More than one way to skin a kata (Introduction)

I cannot deny that I just love kata. I've previously written my early feelings and understanding of the manyfold importance of kata in karate-do: each kata is like an entire book full of ideas and wisdom, to the point that I dare say that you can see the ensemble of all kata of your karate style as a whole encyclopaedia. After all, kata were the traditional method for passing karate knowledge down to the next generation of students, since a description of karate in written form is practically impossible, and even pictures don't help that much. Of course videos get much closer to achieving such purpose, but that was obviously not an option in the past. The point being, that it should come as no surprise that each kata contains a lot of information, and all of them taken together become the bearers of the essence of your style.

I admit that every time a teacher of ours has a lesson on a kata that I've never seen before, my immediate concern is to memorize the sequence of moves, so that I won't forget them next time we practice it again together (which for a non-basic kata might mean many months later). I don't think this is a wrong approach per se, but clearly "adding up" more kata to your list does not make you proficient at any of them. Certainly, you can't judge a karateka by the number of kata he "knows", especially since there is quite a wide range of meaning here for the verb "knowing"! There are in fact several accounts on the karate masters of the past teaching only one kata at a time to their students, and not introducing the next one until years have been spent on perfecting the previous.

Whether you still decide or not to keep practicing more kata than you should be concerned about (at least for the above purpose of not forgetting them completely), the best thing to do is probably to focus our practice on one at a time, and try to study it throughly, the best we can. This is generally very feasible and natural in Goju-Ryu since the style officially only has 12 kata, and typically only one new kata is required for the next belt test.

But what can we do to expand the practice of a specific kata, to turn it upside-down and inside-out? The following series of blog articles will deal with this question: in how many different ways we can vary the practice of a kata, in order to improve our understanding of its principles and execution of its techniques.

It stands still the fact, that all the ideas in the following posts are optional, complementary to what is otherwise the truly important thing: the regular practice of the kata in its standard form as presented by your teachers, its relative bunkai and other applications of its techniques. But I hope nevertheless that my additional ideas can prove useful or at least fun to try out for a change.