Hi all, I had to get to bed earlyish last night to get going very early this morning on a daytrip around various parts of central Ohio that we'd had in the works for a while, so I couldn't participate further in this thread till now (we got back just a little while ago). I'd like to take up Kidswarrior's summary of the Abernethy kata training progression (clearly, it holds for hyungs, tsings and any other MA's pattern set) and speculate a bit on what's behind it and how it has to work.
So (1) involves solo practice. But it's not just rote performance you're working on, with the goal of executing a choreography routine with martial movements prettily enough to wow some judges; what you're doing is fixing in your mind just what the instructions were for the various combat scenarios that the kata creators were trying to give you. The fact that in a certain subpart of a kata you use a reverse punch rather than a forward lunge punch is probably important, so listen up!—the kata may well be telling you that in the situation that part of the kata depicts, you're keeping your assailant controlled or anchored by your forward-projected weight, and the simplest thing to do at that point is to keep him under control and strike him with the rear fist, rather than changing your weight distribution and maybe letting him have a chance to escape. So in the combat scenario in question, it's really important that you understand not to change your weight at that point, but to dig in and use the reverse punch the the optimal target. Training the form so you have a clear understanding of the
logic of the scenario the kata is presenting to you is therefore the crucial necessary first step. But it's understood that at the same time you're learning the form, you're working out the bunkai—the
meaning of those movement sequences—analyzing them as you learn the form. This is part and parcel of learning the form: learning how the movement sequence could be applied. And that involves, very importantly, determining what kind of attack the various subsequences of the kata are supposed to apply
to. Something that looks absurd as a response to a roundhouse or a double grab may make perfect sense if you think about it as a way to respond to a bearhug, just as a sequence that looks loony if you assume you're going to be going to the outside may suddently look totally natural in a scenario where you're going to the outside. This is why kata are actually rather demanding: you have to combine your knowledge of how the body moves and where the weak points are with a certain analytic skill in figuring how to get maximum firepower from actually converting a sequence of movements into linked
moves; something that looks like a punch, and may very well be interpreted as a punch in one context, might be much more effectively (and dangerously) applied as a head twist if it comes at the end of a different sequence. You have to do stuff like think, what the hell good is this middle-level spearhand strike going to be?—the masters of old are telling me to slam my unconditioned fingers into this guy's abdomen or solar plexus?—and then go on to think, hmmm, maybe the previous moves were designed to force this guy's head way down, and the striking surface of the `spearhand' isn't the fingers at all, but the palm heel—it's really a palm-heel strike rotated 90º! And when you look at the preceding moves, they fall into place from this new point of view... because most definitely the masters of old are not going to tell you to do anything that wasn't practical, effective and straightforward. That's how they themselves fought, and the kata are in the end the record of their own fighting methods, their `notes' on effective combat.
Now on to (2): yes, you've nailed down the moves, and you begin to understand them. That `uppercut' wasn't actually an uppercut; it was you cranking your assailant's trapped punching arm around your forearm under his armpit so that you can lock that limb, hyperextend his shoulder and by a quick hard hip twist, completely unbalance him so he falls to the ground. Well... does it work in practice? Let's see... so you and your training partner now have to do some preliminary experimentation to see if this scenario, this
drill, works in practice. I think that Still_Learning's earlier post is based on an erroneous picture of how the great karate pioneers of the past expected you to train: they gave us a kata as, basically, a sets of drills... and then expected us to actually
drill them. The fact that something is itself a `drill' doesn't mean that just by learning it, you're drilling it; once you learn the drill, you then have to go out and
drill the drill. People like Itosu, Motobu, and Funakoshi would have laughed in your face if you told them that all you did was solo practice and `back-of-envelope' bunkai. From what we know of training practice in the Okinawan context, before the mass export to Japan, you worked with your instructor one-on-one repetitively. Kata was the textbook, but to solve the end-of-chapter exercises, you had to start by seeing if they actually work with a partner. If your training partner is totally unimpressed by your ingenious bunkai for the form and can escape your `control' easily, or can counter with an uncontrolled limb before you can apply a terminating strike, then it's back to the drawing board. This is the stage of roughing out the picture, as the draughtsmen would say: deep-sixing the impractical apps, the ones that look good on paper but fail to take into account a resource that your attacker can still bring to bear.
Let's assume that you've leared the movement sequence the kata creator wanted you to learn and have mentally decomposed it into four to six combat scenarios corresponding to different attack initiations, or to different approaches to a single attack initiation in some cases (go outside or go inside? Attack high or attack low? Try to bring the assailant to the ground in the first couple of moves, or try to apply a severely damaging strike to a vulnerable weak point?). And further, that you've tested it out with a training partner who's worked with you on the various analyses you've come up with, so that the flawed analyses have been spotted and flushed. That leaves a core of techs that could be very effective, if trained to be automatic responses. But you know full well that in the heat of a real, violent attack, your assailant may react unpredictably; more to the point, for one reason or another—differences in height or build or other differences between you and your attacker—you may find it convenient, or necessary, to improvise a different continuation from some point in the bunkai action, the oyo, on the spot. That means that full destructive testing of your analysis requires you to see just how versatile your techs are: if the guy somehow is able to get away, can you use your preprogrammed response somewhat differently to still put through a sufficiently damaging
move? So that leads you to (3): making your analysis what the engineers call
robust—giving you a set of alternative options requiring minimal deviation from your original plan if your preferred scenario goes sideways. As Kane and Wilder say about the (2)/(3) phase of training,
Dojo practice affords practitioners a safe and sane way to learn new kata, decipher applications, and increase their skills through trial and error. It is an opportunity to understand strategy, tactics, principles and rules to see what works and does not work for you.
(
The Way of Kata, p. 187.)
So now we come to (4). Inevitably—because (2) and (3) are what you have to do to see whether a certain kata interpretation
can work; but once you've established that that's the case, you still having reprogrammed your own fighting reactions so that the application you've worked out becomes your automatic, reflexive reaction to an attack initiation of the kind the kata subparts are designed to counter. As Abernethy notes, Gichin Funakoshi insisted in his
Karate-do Kyohan that
Once a form has been learned, it must be practiced repeatedly until it can be applied in an emergency, for knowledge of just the sequence of a form in karate is useless
(my emphasis). And just in case anyone misinterprets this statement as a recommendation for endless kata performance `in the air', IA reminds us of Funakoshi's further dictum in the same source that
Sparring does not exist apart from the kata, but [rather] for the practice of kata.
(my emphasis). Similarly, he cites Chojin Miyagi, Goju-ryu's founder, to the effect that
Through sparring practice one may identify the practical meaning of kata
(
The Outline of Karate-Do). The understanding that these masters had of `sparring' is illuminated by the comment of H. D. Plee, one of the first great European karateka, quoted by Abernethy from Plee's 1967 book as follows:
One must not lose sight of the fact that Karate is "all-in" fighting. Everything is allowed Â… This is why Karate is based on blows delivered with the hand, the foot, the head or the knee. Equally permissible are stragulations, throwing techniques and locks.
The message is that `kumite'—sparring practice—exists not for tournament competitive practice
but for training the techiques encoded in the kata, and that, as per Plee's observations, these techniques involve not only the familiar strikes of karate but a range of controlling, grappling and throwing moves. It's clear that classical karate kumite was designed to train, refine and make automatic the combat techs implicit in the kata, which the practitioner was expected to be able to extract for practical use. Why did Chotoku Kyan and Choki Motobu deliberately seek out out street fights? It's pretty clear from their personal histories that both of them were obsessed with effectiveness, and sought out the most realistic of `live' training—actual violent conflicts. Their attitude was that only by subjecting their techniques—which, for both of these great martial artists, were founded in the kata of their system—to the test of real combat could they know what worked and what didn't. Nowadays, we're a bit more rational (most of us) about our MA training, but in the end, we still need to acknowledge that the `final exam' of our MA training is Abernethy's stage (4) training: maximally realistic, minimally compliant and, crucially,
minimally predictable partner training with no techs ruled out (though some of them, like groin and eye strikes, have to be replaced by detuned versions, or you're going to be replacing training partners with liability lawyers on your list of acquaintances...) The keys to (4) are (i) there is no prearrangement as to what uke is going to throw at tori, (ii) uke can do anything s/he likes by way of attack, and (iii) it's not assumed that tori's tech is going to put even a tiny dent in uke's attack; tori has to
make the tech work.
I've trained a little bit this way (most people don't want to do it, and it takes two to tango, so it's a bit difficult to keep going), and it's extremely unpleasant. But so are interval sprints and high-intensity weight training, both of which I've done, hating them, for the past ten years. As a friend of mine likes to say, it doesn't matter whether you want to do it, or enjoy doing it, as long as you do it anyway. Smug preachy bastard!
