Kata training schemas

In my previous musings I wrote about a lot of ideas I have tried out on an occasional basis when practicing kata. I might have gone too far, and that must have been indeed because I didn't know to properly practice kata, except going back and forth with the whole thing. But as lucky as I am, someone decided to organize extra classes in our club exactly for learning better kata training, under the guidance of our most active kata tournament veterans. Note that this relates only to the practice of kata performance, not the study of its applications such as bunkai.

Now that I've been in many of those kata trainings already, I'm getting a much clearer idea about how to arrange my own kata practice. First let me highlight a few principles which I believe I have noticed during those lessons, and make for good kata practice, although not strictly mandatory:

1) Dedicate a good block of time to focus only on kata: I'd say about 30min minimum for each chosen kata. The extent is important to allow room for a progression in the repetitions. Performing a kata a couple of times only in the middle of a longer training is still beneficial at least for refreshing your memory on the sequence, and get a good feeling on stances and techniques, but probably to really improve one kata a step further it is required to dedicate a focused training now and then.

2) Choose a theme, i.e. an aspect of kata performance to focus on in today's practice, such as posture and stances, techniques, speed, breathing, power generation and so on. Or alternatively, encompass multiple themes on a single kata.

3) Plan a short progression of repetitions, where in each of them you either focus on a different aspect, increase the difficulty, or both.

4) Loop a few times over your planned progression, so that you do each different repetition more than once. Optionally also slightly increase the difficulty at every loop.

The following examples are taken directly from those classes, but they are just that: examples. Making up your own is the way to go!


Example A: This sample progression requires to first divide the chosen kata into 3 section. It then focuses on increasing speed.

"No speed" here means to do each kata movement as slow as needed, and then stop to check the posture, take as long as it takes to make necessary arrangements to the stance, then continue with next movement.

- each section of the kata

#1 - Stances and legs techniques only, no speed
#2 - Stances and legs techniques only, half speed and power
#3 - Normal, no speed
#4 - Normal, half speed and power

- the whole kata start-to-finish

#1 - Half speed and power
#2 - Full speed and power (normal)

- total 14 rounds per kata


Example B: This sample progression shifts focus on different aspects, each time trying to push yourself beyond the level at which you would normally do, and finally go back to the normal best-effort version of the kata.

- the whole kata, loop over the following sequence 3 times

#1 - Stances and legs techniques only, half speed and power
#2 - Stances and legs techniques only, half speed but over-emphasize the hips movements
#3 - Normal, quarter speed keeping maximum possible tension as in the Sanchin kata
#4 - Normal, as fast as possible (but with rhythm) even if stances and power are sacrificed
#5 - Full speed and power (normal)

- total 15 rounds per kata