Going down the rabbit hole

When you start looking for evidence, when no one is asking for any, you will be surprised at what you find. Your view of the world, and your ego will be lying in pieces on the ground by the end of it. I'm not talking about confirmation bias research where you ignore all evidence, which runs contrary to your opinion. The evidence of the effectiveness of karate is that it is terrible, but most martial arts are terrible. The evidence which suggests that it is effective is that it survived being passed down in Okinawa. If it's use got you killed then you're not around to pass on your crappy tradition. It's positively selected as opposed to negatively selected. It's survivor bias in a good way. The fact is that adrenal decay, lack of stress inoculation, and lack of experience in violent situations counts for more than your training. Training is the compromise between lack of preparation and being a violent jerk. Rory Miller says it's luck and instinct, which gets you through most violent encounters, until you've hit about 20 force encounters and then it's luck, instinct and training. We've all heard of the people who survive violence by doing X, Y and Z, but we don't hear about those who did X, Y, and Z who died screaming for someone to save them. Unfortunately, there is this thing called reality and it doesn't cooperate the way we wished it would. We as people tend to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to bad luck. Hardly ever do we attribute success to luck, and failure to lack of skill, even though this is more likely.

I remember reading an article about UFC training, where the trainer was explaining that fighters could achieve the same results by training much less than what they currently were doing. The training had nothing to do with power, speed or skill. It might have even been slightly detrimental. It had to do with mental toughness, and anxiety management. Do you want to go into a fight confident that you did everything you possibly could to prepare, or do you want to go into a fight just as prepared, but with a mental nagging doubt? When you're only fighting pain and fatigue, mental toughness counts for a whole lot.

Here's where this can get you hurt. If you train to fight your anxiety and become less effective than you're not doing yourself any favors. You will be over confident, and less skilled, which is a bad combination.

What does this have to do with research?

It means we need to know the aim of research, and what people are trying to achieve. If you train like a UFC fighter who is trying to manage their anxiety, you might be less effective in a life or death confrontation. You might be over confident, because you did super hard training and die, rather than being under confident, running away and surviving. Research might be comparing very minute battlefield differences, which made a difference tactically, but not much of a difference to the individual. The Thompson-Legerde tests on caliber, which is usually dismissed, was testing the wounding capabilities of different cartridges not how lethal they were. They already knew that a bullet through your head, spine, or heart was lethal. They wanted to know what the differences were when the bullets hit non-essential organs and tissue. Their conclusions were based on certain rounds allowing a person to bleed out faster than others, but this time is counted in minutes not seconds, because regardless of the round our flesh is elastic and closes the wound and our body starts trying to repair itself and stop the bleeding. A wounded enemy soldier will be taken out of the fight eventually, but this doesn't help those in his immediate vicinity. It only means soldiers who show up minutes later won't have to worry about him. The person who gut shot him is probably just as dead. It doesn't help you individually, but it helps your comrades in arms later on down the line. It has a tactical advantage in war, but has no tactical advantage in self defense where a person needs to be taken out immediately. You don't have the ammunition, time nor backup to lay down suppressive fire while you wait for the wounded to bleed out.

It was also thought that non-jacketed lead projectiles would not function reliably in an auto-loader, which is false, but has nonetheless changed the trajectory of firearms development regardless of this being a more than 100 year old myth. I just fired some non jacketed lead rounds out of one of my rifles just a few months ago, and it worked just fine. They have been relegated to the dust bin of history without even a retest to see if the original reasons and conclusions still hold true.

In the Napoleonic war the British sabre caused horrific wounds, but seldom killed. The French sword killed, but did not produce grizzly wounds. The difference between cut and thrust. A thrust kills, a cut maims. The British sword was feared because of the terrible wounds, which is a huge psychological advantage in war. Great for warfare, but not that great for a duel against a determined foe. The British sword was thought to be more effective. Was it? Maybe for fear factor, but not for killing though fear counts for a whole lot.

In the world of the stock market, research has shown that actively managed portfolios do no better than broad market passively managed portfolios. Throwing a dart at the Wall Street Journal is about as effective as the most advanced stock market analysis, because regardless of method you can't predict the future. Regardless of this there are still many companies that advertise the virtues of their management, and people are happy to hand over their money in fees.

What does this all mean?

It means things are seldom how they appear, and if you want to get to the bottom of things you need to dig deep and prepare for your ego to be destroyed, your anxiety to hit the roof, and for no one to ever listen to you because you're going against what amounts to tradition. They use anecdotal evidence, research out of context and ignore conflicting information, because it makes their tummy feel funny to face reality. If you're tummy feels funny, it means you're learning something great. It doesn't mean it's true, or false it just means you're testing your assumptions.

If you want to succeed, you need to ignore that funny feeling and look at the hard real-world evidence. You need to be okay with the fact that luck might play a bigger factor in success or failure than you are comfortable with and that people might be selling you snake oil, so you can manage your anxiety. You also have to be okay with people vehemently and even violently disagreeing with you, because it calls their fantasy world into question. Even with all of this there is freedom in facing reality. It means you can keep your head down, train, prepare, plan and know that focusing on the aspects of life that you can control directly is the only thing that matters even if you are falling through the rabbit hole.

Cost Benefit Analysis

This is kind of a part two to the last post on focusing on what you can, and I think it's just a really important factor to take into consideration.

A cost benefit analysis is weighing whether the cost of something is more than the benefits. This should be done throughout all aspects of your life and it can really open your eyes to how marketing, hype, anecdotal evidence and logic not backed up by reality, can really throw a monkey wrench into your plans.

Let me give you an example from my own life.

Me and my wife are very frugal. We don't get the latest toys, but we live very comfortably and the excess capital means we have more options open to us than your average debt slave. In pursuit of saving money, we were kicking around the idea of installing energy efficient windows in our home. Marketing, hype and anecdotal evidence would suggest that replacing our drafty single pane windows would be a giant boon to our cash savings, but would require an upfront investment. We're fine with investment as long as the benefits are worth it. The cost of the windows and installation would be about $1200, which seemed reasonable, but when we calculated how much we would save on our energy bill it ended up being about $10 per month for a grand total of $120 a year. To merely recoup our investment we'd have to stay in the house for another ten years. We decided to pass on the idea. The windows would technically make the house more efficient, but it wouldn't make the money spent worth it. Now we already have a very low energy bill as it is, so if you're an energy hog these windows might work, but for us it was a no go.

Here's the rub, just because something is "better" doesn't mean the costs involved actually make it worth it. Let's take body hardening. Damaging your nerves to fight better might seem like a good idea. Full contact stress inoculation every other weekend might be the ultimate way to train. Getting into bar fights might get you that no-bull-crap experience you've been looking for... but all of these things come with a steep cost to your body.

The odds of a deadly encounter if you mind your manners and aren't a complete jerk is less than 1%. The whole point of self defense or training to become strong, or just having fun is to not damage yourself. This is the opposite of what we want to achieve. There's no point in training to survive being crippled in combat only cripple yourself in training.

Many times these more dangerous aspects of training, and the more expensive pieces of training equipment, or classes, or (fill in the blank) is merely a way for us to manage our anxieties about violence. They become a talisman, which will ward off all the boogeymen of our mind, so we can continue to deny reality.

So here's what you do. Before you make a decision, weigh the costs and benefits. Research how effective the alternative is and see if  there is concrete data beyond what your buddy says or an internet forum, which actually backs up what you want to do. You might be surprised at what you find.

Don't be perfect

How many times have you heard something along the lines of "karate is about the pursuit of perfection"? Striving for the perfect form, the perfect punch, the perfect kick. It needs to be perfect. You need to be the perfect karateka. It is a standard, which cannot be met. It is impossible, and if nothing short of perfect will do, what's the point of practicing karate? If everything just short of perfect is all junk, and you can't get to perfect than you're just left with junk. This unobtainable goal makes karate an endless chore, which only the most masochistic of us will endure. Side note: maybe that's why so many of them ask to be hit?

So don't be perfect. Don't be perfect. Give everything you've got to practice, but do so because it's fun, not because it needs to be "perfect." If it's not fun, why bother? Go kayaking or something. I think less than one percent of the population depending on where you live will experience violent crime. It's almost statistically speaking insignificant. Car maintenance is probably more important as regards to your safety. Karate ends up being just a lot of practice, and if you can't make practice fun than you aren't going to practice. You just won't do it. So go practice karate, forget about being perfect and have fun. Play with the kata. Everyday just ask yourself, "how can I use my kata to hurt someone?" and go from there. Experiment and see what you find.

Testing Spirit

Modern physical exercise can sometimes be a detriment to karate. Mostly because you repetitively use your muscles in the most inefficient means possible. It's what provides the stress, which helps grow them. In karate we want to use our muscles and structure as efficiently as possible, which is designed to not stress your muscles so you can fight longer. This doesn't mean however that muscle building exercises are bad for karate. They just need to be kept in the correct context. One very good aspect of these exercises is testing the spirit.

In many muscle building exercises, the goal is to reach total muscle failure. This means you could not do another repetition in perfect form if your life depended on it. Your muscles are completely tapped and will need a rest. There was a Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps who could work you so hard you couldn't even lift your arms to type for a few hours. This takes a large amount of discipline and courage to train yourself to do. Your muscles burn, they ache, they are screaming at you to stop, and you're trying to force them through immense mental will to do just a little bit more. You're just asking a little bit more. It is a fight. Our bodies and our brains are designed to move us away from pain, to stay still and conserve energy. This is what is easy. Pushing to your complete physical limits is a fight with yourself. It is a complete test of will to do absolutely what is necessary to get the exercise done, no matter how much your arms burn or shake and your brain is telling you to stop.

This makes it an excellent test of spirit. Fighting hurts, you will get hurt, you will get hit and you have to keep pushing through, because if you don't do something it's not going to stop. We should strive never to fight, because it is deadly, dangerous and costly, so we need safe, low risk alternatives to test our fortitude. Exercise is just one small way to test ourselves.

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.

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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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.

Some More Videos

Some more Rory Miller.

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.