Introduction

The Purpose of this Book

This is not a bunkai book. It is not filled with lists of techniques, possible scenarios for use of kata, strategy or tactics even though there is a little of the latter. It is not about the outward expressions of kata that we see demonstrated every day. The almost infinite expressions of movement that people have attributed to be the meaning of kata. This book is about the fundamental essence and quality of kata. It is about putting into words in a concrete and usable manner how we can use kata as a tool for physical violence, how we can transcend the idea of technique lists and use the kata for what it was intended for, as a system. A system that is so simple and easy that with a little bit of understanding and a whole lot of training, but less than most we can use any kata we choose as the foundation for a fighting system that we can use so naturally and intuitively that we can use it as comfortably as using our birth language to speak to a friend. A way of looking at karate kata in a way that will not hamper instinct, reaction, or application through complicated scenario based learning where we match a specific technique to a specific reactionary stimulus. A way for us to use kata for the real world.

It's through this book that I hope people will gain a better understanding of their karate kata, and provide a vehicle and a guide for learning and practicing karate all on ones own.


Studying a single kata is about ingraining a mental cognitive process as much as it is about practicing martial movement. Practicing the kata, studying and understanding its component parts and how it's applied is an internal process that cannot be replicated with empty repetition or scripted drills. I cannot give you understanding. I can only point you in the right direction and help you to analyze and attend to each subsequent part and piece of a single kata practice. It involves an intense focus on the self. Each person and kata are different, so it is ultimately up to you. there is no cookie cutter set of tips and tricks. what follows will be the aspects of each level, thought exercises and different ways to practice and train, but this does not mean you should limit your practice and study to this book, it is a starting point. This book will be broken up by level of complexity. Each part takes thought and focus and knowing doesn't mean it is internalized below the conscious level. You must attend to each part and diligently think, explore and experiment until even the cognitive process becomes unconscious. No part is mutually exclusive or can be separated from the whole. It is all connected so all should be looked at as a whole and individually. Each component checked, rechecked and checked again until it becomes natural and easy. Read the entire book then go back and explore your practice with the ideas from each section. Feel free to skip around, but each subsequent part is only as strong as the preceding part like links of a chain. It‘s only as strong as the weakest link. Be patient, practice and play.

If you are trying to pick out a definitive list of techniques based on specific scenarios than it will take you an infinity of time to unlock a kata. Regardless of what a kata was, we only have what a kata is today. It is better to learn a kata's mechanics and how we can apply them to technique, tactics, and strategy. we need to let our study effect our kata as much as kata effects our study.

Movement to strategy and strategy to movement is not a one way street. Each effects the other.

You will change as you learn, so it is important to go back and reevaluate all aspects of your kata as you squire new knowledge and information.

the Harder Road

The path of a single kata starts narrow, but opens up into the infinity of possibility. It is the harder path, but the more rewarding path. It doesn't foster discipline, confidence, fortitude, or deep thought. It requires them. If you need a detailed map or set of instructions like putting together a new appliance you will fail. If you need to be constantly, motivated by the carrot and the stick than you will fail. If you require the outward signs of martil prowess, or the perception of prowess through rank, belts and costumes than you will fail. It will only give you as much as you put in and no amount of mindless drilling, borrowed bunkai, or tricky techniques will lead you to understanding. Po unlock the full potential of a single kata requires mental energy, careful self study and creative yet methodical practice. You will go from confusion, to knowing to understanding to simply being. A kata will not merely be a routine of purposeless movement, it will be a permanent part of you. It will seep deep down inside and you will not oe able to tell where one begins and the other ends. You will transcend thought, you will transcend technique, you will transcend kata.

Solo kata practice starts in the mind and ends in the mind. ihe abstract nature of kata practice requires thought, deep thought and attention to detail. Lhese are rental nechanics, which cannot be directly observable by the spectator. No amount of scripted drilling, repetition or kata practice will have any value if there is not a willingness to think and study the movements. lhis is not the study of other people's bunkai, ideas or theories. It is not what you'll read in books. lhis is a close observation of what you are doing, how you are doing it and its: meaning in regards to functionality and utility. It is a mental process of check, check and recheck. Not just of the aesthetic outer viewing of kata, but the internal understanding of movement. we have been moving our entire lives and have learned not to attend to our natural productive movements, these movements are closely linked in principle to a katads set of movements. We must learn to attend to what we have learned not to attend to. we must do this during every practice studying, observing and giving attention to every detail until the processes start to creep back to below the conscious level. They are however still cognitive functions, but we need to be able to draw our mental energy towards other endeavors, so we can flow, respond and act naturally in the face of adversity.

The Structure of this book

the order of this book will be as followed. I will first attend to the fallacy of using technique training for the single kata practice. I will describe the context of how it is practiced and how it should be approached. I will describe a variety of analytical tools, cognitive traps and rules to follow when thinking about and applying each part of the hate. I will then attend to each layer that must be tackled for full cognitive understanding, and offer ideas for how to practice each and tie them back into one another.

It is my intention that you should read through the entire book once and then use each section of the book and the suggested resources at the end as a beginning reference for your internal quest of karate, because it is internal. The external trappings of body and technique are the mere reflection of your dedicated practice, not the rewards. the rewards go much deeper.

After these rules, layers and tools have been thoroughly internalized than you can throw the book away or lend it to a friend. 

The typical karate class is made up of kata and prearranged sparring. You come to class and practice kata, you go home and practice kata, you go to class and practice kata. You might get to a higher rank, which allows you to practice more kata. When you started going to the dojo, you probably didn't really care about the belts. You wanted to learn something. You wanted to engage in the cultural tradition of a foreign land. They tell you that the techniques hidden inside of kata are practical, yet they remain somewhat mysterious. But, you don't know any better so you practice kata, you practice kata, people are promoted with you who suck. You practice kata. After about five years, all you've done is memorize the kata that they've handed out piecemeal to you over the years. Gichen Funakoshi said that it takes 3 to 5 years to master a single kata, which sounds about right, considering you learn to talk in about three years, and you were just a baby and talking is complicated. You never seem to get to those practical applications. Five years is not a long time. Three years is even shorter. Compare that to the lifetime it takes to master what is now called modern karatedo. Why spend a lifetime only scratching the surface of a dozen or more kata, when you can dive deep into the belly of a single kata. Dedicating your time to a single kata to the point where the movements are just ingraned into your being. There is no kata anymore. It's just you. Kata is merely the template, the spring board to which we use as the brush to make a single kata a martial art. Practice does not make the martial an art. It is the creative application of the martial, which makes it art.

One kata does not require a dojo, it doesn't require a lot of space, it requires no membership fees, it requires no set schedule, it does not require that you be reduced to the least common denominator in the class. It does not require you to be satisfied with the least crappy martial arts establishment in your town. It can go as far as you can take it, and it can never be taken away from you, because it's just knowledge. Kata is a weapon that can't be confiscated.

Practicing one kata opens up the practice of karate to anyone who can memorize a kata off the internet. If you can memorize a traditional Okinawan kata, than you can practice karate whenever, wherever you want. Memorizing kata is not the point of karate. Once you have the pattern of a single kata memorized you can spend the rest of your life studying it. Imagine how good you will be if you dedicate the same amount of time to one kata, which you not split between 19?

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.

Consumer Mentality

Our modern culture is a disservice to most of us in my opinion. Our consumer culture that is. The health, and safety aspects of it are wonderful. We for the most part are brainwashed by advertising. We all like to think that advertising doesn't effect us, but sadly it does. We are constantly bombarded with sales pitches to buy products and services, while each individual advertisement is for a different product, the message is always the same: "Buy this and your life will be better if not perfect." Notice that the message is almost never "buy this because it's a superior product."

All this advertising builds up in our brain and we're constantly given the impression that stuff = happiness. How many of us when we have a project that needs to get done immediately start looking for the tools that we "need" for the job? Television tells us that with the right tools any job is easy, so we buy the planer, the table saws, the exhaust fans and other various tools to build a bird house. We spend thousands of dollars trying to solve imaginary problems. We've essentially out sourced all of our thinking to merchandise. We are taught that almost any activity is so complicated that we need a specialist to do the job for us. It's supposed to be a convenience thing, but how many of us spend days waiting for equipment in the mail or spend hours driving around to buy something. We usually spend the extra time we have in front of the television anyway and pine after the lives of people who don't spend their entire lives in front of the television.

There's still cost in time however. Most if not all of us work for a living. If you work for an hourly wage you sell your time. "Time saving" contraptions still usually cost you time and money just in a different way. For instance you could spend a few days earning the money to buy a decent rotary tiller for your hobby garden. However, it would only take a shovel and a couple hours to double dig the garden and you'd have those days of pay in your pocket, plus a workout. Win, win. You could also choose to work less. More time for karate. Two hours of labor could literally save you days of work.

I believe one of the larger lessons of karate is learning to adapt and solve our own problems. If you outsource all of your problems you usually gain junk. If you learn and adapt, you get the job done and you also gain a skill.

Karate Snobs and Secrecy

Guilty. Of the first at least.

There are definitely all kinds of karate snobs that range all over the spectrum. Even the biggest, clown wig wearing mcdojo hanshi sifu can be a snob, but let's be fair the snobs usually reside on the shiny hardwood floor side of things right next to their hand crafted Okinawa toilet paper. You know who you are. This can just be part of maturing through karate, but I think it sticks with some and it's just as much of a problem as a mcdojo.

I'll be the first to admit to doing this. My first dojo was very traditional, run by a very high ranking individual, who belongs to a very reputable karate organization in Okinawa. The dojo looked like many Okinawa dojo. Anything that wasn't super traditional to me was bogus. I'm still guilty of being a snob, but at heart I'm really trying to make people better. I want people to think, explore and learn. This requires permission and there are about 0 reputable karateka that I've heard of that do this.

They act like they're giving permission, but they really aren't. It's a giant "catch-22." It goes something like this.

"You need to explore what karate means to you under a qualified instructor."

I saw what you did there. Qualified can mean basically anything. Especially in karate. These people will basically call all karate bullshit, but then say that you have to find someone good who can teach it. Hmm, one of these things is not like the other. What kind of logic is that?

This is compounded by the fact that secrecy is still alive and well in karate. This is secrecy through omission. This is usually done for "moral" reasons. They don't want people to misuse it.  These karateka want to get to know you, feel you out for eight years and then start teaching you how everything actually works, but you have to get an invitation to their super secret dojo first. Sometimes they'll only teach the good stuff at certain times. My first dojo only taught good stuff at noon on weekdays. This makes a lot of sense if you live on a small island with very intense weapon bans, but means very little if you can go to your local Walmart and walk out with a shotgun in about 20 minutes, or a cheap utility knife at a gas station.

Karate takes a lifetime of practice. Wild slashing with a utility knife takes as much time to master as it does to get it out of the packaging. Which do you think is more dangerous?

These are great karateka and they'll be better karateka than I will ever be, but these actions push people to bad places. People are forced to pick the lesser of evils and then have to waste eight years before they figure out whether it's crap. They'll most likely be brainwashed by then anyway. Soft clap. Bravo.

I've got one thing to say to all of you.

"Fuck you."

The secret is that you have to do it all yourself. You have to learn on your own, you have to study on your own, you have to practice on your own, and you have to think on your own and most importantly you can't stop. You can't find a place you feel comfortable and stop. There is no stopping. There is only more doing. No matter how awesome your sensei is and no matter how great a teacher he is you still have to do the work. The sensei doesn't do the work for you.

The next secret is that it might not work and probably won't work, not because it's a bad martial art, but because you have very little experience breaking people. The kicker is that you're not supposed to get experience, because self defense is about keeping yourself safe. The criteria for success is not getting into fights.

Here's your permission from a non-reputable karateka. Go practice for fun. Find a kata you like and a little bit of space and practice, practice everything, think, study and think some more. You have to do the work on your own anyway. Cut out the middle man and keep your money. Practice for fun, fitness and problem solving. Kata is like a puzzle half the fun is figuring it out. Start slow there's no rush. It's literally supposed to take the rest of your life.

Here's a riddle for all the karate snobs:

If the worst mcdojo in the world keeps people out of trouble and keeps them out of fights, is it bad karate?

More BAB Training

J got a little overwhelmed today. We worked angles of attack and conditioning defenses against them. Getting grabbed from behind is a fear of hers so she dropped back into feral flailing mode a few times, while I dragged her to the ground. She got better though. J did the same thing for me, and I had to keep reminding myself to work toward the goal. If there's an opening for escape, I need to take it and I started to. We followed it up with a few minutes of infighting. J threw me a few times, but she still gave up once. We'll need to work on that some more.

All in all a good end to the day. A little tired, a little dirty and a little wiser.

Karate Programming: the hardware

I've spent a little bit of time writing about this in other posts, but I figured I dedicate a couple completely to this idea. The idea is that you can program yourself. Your body and your brain are adaptable. It's how we learn, it's how we get stronger and it's pretty easy to do if you know how to do it.

Training your body is very easy especially when it comes to physical attributes. We may not all have the genetics to look like Arnold in his hay day, but we can definitely make ourselves better. The answer is steady increase in intensity at planned intervals. It doesn't need to be much of an increase. We're not Olympic athletes for the most part. We can throw out much of what professional athletes do, because we're not training for a big game. We're training for an unforeseeable event that we hope will never happen.

All you need to know is how your body adapts to exercise. When you workout your body adapts by overcompensating the recovery of your muscles for future stress. This over compensation period occurs one to three days after you workout. It's important that you increase the intensity of your workout within this time frame, so that the pattern repeats itself. If you workout after this super recovery period your muscles will have reverted back to their previous state because you didn't stress them again during the appropriate time.

This is all you need to know about exercise. Pick some exercises you enjoy doing and go for it, and you can forget everything you ever read in the muscle rags.

It's important to recognize that professional athletes have huge amounts of resources behind them including constantly evolving manufactured performance enhancing drugs, which change the way you train. Steroids for example almost completely change the way you lift. When you take steroids, which I don't and never have, all you need to do is get your reps in. You've taken out your body's natural cycle of recovery, adaptation and hormone secretion. Basically the more you lift, the bigger you get.

The mental aspects of karate training is where careful planning and knowledge of how we build neural pathways for skills come into play. I'll elaborate on this more in the next post.

BAB training

Training with J went well. We took some time working through applying some of the kata movements, and began work on a new section. She's very comfortable with the first repeating set of the kata. A middle block/ punch combination that can be used in a variety of ways. She's become very good at jamming her forearm into my neck if the opening arises and more than once she put me on my butt.

She was less comfortable with the second section we worked on though that should change with just a little bit more practice. She just needs to remember to keep contact, so that you're aware of where your opponent's limbs are without looking. I was able to get her with a variety of circular attacks, but she was still able to perform the main application of the movement.

The funny thing is that she thinks that I've let her get the better of me, but she's been improving so quickly and adapting so readily to the new concepts that I'm scrambling to defend and counter with other sections of the kata, but once she's gotten the hang of those she'll be exceptionally hard to deal with. One of the signs that techniques are working as they should is they feel too easy. When you use structure, you don't feel muscular strain or the resistance that is inherent in other practices, so it sometimes feels as if you're doing nothing.

We finished up the session with five minutes of Rory Miller style one-step sparring. We use a metronome to tick off a steady beat and on each beat we each make one move simultaneously against each other. It helps you work to improve your efficiency since you have little time to adapt and readjust to your opponent making you do many things with a single movement.

Inoculation to Pain

I'm not a big fan of body hardening, but I do think it has a place in karate training, but not the way that many people pursue the activity. Most karateka that I know of that engage in conditioning exercises do so to make their bodies more resilient to damage. They harden their knuckles and arms, their throats, their shins and sometimes their testicles through striking them with various objects or having someone strike them. I've seen very impressive feats done due to this type of training. But, I'm dubious of how much it actually protects you. Even if all your nerves are dead you can still break. I think body hardening can be a replacement for full contact sparring. Let me explain.

The only real value that full contact sparring has in my opinion is intensity and pain. If you're a self defense minded individual, it serves little purpose being so beat up all the time you can't defend yourself. The safety equipment required makes most karate techniques impossible and all the safety equipment in the world can't protect you from a concussion. If you're sport oriented and know the date and time of your next fight then you can do some really hard training and give yourself time to recover. The drawbacks out weigh any of the benefits in my opinion. This is where body hardening comes in.

The fact of the matter is that fighting hurts. Especially in karate when your forearms can become a cyclone of death meant to destroy anything it touches. We need to inoculate ourselves to pain, so we're not stopped in our tracks the first time we get hit hard, or strike hard. This is where body hardening comes into play. Body hardening allows you to slowly build up intensity and control the conditions to minimize the risk of injury. It doesn't take much to bang your forearms and shins on a piece of wood a few times a day, and you don't have to worry about your partner rattling your skull by accident. It's a much simpler way to see if you can take the pain than finding someone you trust to rumble with.

Things you learn practicing one kata

The first thing you learn is that you have discipline. It's kind of one of those Catch-22 things that you really need discipline to learn discipline, because if you don't have discipline you'll never practice enough to have it. You learn that you have discipline because it's really, really, really, really boring. At the beginning.

The first year of practicing only one kata you're just going through the motions. You might as well be dancing. But I found that it's very important to practice mushotoku. This is practice without the desire for gain or profit. It's a Zen concept and people jump down my throat sometimes about this, because they believe that Buddhism has no part in karate. I agree, but these same people usually have the suffix Do attached to karate. Read Gichin Funakoshi, he makes a distinction between karate and karate-do.

The concept kept me going because with one kata it's all you have. There's no belt testing, no classes, no new kata to learn, no new movements to master. It's just that one kata that you've chosen to master and it happens when it happens, you just have to keep going.

You obviously learn patience. There's really no need to rush because you're not going to understand things in an afternoon, or a month, or a year. I personally didn't start getting a handle on what I was actually doing until after year two. You get an idea, but it's nothing you can put your hands on. It's just a feeling.

You can tell when others understand their kata. They're not just moving their arms and legs. They're not miming movements. They are actually doing something in their mind. They completely understand everything they are doing. Their body moves in concert. Not everything is fast, because not every technique needs speed sometimes it just needs leverage.

You learn that the kata is part of yourself. It's hard to explain, but you come to learn it very intimately. You own it, you don't rent it. It doesn't stop because you stopped practicing at the dojo. The dojo is not going to make you a karateka. You are going to make you a karateka. I think this is appropriate, because if you practice for self defense you're the one that's going to save yourself. Not your sensei, or the style, or even your technique because when you get right to the bare bones of it, it's just you and only you. The kata is just a reference point.

You learn that you can get good fairly fast. At least compared to how most karate dojo train. It's just arithmetic. A thousand hours of one kata is a thousand hours of one kata. A thousand hours of 10 kata is 100 hours per one kata. A thousand hours of practice is a little less than three years of study if you study for one hour a day. So if you practice 10 kata for three years you'll have one hundred hours of practice for each kata spread out over that time. You hit the one hundred hour mark at three months and ten days if you only practice one kata. Like I said, arithmetic.

You learn a lot when you only practice one kata, and the best part is you don't need to pay anyone to do it. You can do it in your backyard.

Thirteen Fist Method

I've often been somewhat tempted to call what I practice Seisan Kenpo, instead of karate. It's pretty clear that I don't agree with most of the training methodology of karate overall. Mainly the study of many kata over the in depth study of just a few. Rather than having additive qualities, studying many kata in my opinion has a dilutive effect on ability. There is an argument that one can freeze because they don't know what to do and that one can freeze because they know too many ways to do something. I believe through practice and study that a single kata is a complete system. If one knows more than a few, the number of techniques one can study becomes rather hard to handle. I'm a big fan of the concept of "one and a thousand." One principle that leads to many different variations, but all one needs to know is the principle. I'm getting off topic.

I feel like there is enough precedent for name changing that I could do this with some confidence. Patrick McCarthy calls his stuff Kenpo, though it's old-school karate. Gichin Funakoshi himself changed the names of the kata, because he felt they were not relevant enough to keep, though this has strong political and cultural influences behind it. One could also argue that karate itself is the study of many kata and not just one kata. I know there are those that consider it essential that one be familiar with all the kata of karate to be a complete karateka. I also just like the sound of it. Seisan Kenpo or translated the Thirteen Fist Method, which sounds like a forbidden kung fu style, though 13 is a lucky number in many eastern cultures meaning something to the affect of infinite growth.

There's a few reasons why I most likely will not do this. First, I don't want to be the Grand Poo Bah of my own martial art. I am not the creator of Seisan merely a student of it, and I don't hold to the idea that one needs an instructor to practice karate. In a purely Zen slant of practice, one only needs a kata and some time and off they go to quiet their mind. I don't much like the idea of paying for that. It's almost like a tax on prayer. For practical application, I feel one needs at least a partner and preferably a group of people, so they are exposed to different training environments and tactics, but a dedicated partner is all they need. The second reason is Ed Parker's American Kenpo Karate. I've seen a few of his videos and like his personal presentation of it, but I don't much care for the offspring of his system. It's just a little too much fancy hand movement without a lot of depth. Fast hands don't make a martial artist. It helps, but it's not the defining characteristic. Third, my chief ambition is to influence karate. I want to make it acceptable for those who want to break free from the ritualism and caste structure of the dojo to practice and be acknowledged for their abilities and not the belt around their waist. Sadly if you don't have lineage, study, practice and logic counts for very little.

I'm not trying to destroy traditional karate. I believe that there are some good things about that kind of structure. I only wish to promote a freer interpretation of karate. If I have to change the name to do it I will, but I'm pretty sure people would just say "did you make that up?"

There will be videos, at some time... maybe

Much of the stuff I'd like to talk about and explain requires video. The written word, as much as I love it, just isn't the best vehicle for this kind of stuff. It's like trying to teach someone how to walk through text.

Unfortunately one of the many drawbacks of being frugal and an independent practitioner is that you have to use what you have and take what you can get. Finding training partners and willing participants can be a challenge. Especially since I have to find them, convince them and usually teach them. All of this has to happen while leaving their ego intact to a certain degree. This is especially true if they're a karateka, because my general idea is that most of what people do is a complete waste of both time and money, under certain circumstances.

So my wonderful wife and training partner/ student will be assisting me at some point in making these videos. But I don't plan on demonstrating on her, I plan for her to demonstrate on me. I have about five inches and 70 pounds on her, so me demonstrating a technique on her doesn't really prove that much. I personally feel that techniques exist so that they can be used on someone bigger and stronger than you. Basically if it doesn't work on someone bigger and stronger than you, it's not the technique, it's just you being bigger and stronger.

She is definitely capable of breaking me if she felt so inclined, but getting her confidence to a satisfactory level to demonstrate is a different issue.

So hopefully, some time in the near future, there will be wonderful videos of her dropping me like a bag of rocks.

Power comes from your feet

In close range combat you don't have the time to speed things up to put more power into your strikes. You might just have a foot or even a few inches. Luckily boxing someone's ears is devastating and you don't need that much power. I digress. The point is that close range power has more to do with your lower body than your upper body. It's somewhat amusing when people thing that slighting changing the motion of their arms means that they are somehow not using arm strength for their techniques. Why are my arms so tired? It's because you're not using your mass and you get your mass moving by moving your lower body.

Gravity is your friend and hopefully soon I'll have some videos showing you how much of a friend it is. Basically by dropping weights on stuff and showing how devastating a little  bit of weight moving a short distance can be.

Have you ever noticed that there's lots of kata where you drop into a stance. Literally drop like a bag of rocks down from a higher stance to a lower stance, it's because gravity is your friend. Ever had a little cousin, niece or nephew who only weighs 60lbs or even smaller suddenly decide they want to be picked up so they jump on you and nearly knock you off your feet? This is what I'm talking about. Do you try and push a car by planting your feet and pushing just with your arms? No, you take a low stance, hmm I wonder if that's relevant, and you lean into it to put all of your mass behind it. It's the very same concept. You just use the structural support of your skeleton to keep yourself from collapsing, move just a tiny bit faster and presto, you can blast through someone twice your weight if you remain efficient in your movements.

The Rep Wall

Every movement has a repetition wall. This is the threshold where movements no longer require directed thought in order to be performed. This is not to be confused with skill, application or practicality. It just means you don't have to walk yourself through the steps of the movement.

A good analogy is touch typing that method of typing that you most likely learned in a typing class in school. The home row and all that good stuff. At first one must use focused mental energy to hit the right keys without looking, but after diligent practice and almost by magic you start looking less and less at the keyboard and just start thinking words and they appear on the screen. It is the same way with kata though there are more moving parts and a lot more for your attention.

There is no hard and fast rule for how many reps this will actually take. It could take very little time or it could take a great deal of time. It takes as long as it takes for those neural pathways to develop. One should not dwell on performing a certain amount of repetitions, but rather they should focus on the correctness of each movement. In this case correctness is not aesthetics or keeping style purity, but rather making sure to move according to the principles of power generation, optimal skeletal structure and the correct angles of attack. It's more important that you produce the correct neural pathways than trying to develop bad ones as quickly as possible.

It's important that one crosses this threshold before diving too deep into application. This is especially true for those that are reverse engineering their own kata. Crossing this line frees up the brain to start analyzing the movements to see what they're telling them. To go back to the typing analogy, it's very hard to write a short story if you're always hunting and pecking. You might forget what you were going to write before you get a chance to write it. Without this one cannot begin to experiment. Experimentation allows one to start abusing the system to find the weak points and thereby find the strong points. Remember the confirmation bias. We must try and prove it wrong or at least find the weak points.

To make things easier, one can only work on crossing the rep wall for one kata instead of trying to cross this line with all of their kata. It's much easier to reach if you keep the number of movements small.

Doing this is the first step in transcending kata.

Deeper than I thought

It's very hard to explain to normal martial artists what it's like to practice a single kata for years. I believe that they think they can imagine it, but I know that I never imagined that a kata could go so deep and yet be so simple at the same time. The closest I can come to explaining it is relating it to language.

A kata for the most part is almost like an alphabet. Kind of. Except some of the grammar is written into the alphabet itself. Almost like "i" before "e" except after "c." If it were written "A" "B" "Cei" "D" "iE" "F".

The steps for example in the Seisan kata I practice tell you how to power the hand movements, but also whether you are the one giving pressure or if you're receiving pressure. If you try and flip them around they don't work.

I'm digressing a little here.

Practicing a single kata is like being fluent in a language. You know it front and back, inside out and backwards. You can play with the words and structure to make jokes or whatever you want. It's also designed to work together.

The hard part is that for many martial artists, they feel that practicing the alphabet is speaking the language, and they assume that if something looks the same in two kata than it must be the same movement. Since there are no real hard and fast rules regarding kata analysis, I can't say this is wrong, but it would be foolish to make the same assumption about language. The English and Russian alphabets both have letters that look like a "b." If we assumed that they made the same sound we would be wrong. The "b" letter in Russian is pronounced like a "v" in English. Yet, they look exactly the same. It's only by comparing the letters around it and the words that they make that we see that they are different.

It's also hard to explain that the kata movements can be proactive and not necessarily reactive, and in Seisan at least the directions and movements have more to do with where you are in relation to the opponent and where you want them to be rather than a defense against any specific attack. This breaks the kata down into pretty easy to swallow chunks. It's really the only thing that we can know for sure about the opponent. They can either be in front, behind, on either side as well as inside and outside of the arms. It's rather simple, but the ramifications are rather large.

We can also assume that movements that are not done in a mirror fashion do not require the opponent to be in any specific orientation where as movements that are done with a focus on the right side and then practiced with a focus on the left side are for specific orientations because the left side needs to be trained equally as the right side. Like a left hand punch and a right hand punch, but grabbing someone's head and yanking it around doesn't require you to balance left with right. You'll get pretty much the same result no matter what.

This is just a little bit of the picture. When I first started practicing in this fashion, I couldn't imagine Seisan being more than just a simple collection of punch combinations and reactive drills to prescribed attacks, but the more I practice the deeper it goes.

Sport fighting versus Survival fighting

Due to the growing popularity of combat sports like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there is a tendency to mistake these athletic competitions with survival fighting. It's a mistake that I encounter frequently. People mistake the artificial environment of the arena with violent encounters out in the real world.

The explanation for the difference between sport and survival usually has something to do with the rules. Sports have rules and survival is thought not to have rules, but this isn't entirely true. Self defense is a legal concept. It has to do with laws, statutes and evidence. One cannot use more force than is required to extract themselves from a dangerous situation. Therefore, if one is to survive after the violent encounter one must follow the rules of society.

The rules that specifically draw the line between sport and survival is that of targeting and striking surfaces. Almost all of the first response targeting areas in self defense are illegal under most sporting rules. The neck for example is off limits in the UFC. A solid blow to the side of the neck can knock a person out. A blow to the front can crush a person's windpipe. A blow to where the base of the skull meets the neck can kill. The eyes, groin, ears, kidneys, back, knees, joints and fingers are also illegal targets.

What can be used to strike is also limited. Open hand techniques are banned, as well as headbutts and dropping elbows. It is also illegal to kick a downed opponent.

These rules are good for the sporting arena. They encourage fighters to fight square on and pound on the strongest parts of the human body with some of the weakest. It prolongs the fights and ensures that participants won't end up permanently injured. It would be dangerous to assume that the same techniques used in the sporting arena would work in a violent confrontation.

In sport bringing someone to the ground and submitting them is a solid tactic. A single-leg takedown requires you to change levels and scoop up one of your opponent's legs. This requires you to present one of your most vulnerable targets to your opponent, the back of your neck. A dropping elbow could easily kill you.

Keep in mind that the rules of sport are not in place because they are not effective. They are in place to keep the participants safe. If you're fighting for your life, the last thing you want is for the other guy to be safe.

Magic in the martial arts

It doesn't come up very often, thankfully, but you do run into a fair amount of mysticism in the martial arts. Karate is not immune to this unfortunately.

I recently came across a person claiming that practicing kata would allow you to regulate your internal energy flow and double your strength. Something to do with a person's biofield and electromagnetic field.

This is nonsense.

Not only is is pseudo-scientific hokum, it's also incredibly dishonest. It's also very disturbing the number of people that buy into this type of quackery. Obviously, some people are taking 70's kung fu movies a bit too seriously.

The believers will claim that gaining superpowers. (It's almost too ludicrous to write.) Is the result of subtle energy fields that are not yet known to modern science. This might have been the case fifty years ago, but physicists today now have the capacity to detect some of the most minute sub-atomic particles in the universe, such as the higg's boson, which is what gives all things mass and is the cause of this wonderful thing that makes life possible, gravity. I'm sure that we'd be able to detect a phenomenon  that would cause a person to double their strength without regular exercise.

The United States government in the past has also funded research into such hokum as remote viewing and astral projection. This is supposedly when a person's consciousness leaves their body and travels to far and exotic places, not to be confused with spring break in Mexico. I'm sure that if the government feels fine with wasting its money on this than they wouldn't mind wasting it on biofields to double a soldier's strength.

Unfortunately the martial arts is filled with such scams and many other types of dishonesty. It's tempting to just let people practice as they wish and let the sheep get fleeced, but this is dishonest as well, but there is a simple solution. The next time someone tells you it's possible to gain  magical powers by manipulating imaginary forces you laugh at them and walk away.

The Never Ending School

My biggest beef with karate schools is that there is no ending. Don't get me wrong I love learning. I've made it an essential and enjoyable activity in my life, but if you're teaching a skill at some point the teaching needs to stop and people need to start thinking for themselves.

At any school, academy, college or university, there are classes and one takes them to learn a skill. Once the skill is learned, the classes stop. It's possible to carry this very far until one receives their PHD or equivalent degree, but then the formal instruction ends and self learning begins. This is reasonable.

A karate school on the other hand does not operate on this premise. A karate school is designed to make the students attend classes for as long as they are able. It's not uncommon for people that have been studying karate for 20-30 years to still attend classes on a weekly basis. All the kata have been learned and hopefully the applications have been learned but they keep showing up. In the context of a social activity this is awesome. In the context of learning a skill this is terrible.In any other skill if you've been taking classes for 20-30 years and still need to attend classes regularly than you suck. Have you ever heard of anyone taking piano lessons for 30 years? Probably not. They might study for 30 years, but they aren't paying their music teacher for that entire time.

It's possible for a karate student who has trained for a couple of decades to be more competent and more knowledgeable in karate than his instructors and still be paying those instructors for classes. I call this a scam. Like having your chakras realigned by a crystalagist every week to keep your chi flowing.

A person shouldn't have to practice karate for four years just to start learning. It takes five years to master a single kata and two years at the most to become competent in that kata.Why spend four years learning what amounts to dance routines and then spend the rest of your life trying to train out all the bad habits you picked up in those four years.

Karate is a concrete skill. It is physics, anatomy and movement combined to cause harm or prevent it. It is nothing more than that.

Designed for sport

When I first started training in karate, I studied at a very traditional dojo run by Doug Perry. We had two classes of kata per week, one weapons class and a kumite class. Basic 3K karate meaning kata, kihon and kumite. It's the basic template for most traditional dojo. Traditional dojo usually try and set themselves apart from "modern" karate, the type of freestyle martial arts, which is more about stunt choreography and showmanship than practical technique, by advertising as not being a sport. The focus is on personal development, or spiritual growth.

I accepted this to be the case, because my sensei said so. I didn't really have any reason to not trust this because I hadn't done the research. The more research I do however leads me to believe that classical karate was intentionally changed and made more superficial to fit into a sporting format for recreation. This I believe is what gave rise to what we usually refer to as traditional karate or post WWII karate.

For a martial skill to be useful or practical it needs to be simple, easily deploy-able and effective. This can be supplied fairly easily. Think of police or military training. It doesn't take twenty years to train a soldier or a policeman. It can take a few months at the very least.

Traditional karate fills none of these criteria. It's techniques can be simple, but because of the sheer number of named techniques knowing the correct circumstance to use any specific technique is almost impossible. It's why you see karateka windmilling and losing their technique when pressed. It's not that they don't know any techniques, it's because they know too many. It's not easily deploy-able because it takes years and years of training to even become competent. How long does it take to master traditional karate. Probably 50 years. If you start at 30 years old you'll be able to successfully defend yourself by age 80. The failure of these two criteria make it not very effective.

When looked at from a sporting perspective, traditional karate makes a lot of sense.

Kata is used as performance art. Only a very superficial understanding of the kata is necessary. It's possible to win kata tournaments and have no idea what any of the movements mean. The number of kata available to a person is firmly in the double digits. This allows for extended years of practice just learning the patterns of these kata. It also offers a handy way to separate people into subsequent rankings. Kata 1-5 are beginner kata, kata 6-10 are intermediate kata and kata 11-15 are advanced kata. This basically ensures that a person can't compete if they only know one kata, no matter how good or competent they may be at it.

Kihon then becomes the artificial links that supposedly bind all the kata together, but they more importantly serve as the watered down list of techniques allowed in competition. Notice all the dangerous techniques that are designed to end a violent confrontation immediately are not among the basics, even though putting down an opponent is the entire point of karate.

Kumite is obviously the most sport like of all the aspects, but it can be ignored in some traditional dojo as if not participating in one event makes them more practical even though they participate in the performance art.

We're left with a sport that can be enjoyed by young and old. This makes it rather wonderful for recreation. When you're young you play tag, when you get older you perform kata and when you get even older you enjoy karate in a more internal way, and there's a handy rank structure to keep everything tidy and organized (for the most part). There's nothing wrong with this.

This is perfect for sport, but terrible for practical application.

Bunkai Wizards

Two gi clad men face each other. One punches and the other unleashes a torrent of locks and strikes ending with a throw performed with a flourish.

I see it all the time on YouTube channels. Someone else coming out with their own interpretation of kata. There's nothing wrong with this. I love that people are thinking more about kata, but the applications still have to be good.

I call these people bunkai wizards. I call them this because they seem to pull techniques from thin air without regards to structure, physics or an uncooperative opponent. All while disregarding each kata's individual combat strategies. It always looks good in the video because the other person must stand still after the first jab and wait for the person demonstrating to rain down holy hell on them.

If the technique works than the person being demonstrated on shouldn't have to hold still. They should be actively trying to make the technique fail. If the technique still works than it's a good technique. Think of a simple punch. Does an opponent need to be ignorant of what a punch is for you to crack his head open? No, they just need to be open. It's even okay if they know you're going to punch as long as they can't stop you from connecting.

The applications I see usually have too many steps, have points of failure and rely on specific responses from the opponent. As a general rule one should strive to put a person down in three movements. Not three techniques, three movements. The best case scenario is not having to take action at all, but a close runner up is just one movement.

Every movement/ technique should end a conflict immediately if done correctly. This includes escape.