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.

We now have video

 Just copy and past the link below to see the first of what I hope will be many videos to come. The goal is to put out at least one a week, mostly because I'm learning video editing, so everything is slow. I hope they will come out faster in the future.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy4t5zg542g&feature=youtu.be

For Children

How would you make shooting a gun beneficial and completely safe for children?

I don't know what you would do, but I know what I would probably do. I'd take the ammunition out of the equation. The gun isn't dangerous, outside of being a crappy club, without the ammo. This is the only way to make this completely safe with children, without very close and careful supervision. There's no way in hell I would hand a bunch of loaded Glocks over to a group of five-year-old children. Now without ammunition there is really only so much you can do, so instead of focusing on marksmanship, I would focus on dry firing the gun. It would be about the meditative qualities of focusing on the fundamentals of marksmanship. Sight alignment, sight picture, breath control and trigger control. It would be about striving for the perfect synthesis between these four aspects, instead of hitting a target. Now without ammunition I wouldn't even need to use real guns. I could hand out toy guns with sights and still get the same effect. Now to keep a safe and competitive environment and so the kids don't get bored, I set up a duel using Nerf guns for them where the first one to get hit with a dart, even if both are hit, is the winner.

Sound familiar.

This is basically what happened to karate. Strip away everything except the principles without a goal or a map for application and focus on the derivative zen effects of the activity. Because it was taught to children, and kids would hurt each other just by accident if they were taught how to apply it practically.

Everyone now is pretty much just trying to put the pieces back together after it was consciously smashed in the name of progress.

Please help me spread karate to the masses. Share this blog post and help karate become the creative individual pursuit it was always meant to be.

Kata for Creativity

A single kata affords us an astounding amount of creativity, despite it being a fixed set of movements. The movements themselves are not representative of technique, they are rather representative of efficient and effective body mechanics for physical violence. Each movement is merely a template for producing kinetic energy in a useful manner. It is up to the individual practitioner how this energy is applied. Karate therefore becomes more about how you apply the kata, rather than how well you perform the kata. It also allows for the karateka's own personality, tactics and style. This is how kata is used creatively. There may be value in the calligraphy style zen exercise of kata, but the creative application of kata means you keep growing, you keep pushing yourself and keep learning.

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.

Push Hands and Constant Pressure

I like push hands as a training tool. It allows me to practice my structure against a person in a non-competitive fashion and practice many of the patterns in kata that are not only used for ballistic attack, but are also used to receive and redirect force and put you in a position to return force without changing positions. I don't want to have to stop and reset my position to manipulate someone. I want to be able to manipulate them from the position I'm currently in.

One thing I've learned while doing this is that you need to give constant pressure. This could be deemed sticky hands, but it's more than just keeping contact, it's keeping pressure. I want to bog down the other person, to throw off their balance and keep them reacting instead of acting. I want them to have to move, shift and reset to manipulate me, so that they're always a step behind me. Part of how I do this is using stances, weight shifts and stable arm positions to lean on them. The end middle block position is a surprisingly stable position for leaning on someone. If the other person doesn't use structure than they'll be bearing some of your weight. Proper stance integrity is essential when I do this because if the person suddenly shifts than I need to have my balance.

Another lesson is angles. Use them. Angles, angles, angles. When ever I read something or heard something where someone was talking about angles they always seemed to explain it like you were lunging at someone from a few feet away at an angle, usually a 45 degree angle. I think it can be a little more subtle than this. It's really the difference between pushing a boulder and rolling a boulder. Another example would be walking furniture. You push at an angle and then the other side at an angle or you tilt it at an angle and walk it back and forth. It's the same with a person. You don't want to push into the center of their mass you want to push at the angles and tip them.

Just a few thoughts.

Staying Positive, and Play and Movement

Staying Positive

It's hard to stay positive as a karateka. There are so few definitive answers in conflict already, but karate seems incredibly ambiguous as well. There aren't many definitive answers in karate either. Usually the days where I'm positive that I finally understand the essence of my kata are the same days where I feel I know the least and should stop kidding myself. There are plenty of other things that can make me feel negative toward karate. Tribalism, cults, fantasies, politics, egos and money to name just a few. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I remember eventually that ambiguity is one of the things I like most about karate. If there is no right answer, there is no wrong answer, so I keep on practicing and stop worrying about it.

Play and Movement

In a very real way the kata tells you what you're doing. The kata teaches you about karate by making you move and speaking to you through that movement. You just have to learn how to listen. Learning how to listen involves playing with the movement and figuring out where your kinetic energy is going. Usually it's a combination of forward movement and dropping down into a stance using gravity. It's a feeling similar to falling, but you fall into a stable structural stance, like front stance if exploding forward. There's also rotational energy and using leg strength to push up into a technique.

Figuring out in what direction your energy is moving is key to understanding what you can accomplish with the arm and leg movements attached to each portion of a kata. Body weight, gravity and structure are what power techniques. It's what makes them work. How you move dictates what type of techniques you can use. So forget about what your arms are doing, while you practice and focus on your stance, your footing and where you feel your center of gravity moving or your hara.

The fun part.

This is really where play comes in. Practicing the kata as a kata is great, but it's a best case scenario situation to showcase use of body weight, gravity and structure. One needs to know how to apply them in a more free form fashion. Take a section from your favorite kata and play with it. Don't just repeat the movements like a drill. Change tempo, stance length, speed and direction. Make it a dance and just feel how your body is moving. Stretch a stance to it's limits. How wide can you get before you become unbalanced, how narrow can you get before the stance loses meaning, are you dropping or pushing, how quickly can you move between each position at random. Practice the stances, but keep them fluid, loose and mobile. We want good principles not aesthetically pleasing sculptures.

Don't be afraid to do things wrong. Doing something wrong can tell you more than doing something right. Structure and balance is particularly squishy meaning that it's more of a "within accepted parameters" concept rather than right or wrong. You want to find the limits of the movements, so you know how far you can stress your balance and structure. If you're off balance than you know how not to do it. Everything becomes a lesson.

Most importantly it comes down to thinking, feeling and playing.

Simultaneous Attack and Defense

Maybe 99 percent of martial artists that I come into contact with have no idea what it means to combine attack and defense. It's sad because pretty much 100 percent of karate techniques are attack and defense combined.

Usually when I read someone's work on this subject, they talk about a simultaneous block/ strike combination. A person punches and you block the attack and launch your own at the same time. This is not exactly the same thing. Attack and defense combined means that when you attack you hamper the other person's ability to attack. This is hard for people to understand with karate because they believe it is a strict striking art like boxing. It is not. The simplest example I can give of attack and defense together is a simple shoulder throw. The throw itself protects you from harm because it's really hard to launch an effective counter attack while you're sailing through the air. The attack and defense cannot be separated. Another example would be just getting a person off balance. If I put my foot behind someone's heel and then push, it will trip them. They may not fall, but they'll have to spend a half second reorienting before they can counter. While they're trying to reorient, I attack again. I'm preventing an attack in the first place. It's much easier to avoid attacks that are thwarted before they even start. Defense becomes more about prevention than reaction. Prevention is the best medicine.

Preventing an attack can be lots of things however and it's pretty easy to practice and it's the most annoying thing in the world if you get caught on the wrong end of it. Moving off line can prevent an attack because your opponent has to reorient himself to attack again. Grabbing someone by clothing and jerking them around while you pummel them in the head works really well also. An overwhelming flurry can be attack and defense as well. The opponent will have trouble attacking if he's too busy trying to defend against your flailing. It's not complicated.

Your opponent should only get one attack and that's the one you don't see coming. After that, well fuck'em, he had his chance and he blew it. It's your turn now and they don't get another because you don't let them have another.

Simplicity Over Complexity

I see much more complexity in karate than efficiency. I think this is a backlash to the kind of punch, kick and block interpretations that people are so used to seeing. Karate can't be too simple anymore. I fear that it's only been replaced by overly complex maneuvers and frankly just as preposterous situations. Just because something is complex doesn't mean that it's better.

There are straight forward, effective and robust movements in every karate kata. It's okay for karate to be simple as long as it's effective.

Kata in the Cold

It's been snowing for the last two days and it's below freezing outside, but I went outside to practice anyway. I practiced the kata for about twenty minutes stamping down the snow and adjusting to the difference. Then I spent a few minutes striking the pounding post.

It's always good to practice in varying weather conditions and terrain. It's easy to say you have a stance locked in when your bare toes are gripping the dojo floor, but it's harder to say when your leg muscles have to lock in a stance while sliding on snow and ice to keep yourself from falling, while wearing boots. It's a different feeling. Different terrain calls for different stance depths and there needs to be a certain amount of adaptability when dealing with uneven footing. These are things most don't talk about in the rigid uniformity of the dojo.

It's also good to be uncomfortable. Can you practice with the wind throwing snow in your face? Can you stick it out until your body heat compensates for your thin clothing? Can you keep going after your shoes are soaked and your fingers are numb? Questions that need answering.

Direct Action

I like to practice direct action in my karate. Direct action is only acting on things that you have direct control over. You can't control your opponent's actions, but you can control your own. It's acting on the openings that are presented to you and acting on them instantly, not waiting for the openings that you want. You can't control the opponent. Direct action is movement that breaks down an opponent despite the actions of the threat. I don't like to gamble as to whether an opponent will react the way I wish him to.

Ippon ken, tsumasaki-geri and spear hand

These techniques had always kind of confused me when I first started practicing karate. I'll use the English terms for ease of understanding. I'm speaking of the single knuckle fist, the toe kick and the spear hand. All of which seemed like kind of a dangerous proposition. Wouldn't they just break? After a few years it dawned on my why these techniques were trained and why you wouldn't just break yourself. I'm sure many did.

First on the breaking part cause it's shorter. The answer is structure. With the toe kick and the spear hand the striking surface is supported by the phalanges around them. The bones are kept in line with the supporting structures of the large bones to which they are attached. The single knuckle fist is supported in a similar fashion, but different configurations depending on style. The trick is that you have to get the alignment perfect, or at least within acceptable parameters. Hence the conditioning exercises. I don't really believe that kicking wood or stabbing tires makes your fingers harder or toes harder, but I do think it tests your structure. If it's wrong you'll definitely know it, hence the slow build up of these techniques. The callouses and such are just by products of the training.

Now why would one want to do such a thing?

Simple. Smaller surface area. Imagine you have a staff. It's a pretty good all around tool. If you stab someone with it, it can get the job done through impact. Now if you put a point on that staff you have a spear. The smaller surface area at the top with the same force behind it allows it to penetrate and cause more damage. It's the same basic principle.

This has a couple of advantages. The first is if you can get all your energy behind one of these strikes like the toe kick or the single knuckle punch you're going to obliterate the point that it touches. Maximum damage. The second advantage is that because it does have a small surface area you can use less force and get the same effect as a punch, or a kick. Motobu Choki recommended the single knuckle punch for when you were too close to punch properly.

Like the spear hand, these are soft target strikes and do have their own limitations due to the skill required to use them effectively, but the thought of someone launching their entire body weight behind a single knuckle punch into your solar plexus is a scary thought, or worse a toe kick into your testicles. They might just rip apart.


 

History and Tradition

I read a lot of karate books and books about violence, because I'm essentially on my own. Books become my teachers. Almost all of the old karate books have a section on history. Patrick McCarthy's Bubishi has an entire section on the history of the work before it even starts for context. There are a few things that all of these books agree on.

1. There is no orthodox karate
2. No one really knows what the movements mean
3. Old karateka practiced few kata
4. There are many variations of kata and none are "correct"
5. No one truly knows the history of karate 
6. There were no styles in the traditional sense just local flavors
7. Karate has evolved and changed

I find it troubling that it's almost the opposite of the modern karate paradigm. Uniformity, lineage, usually at least 15 kata, styles and tradition.

I believe economics is the answer to this, but who knows.

Everything and Nothing

The martial arts are weird and especially karate, because we talk about them as if the martial art or the technique does all the work when really it's you who does the work. Technique is just the movement of our bodies. The martial arts are like an idea, real and not real at the same time. They are everything and nothing.

The same thing goes for kata. I like to call kata the shape of the weapon, because it's easier for me to think about it with this filter. Kata is very abstract and this gives it a handle of sorts. It helps me picture what I'm thinking about. By shape I don't mean the embusen, I mean the actual movements and all the parts of the movement. If I could take a photograph of a movement with a low shutter speed, the blur of movement that the camera captured is the shape. It's not the beginning or the end that is important. It's only a guide. It's me who does it, not the kata or karate. There are plenty of ways to interpret kata movements. There are definitely different legitimate ways to look at the same movement. There is no right or wrong. There is only movement. Because of this, kata essentially becomes everything and nothing. Because it's nothing it has the capacity to be anything, because it can be anything it's essentially nothing.

This ties rather well into the idea of mushin no shin, or mind without mind. Thought without conscious thought, or no mind. There is me, my opponent and that is it. My resolve against theirs. Everything else is irrelevant.

Makes me think of the union of mind, body and spirit in a more tangible way. Interesting.

Nostradamus Kata

"If I grab his testicles, he'll grab my wrist and then I'll apply the wrist lock."

"If I trap him here, he'll have to attack me with an overhand right, and I'll be ready for it."

I hear statements like this fairly often. I read them and for a fair amount of time I believed them to be pretty good interpretations of kata. The taking advantage of "natural" reactions or flinch responses. It all sounds well and good, but it's betting on an assumption.

In Dirty Ground by Lawrence Kane and Kris Wilder the authors describe a story where a hoodlum was walking down the street smashing up cars with a bat. One of them runs out to confront them because his car is next on the smashing list. There is an exchange of words and the hoodlum is about to attack and they think "the bat is basically the same as a sword, I'll use one of my sword defense techniques and take the kid down." Well the kid threw the bat and he got a crack on the head.

The moral of this story is that people don't do what you expect. The same goes for these examples. An adrenalized person might not feel you crushing their testicles or just might not care and you're waiting for a wrist to lock that isn't coming. They might have other plans than an overhand right. A competitor might do that, but someone else might just flail violently and overwhelm you. Pick you up and slam you on the pavement perhaps.

This is Nostradamus Kata. The idea that a kata hundreds of years old can predict what a living breathing human being will do in response to anything is ludicrous and dangerous. I believe the people that made the kata, the fighters, thugs, warriors and peace keepers would have kept this in mind.

The only thing you have control over in a crappy situation is yourself.