Garden dojo

I recently had to have a tree on my property cut down. Leaving me with a pile of mulch large enough for me to bury my car in it. I spent a few days replacing all of the old mulch in my garden, but still had a giant pile left. I could have given it away, but I like using everything, so I set out to make a nice practice space in my backyard.

I started out by leveling a 15x15 portion of yard and framed it with rough wood to make a square and then filled it in with the mulch. All of this by hand with just a shovel, some buckets and about a week worth of time. It was a very long slow process. It was worth it though. I not only have a nice area for practicing kata, but the mulch provides a good cushion for throwing techniques, so I can get tossed on the ground all I want and be relatively unhurt.

Besides the cost of cutting down the tree, which had to go anyway due to the threat of it falling over on my house, it cost me nothing except time and effort. This will not be a permanent solution, because it will decay and I'm too cheap to go out and buy the stuff to preserve it. It  just means in a couple of years I'll need to replace it with something a little more permanent. Maybe ground up rubber if I ever have the money, which would be unlikely.

What is karate?

It's a surprisingly hard question. It should be rather easy to answer. I guess the simplest and most realistic would be that it's a martial art that was developed in Okinawa. It's not even fair to call it Okinawa, Japan, because the development of karate was taking place long before the island chain was ever fully adopted into the Japanese empire.

There are plenty of people that are willing to tell you what karate is, if you pay them. They even claim that they'll be able to tell you how to do it.

Karate becomes rather abstract rather quickly once people start talking about it. There are so many ways to define what it is and what it isn't, and each explanation is nearly as valid as all the others because the creators are rather silent on the subject. If everything is valid, invalid, wrong or right than what karate is and isn't is of no real consequence.

I'm not exactly sure karate was ever supposed to not be abstract. Even the name karate is rather abstract. It seems simple. Stupid simple, but it gets rather complicated when you realize that the name is political, sneaky and not as clear as we might think. Kara means empty, te means hand. What's complicated about that. Well it get's complicated when you have books titled Ryukyu Kempo Karate Jutsu. Kempo means fist method, so empty handed fighting, so the title translated means as we understand the terms today as the Okinawan empty handed fighting method empty hand techniques. It makes more sense if we use kara in the original context meaning the Tang dynasty of China and Te referring to the indigenous Okinawan martial art. Karate being the synthesis of the two. So than it reads the Okinawa fighting method of the Chinese/Okinawan techniques. It can also be translated as the Ryukyu fist method of emptiness and Okinawan techniques. In karate do kyhon Gichin Funakoshi explains that the empty part of karate has some philisophical merit to it.

Karate teachers of old, before WWII, never seemed to explain anything to their students and never allowed them to ask questions. I thought this was strange at first, but I think they might have been on to something.

I think this abstractness can be both good and bad. It's bad because people tend to make stuff up to fill the holes in their knowledge. They don't know what something is, so instead of asking or better yet trying to figure out what it is, they just guess and leave it at that. I think the whole point of it is to figure out what it is on your own, without teachers. The teachers show you the proper mechanics, but you figure out how to use it. Like walking or riding a bike. You can't explain to someone how to ride a bike. You can tell them the steps, but until someone balances themselves and push the pedals there's no amount of instruction, drills or practice that is going to get them riding a bike until they just try and ride a bike. The more I learn about karate the more I feel it is the same. You can explain a move, but understanding is dependent on each individual person. The teacher's job is to foster an environment in which that person can come to understanding on their own.

I guess if something comes from within, it is futile to look for the answer without.
 

The Reactive Drill Fallacy

When watching demonstrations of bunkai, one usually sees a reactive drill. Actually most of the time when someone is demonstrating any type of martial or fighting technique it is reactive. The most common example is the defense against the punch. Someone tries to punch you, and you skillfully block, counter and then pummel. This is the usual order of these demonstrations. But this is wrong for a couple reasons.

The first problem is one of time. Action is faster than reaction. It takes more time to react to a person than the person who is acting upon you.

According to Rory Miller, a former corrections officer, tactical unit leader and all around intelligent guy, explains that you usually go through four steps to do basically any task. You need to observe, orient, decide and then act in order to do anything that isn't hardwired into you by operant conditioning.

First you must observe what is happening to you, orient to what is happening to you, decide what you're going to do about it and then act upon that decision. The other guy, the guy punching you, has already gone through the observe, orient and decide phases of this process and is already on the act portion by the time you start observing. The result is you get blasted in the face. If the punch is a complete surprise attack, the odds of you being fast enough to do something about it is very, very, very low. You basically need to know that it's coming before the punch is thrown, which is the second problem.

If you know that someone is going to punch you, why would you stand there and let them try? You should either do something to prevent them from punching or remove yourself from the vicinity by running away. Playing chicken with the person's fist is rather counter productive. If you react in time, you've only stopped that one attack, if you don't than you get injured, neither outcome prevents the person from attacking again.

You might be asking "If this is true, why do these applications work in the dojo and in the sporting arena?"

The reason is the same as the second example. You know it's coming. Most drills start out with someone saying something like "Defense against a high punch." You know what's coming, so you've observed, you've mentally prepared yourself for the attack so you've oriented to the situation, you're going to block, therefore you've decided. The only thing left to do is act. The situation becomes act versus act. Nevertheless, this is still wrong because in a truly defensive situation if you know it's coming you either escape or if escape isn't an option you preempt the attack and then escape. Very few drills start out with someone saying "Attack in a completely random and unpredictable fashion."

The same is true for the sporting arena. You might not know when your opponent is going to punch, but you have a pretty good idea that they will at some point punch. Your brain is already in red alert status, and you are reacting more to the telegraph or the tell than you are to the punch. If the person doesn't have a telegraph or tell than you get creamed. If you throw up the wrong block you might get creamed still. How many times have you seen someone throw up a hand by their head in response to a high kick only to have the energy transferred through the hand and into their skull despite the quick reaction time.

Within the insular environment of the dojo or gym, these reactive type drills seem like a good idea. People punch, I don't want to get punched, therefore I need a defense-against-the-punch technique. This ignores the circumstances of a self defense situation. The most important variable of a conflict that makes it self defense is that you didn't provoke or know the attack was coming. If you knew the attack was coming and didn't take steps to keep yourself safe by escape than it isn't self defense.

There is somewhat of a caveat to this, which is the defense against strangles, grabs and locks. While you are technically reacting to the above techniques, you are reacting to them after the fact. You are assuming that you did get surprised by the technique otherwise you never would have let the person get in position for them. They are rather counter measures or reversals to misfortune rather than the prevention of misfortune.

Unfortunately this is exactly how we get taught "defensive" techniques in many dojo and gyms.

Internal Fantasies

We're all guilty of this to varying degrees. We have a story about ourselves that we tell to ourselves and we are always the hero. We are always victorious. We suffer no consequences, and any wrong doing is justified through our own internal logic. This is a fantasy, obviously, but people try to protect this fantasy by insulating themselves from anything that can challenge it.

Dojo culture helps to protect people's fantasies. It's an insular self-fulfilling environment that can usually be more church than school. Even those that do question certain teachings or training practices still willingly go along with those unrealistic practices because it's part of the system, tradition or more importantly they want that next belt or grade. I've done this in the past myself.

I think the internal fantasy is what keeps people from progressing. They don't want to think that they will get hurt or beat up if the time came. They also don't really want to know if they've been wasting their time and money. They want to believe all the fairy tales they've been told and turn a blind eye to any opposing evidence or logic. They want their fantasy.

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.

Kata bunkai and confirmation bias

"In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors."

This is the definition of the confirmation bias according to Science Daily, and it's the biggest mistake I see in kata interpretation.

The very foundation of the scientific method is to try and prove your conclusions wrong, not to try and prove them right. According to Nassim Taleb in his book The Black Swan, you can have a thousand days of positive results and never prove yourself correct, but you only need one day of negative results to prove yourself wrong. I'm paraphrasing, but the gist is basically that it's easier to know that something is definitely wrong than definitely right.

I see people make this mistake with kata bunkai. It's the easiest thing in the world to string together movements and call them bunkai if you never actually test them. Most of the time the reason these interpretations are wrong is because people have two hands, and they usually don't wait patiently for you to apply your super technique to one arm and do nothing with the other.

The point is there might not be any "correct" bunkai, but there definitely is incorrect bunkai.

A good technique should: protect you from harm, give you better positioning, disadvantage the opponent, prevent the opponent from attacking and most favorably end the conflict. This includes escape, evasion and deescalation.

At the very least the technique should protect you from harm and give you better positioning.

So the next time you're trying to decipher some kata movements, remember that you should try and prove them wrong, not try and prove them right.

Know the Law!

Nothing disgusts me more than watching some idiot demonstrate a technique that they claim is self defense. It usually goes something like this.

"You look at someone's girlfriend or accidentally splash him with water and the guy comes after you and wants to kill you. You block the first punch, throw him to the ground, break his elbow and then stomp his face in and walk away."

They always create this fantasy that leaves you with no option but to use force and usually lethal force. The above example is lethal force and in most places this situation would be called murder.

Yes that's right, murder.

This isn't television people. It's not a game. It's real life with real consequences. For some reason people believe that if you aren't using a gun than you're not using lethal force. Not true.

You need to know the law, federal, state and local.

Once you know the law, you'll find that many martial arts techniques are more for combat and assassination than self defense.