The Importance Of Kata

[MJS]

How much emphasis does your school put on kata? How in depth do you get with the various applications of kata?

For myself, I think its an important piece of the puzzle. While kata is not the end all be all, I do think that it has its place. Stances, offensive/defensive movements, moving while attacking, are just a few things that they touch on.

Looking forward to your replies!

 

[RevIV]

My school puts a high emphasis on Kata bunkai. I think I do this mostly because for years it was not taught in a lot of the schools that i attended, and a lot of the times when people asked what the meaning behind a move was instructors would make it up on the spot because they were never taught it either. My original instructor (and still current) taught us Bunkai from our forms that he interpreted from his previous training in other systems. Unfortunely even the GM's teaching him SKK did not explain (or know) the actual bunkai. This seems to be the norm for the SKK people. I have visited many of my friends schools who are in sub-systems of SKK (or the original) and they told me they never work the Bunkai's for any of their forms because their GM's never taught them either. Once you start working the Bunkai's you can see the lineage of your art if you research enough. On the other hand there are High level forms in SKK that were made up just to look good in the early 80's closed tournaments. These are forms that i do not look deeply into because i know there is no depth - just show -- and that show ended a decade ago.
In Peace
Jesse

 

[kosho]

Pat Kelly sensei breaks down all kata and in many different levels. I now myself teach kata and look into kata in a different way. so my students will be at a higher level then i was when i was at there rank.
I think kata is a strong tool. this is something that can go back and forth good bad etc.

I think it is GOOD.

Kosho

 

[kidswarrior]

My school puts a high emphasis on Kata bunkai. I think I do this mostly because for years it was not taught in a lot of the schools that i attended, and a lot of the times when people asked what the meaning behind a move was instructors would make it up on the spot because they were never taught it either. My original instructor (and still current) taught us Bunkai from our forms that he interpreted from his previous training in other systems. Unfortunely even the GM's teaching him SKK did not explain (or know) the actual bunkai. This seems to be the norm for the SKK people. I have visited many of my friends schools who are in sub-systems of SKK (or the original) and they told me they never work the Bunkai's for any of their forms because their GM's never taught them either. Once you start working the Bunkai's you can see the lineage of your art if you research enough. On the other hand there are High level forms in SKK that were made up just to look good in the early 80's closed tournaments. These are forms that i do not look deeply into because i know there is no depth - just show -- and that show ended a decade ago.
In Peace
Jesse

This is my experience, too, Jesse. Fortunately, I have cross trained in CMA for years, and also stumbled onto the current revolution to bring back the bunkai, so can do better for my students than was done for me. Sounds like you're doing the same.

I think it is GOOD.

Me too, Kosho. :wink2:

 

[RevIV]

to Kosho and Kidswarrior -
My sentiments exactly. I tell my students all the time that if they are in the arts as many years as i have been right now -- there is no way they cannot be better than me at this stage. When i teach some of my students informatin at green belt that was not excessible to me at the time they will def. be better. Some day it will be a humbling edxperience watching my students grow and go beyond me -- they just better remember that i will be older and waiting for the saying to come, about old people and treachory when they fight.. I'm sure if my brain was working right now i could remember the qoute - GM Pesare uses it all the time.
In Peace
Jesse
I might be back on today because my school area is supposed to get hit with a nasty storm starting at noon and getting an inch of snow an hour. THe school district my dojo is located in has already called for early dismissal-- ahh my back is already aching from just the thought of the shovelling to come this week.

 

[Danjo]

I come originally from Shotokan, so I have an affinity for kata that many of my Kajukenbo brothers don't (like Prof. Bishop said, "If you told the Kaju guys in advance it was going to be 'kata night', you'd have maybe two people show up.")

However, I feel they are important for the learning of basics and transitioning. Of course, we're talking about the basic kata, not the fancy acrobatic ones you see in tourneys done to music. (blech!)

 

[exile]

For me, and for our dojang, kata/hyungs (we do many of the Japanese kata for promotion to, and after, shodan) are the textbooks of CQ combat. They are the answers to questions like

(i) What do you do to defend yourself against a straight punch or roundhouse thrown at your head?

(ii) How can you most effectively respond to a grab to your clothing to hold you in place for a followup punch or kick, or a double-handed grab to line you up for a head butt?

(iii) What can you do about a grab from behind?

The ordinary colored belt forms, read correctly, give you powerful weapons to use in hard, dirty street combat. Learn to think of the 90º turn that begin these forms as part of a wrist lock/pin combination, a `down block' as a forearm pin on the attacker's grabbing arm followed by an elbow strike and then a downward hammerfist to the throat; an `upper block' as a forearm strike to the attacker's layrnx/jaw, a `crane stance' as a combination beginning with a knee shot to the abdomen; a `180º pivot' as part of a throw bringing an already damaged attacker to the ground. This is `old school' karate, pre-sanatisation (as per Itosu's repackaging of kata at the turn of the century for school use)—and it's what the bunkai that people here and on many other threads have been talking about are designed to recover. In the past ten years or so, we've gotten much smarter—in the sense of more realistic, more inquisitive, more demanding—about our standards for kata bunkai. Take a look at some of the great work that's being done on the true fighting content of the Pinan/Heian kata, for example, and compare it with the `official' story from the previor era.

This is really the Golden Age of Kata, I believe!

 

[Jdokan]

There are 2 things that work on and keep close. Combinations & Forms. I believe that everything that you need to know is “in there”. Focusing on that forms contain most of everything you need, forms are the mainstay of my system. This does not mean I have “devised” a system; it just means that I do things my way. I incorporate fighting aspects in each of my forms. If what I was taught seems flashy or too fluid or more importantly…it wouldn’t work on the street…I look to discover how it can be made to…Like Jesse said earlier a lot of forms in the 80’s were devised to look “pretty”. I try and stay away from that, not saying that it’s wrong...just wrong for me.
Jeff,

 

[LawDog]

The importance of Forms / Kata's is what a person can learn from them and not the Kata's themselves.
:ultracool

 

[tshadowchaser]

When I was studying Kenpo we spent about a quarter of the class doing Kata. It might be explained that a certain part of the form was technique # x, y, or z but it was never broken down more than that.
Not sure my instructor at the time would have known if there was more to it.

 

[Live True]

First, my apologies for the intrusion, and I hope it's okay for me to post here, as I am not in Kenpo/Kempo. I learned something interesting in my class this weekend that I thought kinda applied to the thread.

We were doing a basic Uechi Kata, and we spent a good part of the class going over the many things this particular Kata taught. From the basic mechanics of rootedness (is that a word?) and step length to why do we hold our hand palm up as we start the strike and why XYZ...and this last is the part that I found most interesting:idea:. Now, we are a VERY beginners class, but it gave me a clue that there is so much more in what seems like a simple repetition of form. There are the basics to blocks, movement, balance, and the beginnings (at least for me) of tactical thought processes such as set up and planned movement. It was an "ah ha!" moment for me, and I look forward to the many many things I will continue to learn......

From the prior posts, it sounds like the narrow/broad application of Kata might be universal across a lot of MA. Yes? Anywho, my .02.

 

[Gordon Nore]

My two cents. Kata teaches the student to do everything in a traditional stance, yet at the same time teaches students that all stances are transitional, not static. That's just what's going on from the hips down. If you can do all the other stuff (blocks, strikes, etc) without looking at your feet, that's a good step forward. If you can do everything from the waist down and the waste up and only see uke (even though he isn't there), you're probably pretty damn good at kata.

That said, we've never done tournament kata -- we'd fail miserably. Over the years many of us have had to shorten our stances -- I'm talking about the older students here. Of late, my sensei, who is also sandan in Aikido, has explained that he has shortened his stances for the preservation of his knees.

I think kata is a good discipline, a walking syllabus of an art's wealth of techniques.

 

[IWishToLearn]

For me, and for our dojang, kata/hyungs (we do many of the Japanese kata for promotion to, and after, shodan) are the textbooks of CQ combat. They are the answers to questions like

(i) What do you do to defend yourself against a straight punch or roundhouse thrown at your head?

(ii) How can you most effectively respond to a grab to your clothing to hold you in place for a followup punch or kick, or a double-handed grab to line you up for a head butt?

(iii) What can you do about a grab from behind?

The ordinary colored belt forms, read correctly, give you powerful weapons to use in hard, dirty street combat. Learn to think of the 90º turn that begin these forms as part of a wrist lock/pin combination, a `down block' as a forearm pin on the attacker's grabbing arm followed by an elbow strike and then a downward hammerfist to the throat; an `upper block' as a forearm strike to the attacker's layrnx/jaw, a `crane stance' as a combination beginning with a knee shot to the abdomen; a `180º pivot' as part of a throw bringing an already damaged attacker to the ground. This is `old school' karate, pre-sanatisation (as per Itosu's repackaging of kata at the turn of the century for school use)—and it's what the bunkai that people here and on many other threads have been talking about are designed to recover. In the past ten years or so, we've gotten much smarter—in the sense of more realistic, more inquisitive, more demanding—about our standards for kata bunkai. Take a look at some of the great work that's being done on the true fighting content of the Pinan/Heian kata, for example, and compare it with the `official' story from the previor era.

This is really the Golden Age of Kata, I believe!

Not sure if I agree with the Golden Age comment but for those that spend time actually training for realistic applications in their forms - bravo... there has never been a time for more availability to explanations and applications than today.

 

[exile]

My two cents. Kata teaches the student to do everything in a traditional stance, yet at the same time teaches students that all stances are transitional, not static....
I think kata is a good discipline, a walking syllabus of an art's wealth of techniques.

My own take on the stances in kata is that they aren't intended to be maintained; they are there to show you how to link your weight placement to a technique, at least so far as original intentions go. The front stance's importance is that it shows you where to project your weight into a tech: bringing your full weight to bear on an elbow lock, say. The back stance is part of a strike against an opponent whom you're using your back-shifted weight to immoblize or to bring towards you into a strike, like a knifehand `block'. You don't `assume a stance' and fight from it, on this view of kata; what you're doing instead in using your weight to impose leverage at vulnerable points on the attacker's body to hyperextend his joints and thus to force compliance with your efforts to bring high-valued targets into range of your attacking weapons with minimal risk to yourself. I think it was the move to Japan which reified stances into fixed postures that you adopt and fight from, and it's not hard to see why: on Okinawa, kata were all about the combat techniques revealed by bunkai; in Japan, kata were part of the reinterpretation of karate as a kind of martial calisthenics, and bunkai were largely ignored (Gennosuke Higaki's useful book on the Pinan bunkai, Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi, makes it clear that the Okinawan instructors had a kind of gentleman's agreement not to show their Japanese students the advanced combat applications concealed in the simple punch-block-kick camouflage that Funakoshi brought to Tokyo). Stances as the temporary byproduct of a movement to enforce a technique by using weight shifts to force a response from an attacker, an essential component of bunkai, were cut adrift from their tactical mooring as bunkai became more and more a lost art; they became instead a standard component of the mass line drill that Funakoshi introduced into karate training, and which has become a staple of the various Korean developments of karate emerging from various kwans in the liberation era. The more you emphasize bunkai in your training—not just the analysis it requires but the realistic partner training of the techniques it makes available—the less stances will have any kind of stable existence in your combat practice.

...for those that spend time actually training for realistic applications in their forms - bravo... there has never been a time for more availability to explanations and applications than today.

Well, this is in a way the crucial point of kata: they are the instruction manual, but they only tell you what to do and how to do it; they do not do it for you! I'm always surprised at how misunderstood this basic point seems to be in the wider MA world.

Supposed you purchase a book on calculus or physics, as part of an effort to learn these subject matters. In each chapter, without fail, no matter how innovative or `modern' the approach, you'll always find the same thing: (i) a general discussion of a particular kind of problem, along with a description of how the subject matter of the textbook breaks the problem down into subproblems that the methods covered can solve; (ii) a couple of worked examples, showing how the material covered in (i) can be brought to bear on a number of seemingly disparate real cases to yield a complete solution, and (iii) a number of problems that you have to solve yourself—often very many; some of my university physics textbooks had as many as sixty such problems at the end of each chapter, of increasing difficulty. You couldn't really feel you had learned the material, really grasped the basic relationships, till you were able to solve all of the problems, including the lethal, soul-destroying last five or so. The thing is, you could not possibly get to that point if you didn't fully understand the fundamental relations and mathematical techniques covered in (i), but by the same token, such understanding could never stand on its own, because it was only by doing the problems in (iii), guided at the outset by the models given in (ii), that you finally saw the actual connections sketched in (i).

OK: so, the kata, with their associated bunkai, are like (i) in the preceding analogy. The illustrations given by people like Abernethy, O'Neil and others showing how the techniques laid out in the bunkai can be used for effective defense are like (ii). And what's (iii)? It's you doing highly realistic, noncompliant, extremely unpleasant two-person attack/defense scenarios in which you actually use the techniques the kata teach you to impose unacceptable damage on your attacker. You cannot expect to learn actual combat use of a form-based MA by thinking about the fighting applications of the form and no further (let alone practicing the form endless without trying to see its combat applications) any more than you can learn a mathematical discipline or branch of physics by simply reading the part (i) of each chapter without ever solving actual problems yielding results that you can then compare with the answers in the back of the book, or with the instructor's answer sheets. Thinking you know a MA because you can execute its forms flawlessly is like thinking that you know integral calculus because you've committed to memory, and can recite flawlessly without looking at the text, the passage in the book that describes how to find the area under a curve by summing the areas of a bunch of infinitesimally thin rectangles. The authors of the book certainly didn't think that was enough—that's why they put those sixty examples at the end of the chapter for you work on!

Fortunately, as IWTL notes, there is now a lot of material around that provides the equivalent of (i)-(ii) for you, and even explains how to go about doing phase (iii) training with better chances of not breaking anything or winding up in hospital. That's exactly why I characterized this as the Golden Age of Kata. But it's only so if you take your analyses to the dojo floor and test them out in hard, fairly brutal training sessions that simulate streetfights as realistically as possible without trips to the ER every week...

 

[kidswarrior]

There are 2 things that work on and keep close. Combinations & Forms. I believe that everything that you need to know is “in there”. Focusing on that forms contain most of everything you need, forms are the mainstay of my system. This does not mean I have “devised” a system; it just means that I do things my way. I incorporate fighting aspects in each of my forms. If what I was taught seems flashy or too fluid or more importantly…it wouldn’t work on the street…I look to discover how it can be made to…Like Jesse said earlier a lot of forms in the 80’s were devised to look “pretty”. I try and stay away from that, not saying that it’s wrong...just wrong for me.
Jeff,

My take, too. 'Pretty' is for solo 'kata' (dancing in your jammies, as Iain Abernethy quips). But I've concluded that for my own practice, there's no such thing as solo kata--gotta have a partner, even if only temporarily imagined.

My two cents. Kata teaches the student to do everything in a traditional stance, yet at the same time teaches students that all stances are transitional, not static. That's just what's going on from the hips down. If you can do all the other stuff (blocks, strikes, etc) without looking at your feet, that's a good step forward. If you can do everything from the waist down and the waste up and only see uke (even though he isn't there), you're probably pretty damn good at kata.

And so, damn good at fighting. Gordon, I think your parsing of the legwork, the handwork, and then the combination of both into an unconscious movement, ultimately while visualizing the opponent, is a great job of sequencing how kata are rightly taught, learned, and used, imho.

That said, we've never done tournament kata -- we'd fail miserably.

One reason I've never posted anything on video for others to see. It'd just look like the Ugly Fu it is without a visible partner to bear the brunt of the application.

When I was studying Kenpo ... It might be explained that a certain part of the form was technique # x, y, or z but it was never broken down more than that.
Not sure my instructor at the time would have known if there was more to it.

Yep. Seems to be some consensus in this thread that this is somewhat prevalent, at least in us old timers. :idunno: It's encouraging to read so many fellow MAists willing and able to make it better for their students.

 

[IWishToLearn]

Fortunately, as IWTL notes, there is now a lot of material around that provides the equivalent of (i)-(ii) for you, and even explains how to go about doing phase (iii) training with better chances of not breaking anything or winding up in hospital. That's exactly why I characterized this as the Golden Age of Kata. But it's only so if you take your analyses to the dojo floor and test them out in hard, fairly brutal training sessions that simulate streetfights as realistically as possible without trips to the ER every week...

Aha, now your Golden Age reference perspective is cleared up. I'm with ya on that now.

 

[Nomad]

I am in a very kata-centric dojo. We do other things too, but it always comes back to the kata. Aside from the basics like teaching stances, distribution of weight, transitions, combinations, kime, etc. the kata have so much in them.

One of my instructors made a statement in class a little while ago that over the past 8 years or so, teaching 4-5 hours a day to children and adults, he hadn't gone "outside" the kata to come up with combinations & partner drills & class "themes" to teach. This includes specialized sparring and jujitsu classes. Considering the huge variety I've seen in class, this statement is pretty amazing.

 

[KenpoDave]

Katas, designed and performed properly, are the textbooks of a system.

I also believe that if you continue to properly practice kata as you age, you continually "reset" your system to your physical abilities.

 

[donald]

I agree that good kata practice is very important. Its the shadow boxing of kenpo.

1stJohn1:9

 

[Jdokan]

I also believe that if you continue to properly practice kata as you age, you continually "reset" your system to your physical abilities.[/quote]

I couldn't agree more!!!