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.

Plans for the Future

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

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

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

If you don't live your values

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

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

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

If karate is humbling? Make yourself humble.

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

Make Training a Part of Your Everyday Life

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

Keep weights around the house.

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

Elastic bands

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

Make everything harder!

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

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

The Artificial Barrier of Belts and Organization

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

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

Technique is not the problem with kata

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

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

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

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

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

Why Love Karate?

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

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

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

Naihanchi vs Seisan

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts

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.

Videos to Watch

I'm going to be posting some videos on here of some stuff I like, just to get some people exposed to what are hopefully new ideas and new practices. I hope it's beneficial.

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.

Choosing a Kata

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

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

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

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

Patience, practice and play are the key.

Pressure Point Knock Outs

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

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

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

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

Skill Not Included

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

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

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

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.

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.