to put all of their tools and techniques to use. Striking, grappling, gouging, throwing and locking are all options. This is opposed to longer range ballistic attacks, which limit the techniques you can use effectively. If you're beyond arms length from an unarmed opponent than you're relatively safe and should work toward escape or diffusing the situation.

To sum up karate for me is an infighting system, so there is no guard. Self defense and infighting aren't really separated in my head, so it was unfair of me to make such a blanket statement. These are of course just my opinions. I'll try to do better in the future.

Choosing a Kata

If you're already a karate practitioner and would like to change your avenue of study than the kata you choose will be rather simple. It's whatever kata you like to practice the most. In my opinion, there are no bad kata. There are some pretty wonky versions of kata out there, but even the worst of these can be fixed by paying attention to body mechanics and the principles of efficient movement. This means proper power generation, skeletal alignment, weight shifts and understanding how and why the movements work. It's a tall order. You'll have to do this type of stuff anyway, but it's easier if there aren't superfluous movements added to the sequence.

If you're new to karate than I would suggest that you choose one of the foundational kata like Seisan or Naihanchi. If you choose Seisan, I'd go with one of the simpler incarnations of the kata. There are many, many different flavors of Seisan and each put emphasis on different parts. Shito-Ryu, Uechi Ryu and Goju Ryu have fairly simple versions. There are a couple of reasons why I would suggest choosing a simpler looking kata. The first is that if you are new it will be easier to learn the sequence of movements. The second reason is that flashier or more complicated kata do not mean that they are more advanced. Each kata is a collection of principles and fundamentals. If you understand the principles and fundamentals, it's possible to create an almost infinite number of technique variations, so don't sweat about how they look.

I would also advise that you ignore any labeling of techniques in a kata. In my opinion, they hinder more than they help. Blocks are not just blocks, punches are not just punches, kicks are not just kicks. They have many different layers and uses, and labeling artificially constricts our thinking. They are blinders that we do not need. This makes the movements a giant black hole of sorts, but you need to have faith that everything will come together. Karate is more abstract than concrete, which is scary at first, but it prevents you from getting stuck in one frame of mind and allows you to be adaptable later on.

It's important to remember that just because someone learns a kata from a living breathing person doesn't mean that said person knows what they're doing. I've seen very terrible kata and technique from people who have been practicing long enough to know better. Why do I bring this up? It's because you're not going to do any worse learning on your own than going to many commercialized dojo. Take comfort in the fact that you can't do any worse if you were paying for it, so relax, practice and study hard.

Patience, practice and play are the key.

No Nonsense Self Defense

I'd like to turn people's attention toward this website, No Nonsense Self Defense, which I've added to my links. I've mentioned it before in another post, but I just wanted to repeat myself. It's full of great information on many subjects related to violence and self defense, and I encourage everyone to read it. I use this site as my bullshit meter. It helps me determine whether someone is trying to sell me snake oil. It's big, long and somewhat complicated so prepare to spend a few days glued to your computer reading all of Marc MacYoung's stuff.

Sorry if you recently tried to click on the link. It's now fixed.

Pressure Point Knock Outs

To paraphrase Rory Miller, if these pressure point knock outs were real than no one would survive a good massage.

I know you've probably seen the same videos as me. Some guy taps someone on the neck or the chin and they collapse like a boned fish onto the mat, and this guru has to do some sort of back rub to get the guy conscious again. This is stupid. People believe this stuff because they want the martial arts to be like magic. They want to power up like Dragon Ball Z, and turn into some ultimate unstoppable thing with their chi. Maybe not this exactly, but it's pretty close. I used to be one of these people. I wanted the martial arts to be magical and mystical. Some dojo don't try to refute this type of stuff. In some ways they encourage it when they say "you'll be able to unlock the kata subconsciously when attacked." It's playing on people's insecurities that they need an ultimate weapon.

I put this kind of stuff in the same category as the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, alien abductions, moon landing conspiracies and astral projection that is the utter crap category.

Edit: I'd also like to say that I don't care for pressure point fighting in general. Like I've said, I broke my arm riding my bike. Because of the adrenaline dump, I was able to pick the bike up, fix the chain and ride home. An hour later, I couldn't even lift it, so I find the idea of performing some type of vulcan nerve pinch rather dubious.

Skill Not Included

This is something that's been bouncing around my head for a little bit. Skill is not included when it comes to kata movements or even analysis of those movements. I think skill is a foreign concept to many people. We can watch a professional athlete, a musician or an artist and enjoy their skill and on a certain surface level we know what a skill is, but we don't necessarily understand it. Most of us are much more familiar with just following instructions on some type of electronic gadget, or putting together some sort of boxed furniture from the store. Insert dowel A into recess G, or after booting up, click on the setup icon and choose tint from the drop-down menu. I believe we confuse the two sometimes. We confuse skill with instructions.

Kata has more of a parallel with hand tools than it does with electronic gadgets. There is some degree of skill required with electronics, but hand tools don't even come with instructions and require a larger degree of skill, nuance and experience to be used effectively. They're harder. It's why people don't use them. Anyone who's ever used a chisel knows there's a big difference between knowing how to use one and actually using one. They're two different things. Angle, pressure, grain and tactile feeling play a huge role in the finished product. This is information that can't be passed through instruction personal or otherwise. Kata is the same way. It's the text book and the tool, but this doesn't imply skill. There is nuance to it gained through experience. Not just partner practice, but solo practice as well.

Skill is derived from understanding how the tool works at it's most fundamental levels. If we understand the tool, than we can use it to its full potential. In regards to karate, understanding the tool really means understanding ourselves. This requires more diligent study turned inwards than looking for answers without.