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.
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