Goodbye for Now

This is goodbye. I will no longer be actively updating this blog. I'm sure the five people that read this will be heart broken. I am not quitting karate, nor am I changing any of my practices. I've only under taken a rather large project that is going to take some time to complete and I need to focus all of my attention on it. It has the capability of helping more people than this blog ever could and just might help myself as well.

If you need or want to contact me you can reach me at brandon.r.holgersen@gmail.com. If you're ever in North Carolina, drop me a line and we'll do some training.

So for now, farewell and remember the only thing keeping you from practicing karate is yourself.

Exercise and Efficiency

I was thinking the other day about how exercise can teach us some bad lessons about efficient movement. Not all exercise, because obviously some weight lifting movements are based on how to efficiently get as much weight up as possible by using your whole body. I'm talking more about body specific exercises, or what might be called aesthetic exercises. These exercises make us strong, but they don't teach us how to use our strength.

Using structure and body weight to power technique is about using gravity and the natural sweet spots of your bones and muscles to perform work, while using the least amount of chemical energy possible, fuel. It's about using the least amount of muscle necessary. It's harder to fight if your tired and generally dropping your whole weight on someone will get more done than punching with just your arm. Many exercises on the other had excel at being exercises because they are inefficient. To maximize the benefit of many exercises, you move in a way that stresses the muscles the most. It is literally the point of exercise to stress the muscles to stimulate their growth. In a real way, these movements strengthen the muscles, while showing us the exact opposite way to use them.

Is this an argument against these types of exercises? No, but it could be. It's only to bring up the point that we need to be aware that what goes into training something and what goes into using something can be different things. We have a tendency to confuse effort with effectiveness. We feel strong when we use muscle, because the only other time we might feel strong is when we're in the gym. Weights make us strong right? In reality, a movement is usually very strong if we feel nothing at all, because it's efficient.

More principle articles are on the way. They just take longer to put together. Cheers.

Playing Monopoly

Using the same strategies you use to win a sporting match to defend yourself is like trying to use the strategies you develop to win a game of Monopoly to become a real estate tycoon.

Small Aside

Because of the nature of the series I've been working on, I've been spending a lot of time just thinking and examining. One thing I've realized is that while many people write about how what you learn from karate gets expressed in the rest of your life, I do the opposite. I don't apply karate lessons to life, but life lessons to karate. The order really isn't important, because the importance rests on making connections between topics to increase an overall understanding of everything, or life as it relates to ourselves. Is this karate training, life training or something else? It's something to meditate on.

Traditional?

The way I practice karate has been described as super traditional since I only practice one kata. About the only thing that Motobu and Funakoshi agree on is that people used to practice only one kata, or at least established a firm foundation in one kata before continuing on to another, so I guess it's fair to say that it's a traditional practice, but this isn't the reason I started practicing one kata. I don't practice this way because it's traditional. I practice one kata, because it's the only way I can practice karate.

I had no money, still have no money, to spend on classes. The greatest teachers in the world can live down the block, but if you have no money to pay them, they might as well be on the moon. I did know that people used to practice one kata that it was supposed to embody a complete fighting system and that there was no definitive interpretation to any of them. I decided that if people used to practice one kata and make it an effective fighting system for themselves than why couldn't I? I had a kata, some spare time and a drive to learn. This was how I was going to study karate, or I wasn't going to study karate at all.

Is it traditional if you practice a certain way because you don't have the money? Maybe, maybe not. I'm glad I went this route though. I've learned far more than if I'd gone the conventional way. I don't really care if it's traditional. It's not really about the labels. I'm not even sure if I really practice karate. It's just a convenient descriptor, because telling someone I practice Seisan requires too much explanation.

Thoughts on Analysis

My bachelor's degree is in English Literature. The degree taught me much and more about structure, narrative, rhetorical devices and language, but the over arching theme of all my classes was analysis. Analysis on the face of it seems rather simple. You're exposed to something and you give your opinion of it. This is what I thought analysis was, but it's more complicated than that.

Merely reading something and giving your own interpretation of the material is not analysis. Analysis is a tool. It is an activity to help you understand the material. It is not an end unto itself. Analysis is about looking at something through different lens, like putting a colored filter over a photograph. Some colors disappear, some are enhanced and this change in perspective brings attention to different aspects of it. In analysis these lens, are used to help shed bias, but also to take on the bias of another.

There is a theory of analysis in literature where you try and throw off all of your own bias, the bias of the author, the historical contexts of the work, or any outside factors and look at the work completely on it's own. It's an annoying and difficult prospect, but it helps you try and see things for what they are. There are other theories of analysis where you take on the bias of another person. My personal favorite is the Gay and Lesbian theory. I'm neither, but it's the only time I've read The Great Gatsby and enjoyed it by looking at it through these borrowed eyes. You borrow the eyes of another and you see what sticks, what changes and what fades away.

I try and use these same ideas to analyze my kata, and it's something to think about.

Thoughts

I don't really like bunkai videos anymore. I used to like them a lot, but they don't really do it for me anymore. It's not really that they're bad, or that the ideas wouldn't work, but that they don't teach people to come to their own conclusions. They don't really teach people how to analyze kata for themselves.

I kind of think of kata as a spring board now, a template for possibilities and not so much as even different techniques. It's like a spring that gives rise to many different streams. The kata is the spring and the streams are the techniques, but the stream is not the spring.

I can come up with a bunch of drills, and techniques and variations of techniques and drills, and then make a flow drill to tie all of them together, but I don't think that would help people understand what a kata is in a helpful manner. A kata helps you build the tools to become a navigator. It's not a set of directions. If the directions are bad, or something goes wrong than there is no room to adapt. If you know how to navigate than you can come up with your own directions. You learn to adapt.

Practicing kata should start with identifying the principles that give rise to all techniques. Teachers should give students the analytical tools they need to find these answers for themselves. This way they can surpass the teacher instead of just following.