Early thoughts, the second "K": Kata

If you browse the web for discussions on the meaning and usefulness of kata (the term varies for non-Japanese martial arts), you'll get wildly different opinions. Most practitioners will tell you that kata are very important, but I suspect that not that many can fully explain you why, and it is more a reflex of saying so because your sensei tells you every week.

Personally I find myself deeply fascinated by kata, and quite enthusiastically committed into learning them, perhaps even a bit disappointed (but wrongly) by the fact that our karate style Goju-Ryu only has a dozen of them, while other styles have many, and some has more than 50.

Let me first try to describe what is a kata in my understanding. On the surface, it is a sequence of attack and defense techniques combined with movements in specific stances and performed start-to-finish on your own, representing an imaginary battle against multiple opponents. Learning the sequence is only step zero of the whole process, because there is a myriad of features and details to understand and practice for improvement: there is the visualization of the imaginary opponents implying directions and distances; there is "embusen", the pattern of steps and positioning that you invisibly trace on the floor during the sequence; there is proper modulation of strength at different moments to match the meaning of each technique, and the accompanying changes of speed; there is an overall rhythm to achieve, when putting together strength and speed variations with correct breathing and embedding pauses at proper times; there is "kime" or focus, and the additional emphasis to a decisive strike with the "kiai" shout; there is "zanshin" or lingering attention after the end of a combination. All considered, it doesn't at all feel that 12 kata are but a few!

So why practicing kata then? Many people approach martial arts for sports or self-defense, and it is understandable for them to have a down-to-earth practical attitude, so it comes as no surprise when I hear someone saying "if you want to learn to fight, then you need to fight someone, not practice kata". And yet I read that the masters of the past, including Gichin Funakoshi founder of Shotokan karate (the most popular karate style in the world), based their teaching on kata and included almost no sparring in their practice, and I'm pretty sure their students could fight!

To continue with my musical metaphors, a kata is like a written song or etude, while free sparring is like improvisation. There are blues and jazz musicians who practically only improvise all their lives and probably never sit down doing technical exercises or studying and writing songs. It's all good for their chosen music genres, but I think everyone can see that this means to ignore a large potential of music as a whole.

But from my still very short experience, I can tell already that there are at least 3 levels of reading into a kata that can be convincing of its importance.

At first level, you see kata simply as an extension to kihon: you are now increasing the length of the combinations, effectively removing the idea of repetition, just like when you move from piano exercises to learning a full song. This brings your practice to a form that is intermediate between repetitive patterns and total freedom, and can be essential to strengthen the connection between pure technique and its applications.

At the second level, you will be explicitly introduced to the many possible applications of each technique or section of a kata. Usually the kata is taught first in its entirety, and students are supposed to at least somewhat get used to it, then gradually they are exposed to the kata's bunkai: this is when one or more training companions join the fray to perform what could have been the attacks of the imaginary opponents that prompt your kata techniques as a response. While there may be an official version of the bunkai, the truth is that the potential applications are many, and thus many should be the variations explored.

There is however a third level to read into a kata. In a way, each kata as a whole also represents a fighting style, or perhaps more appropriately I should say a fighting strategy, since "style" sounds more like a matter of personal preference for matching one's best skills. The strategy implied by a kata is something that is situational by nature, and an expert karateka should probably be able to switch from one to another during the same encounter if needed. As a white belt, am I currently focused on learning our style's first kata. It's called "Gekisai dai Ichi", where the word "gekisai" means something like "attack and destroy", and that's exactly the strategy that this kata reveals: to fight aggressively and decisively, because attack is your best defense (this does not mean to be aggressive in general, karate is always defensive and in fact every kata starts with a defensive move, but it rather means to be responsively aggressive once you've been attacked first), and make your every attack a winning blow. If you really get into this, you can actually think of yourself in "gekisai mode" even when you're training in kihon or kumite, or anything else! Clearly, this is only the simplest and most obvious strategy to have in a fight. Later but soon in your karate experience, you will encounter new kata with different hidden strategies: there's a "Gekisai dai ni" kata which introduces evasion, and then a "Saifa" kata which brings forth positioning tactics (pushing and pulling the opponent, or moving yourself around him), and then others about hands/limbs manipulation or throws and take-downs. The unhurried and foresighted student takes the study of one kata at a time, and gradually adds their implied strategies to his own capabilities, and this is what will ultimately make of him a complete fighter.

Early thoughts, the first "K": Kihon

Six months of training, and I still can't pull a simple punch.

That's the phrase that kept buzzing in my head during my last karate training this week. Truth is, I will probably feel that way for the next six years as well and beyond, and in many ways I will not be wrong. This isn't about bashing yourself or pretending to be humble, but it is really about the nature of "Kihon", the fundamentals of karate technique. No matter how long you practice them, you're never done, because there is always room for improvement. No one ever stops practicing the fundamentals.

To explain why they're so important, I'll make an analogy with another hobby I had for almost 20 years: guitar. If you're trying to study a musical instrument seriously, you're not just interested in learning a few campfire songs, but you're looking at it from the perspective of "becoming one" with it, to be able to play anything that comes to your mind anytime, pretty much like the fact that you can speak in your native language without the need to think about the syntax (although thinking about semantics is generally advised). Obviously, at different stages you have a certain overall level of skills and confidence allowing you feats of varying difficulty, but the best way to achieve some sort of "organic growth" of applicable skills is to always exercise your techniques at different levels of complexity, from the lowest to the highest. This does not mean levels of difficulties, such as for instance from the slowest to the fastest. Low complexity means to focus as much as possible on the barest elements of technique: with the guitar, it could be playing scales and patterns and arpeggios, or even the same one note over the metronome paying attention that the timing is perfect and the volume is constant. Low complexity implies repetitiveness which raises your attention over precision and reliability. The musician clearly cannot practice this way only, as it would mean to be far away from musical applications and purposes, but these fundamentals are similar to the building bricks of a house: with loose and brittle bricks you can maybe build a hut, but get yourself more solid bricks and you can build a tower or even a castle. It might feel boring and frustrating to go over the basics again and again (and potentially cause severe humiliation when you spouse/flatmate/mom goes "twenty years of guitar lessons and you're still at solfeggio?"), but the benefits of practicing fundamentals spread around to pretty much everything you play, and slowly move you toward that "becoming one" with your instrument by making the movements of your hands become more and more natural to you, so that when you want to improvise a killer solo you won't have to think about how your fingers should move to do it.

These are the reasons why you never leave "Kihon" practice behind you in karate. The more you review the basic stances, footwork, strikes or defenses, the more you notice additional details to improve or problems to fix that you could otherwise not be aware of (and much less correct) when you are doing "the real thing". Then of course, just like the musician then also practices higher complexity things such as solos, rhythms and whole songs, the karate student distributes his practice time over more elaborate exercises as well, from Kihon Ido (still basic techniques, but this time combined with moving around in a formal stance) to kata to sparring, but the Kihon exercises always remain, as the most effective strategy to "divide and conquer" your flaws. So that when you'll have to really pull that punch in action, you'll only have to choose the what and the when, and the how will come out naturally.