kata Archives - Karate

Progress through practice

When I first started training martial arts, I did so with an inferiority complex.

Most of my physical education experience up to that time was outdoors. Rugby, football, (grass) hockey, athletics and cricket. I didn’t do well at these. I was usually the last or second to last guy to be picked on teams in compulsory sport. In fact, I was so bad that I didn’t even notice that when it came to rare indoor physical education sessions of volleyball, crab football, weight-lifting and gymnastics I actually out-performed many of my sporting peers. The root cause, not spotted until I left school and changed doctors, was that my childhood asthma was very poorly managed and physical education coaches of the time were either not trained or not invested in helping lower ability students progress through that type of medical hurdle.

Beginning training in Karate at the age of seventeen I did so with the automatic perception that I was worse than the students to my left and right. It was a new club so we were all the same grade, but I was certain that everyone else was better.

I took matters into my own hands.

Every evening, before going to sleep, I made sure I worked through all my fixed kihon sets at least ten times on each side. I would also work my fixed kumite sets and my kata. I didn’t have much space so there was a lot of shuffling on the spot.

When the old doors were removed from ‘my’ Squash Court Dojo to be scrapped as part of its renovation, I kept this souvenir.

Personal training outside of class is something I have never dropped. Whether I was only making two classes a week or eleven classes a week, I’ve made time and found space. That may have been training on the spot in a narrow gap between a bed and a wall, walking down to Squash Court 3 at Birmingham University every weekday for a 7-9am session before lectures, or finding an empty space at a Leisure Centre for an hour. I’ve stretched and trained in front of the television, in the kitchen while waiting for a kettle to boil, in hallways waiting for others to get their coats on.

Repetitions count. Static repetitions of martial arts moves may not be ‘as good’ for learning as repetitions that are adapting to the fluid dynamic of paired training, but so long as they are not done to exhaustion and are not hindering recovery from any other training, they will be beneficial.

I’ve not limited my ‘out of class’ training to my martial arts techniques.

I’ve had a few gym memberships over the years, but I’ve generally preferred to see what I can do ‘cheaper’ around my own schedule at home. When I was 21, shortly before I qualified as a fitness instructor, my sister bought me a weights bench and I still have that today even though I’ve changed the types of weight and exercises I use. I’m lucky because I have my own dojo these days where I can set up my bench, keep my free weights and bar, hang my heavy bag and speed ball, attach resistance straps to the bag hook, or use my rowing machine, but I’ve seen others do the same in garages or garden sheds. There are multiple things anyone can do to improve their strength, power or achieve hypertrophy without buying kit, just so long as they can find a space to train.

Students finding space to train and video training at home during lockdown.

You don’t need much space to train. If you have room to do a push up, there’s a lot of different bodyweight exercises you can do in addition to kata or kihon on the spot. Weather permitting you develop explosive power jumping on the spot outdoors. You can improve your VO2 max running up and down stairs (again possibly best in a venue where you aren’t going to wake people or cause cracks in the plaster work).

There is so much you can do outside of class and it actually takes so little time. Micro workouts count. Too often people feel that they have to lump everything together or be in a particular place, placing self-imposed obstacles in their path to greater health. Listen to a podcast or audio reading of a work text while exercising, use the rest breaks between sets to make bullet point notes of the last few minutes (I do this a lot). Watch your favourite show while working out on the spot, listen to your favourite tunes.

Forced online training during lockdowns showed how people could find space to train indoors and outdoors.

You won’t know what you can do until you try. Start small: choose something that is easy to do regularly and then increase either intensity or frequency or both, then add something else. It’s amazing how much supporting exercise we can add into our lives without feeling as if we are ‘losing’ any time. Technically speaking by improving cognitive function and health through exercise we are gaining time.

I hope you enjoy the benefits of personal training as much as I do.

Cross training

Cross training is something I strongly support. It’s also something I think I do every week, but what I consider to be cross-training may differ from what you think.

Last weekend I held a Shotokan Sandan grading. I was grading an instructor I consider to be one of ‘my’ Shotokan students (although he gained his other grades in another association) because he’s trained with me twice a week for almost 3 years (he also trains with another association each week too). To assist in the grading, I brought in two of my DART Dan grades to act as uke and two Shotokan Yondans from two different associations whom I know from their attendance at my seminars and courses.

The majority of the grading was focused on kata based HAOV related sparring with participants mainly using approaches I had taught them. The successful Sandan candidate also taught a kata-based lesson and we sparred using his approaches. When we looked at our solo kata performance however, there were definitely different flavours of Shotokan on display: no two kata were identical even though we traced very similar lineages.

I know where I’ve changed my Shotokan kata. My base template when I began training was Hirokazu Kanazawa’s kata as recorded in his 1980s videos. As time went on, I saw alternative versions in use in other groups and was able to see in books elements that had been adjusted or discarded. Over time I’ve mainly kept my ‘original’ template, but in some instances have made the conscious decision for practical reasons to tweak some elements back to Funakoshi’s recorded 1920s or 1930s versions. This means that you probably won’t find other associations that teach Shotokan kata exactly the way I teach them.

When I first began Karate, the mobility of my education and home life meant that while I would do sustained training, I would often be working with at least two different associations of the same Shotokan style throughout the year. Moving a few times meant that I might stay with one while switching another. It was immediately noticeable that everything was different wherever I went. The kata was the least changeable element, but even then, if you looked closely, each association did the kata slightly differently. What I was doing by going to more than one Shotokan association was cross training. Occasionally I would learn new material, but mainly I would experience a different perspective on the same thing: varied fundamentals combinations, distinct sparring work, alternative takes on stances and even differing ways of doing the same kata.

That is what cross training means to me. Gaining a different perspective.

As a kyu grade I learned from the different karate instructors in the various karate associations in which I concurrently trained, but I would also learn from instructors in other arts through books and magazines. I would also travel to seminars, training with Kung Fu instructors and Karate Instructors from other styles. I would often learn new material, but more importantly I gained a different perspective that enabled me to look differently at what I was already doing and gain a better understanding of it.

My over-arching purpose then was the same as now: to learn more and to have fun.

There have been times when I have been far more specific in my cross training. I studied Aikido on a regular basis for eight years with a view to improving my stand-up limb control, unbalancing and using angles of attack rather than strength to achieve my aims. I’d be a beginner now if I stepped into an Aikido class, but the perspectives that I gained from that training has been so integrated into my own practice that it’s all Karate to me now.

I am always cross training.

Going to another instructor’s club, going to a seminar, having a guest teach me and my students: these things are all cross training. Watching another instructor from a different background doing different things, whether in person or in video, I regard as cross training when I take elements of what I’ve seen and physically try it. It’s a rare week indeed when I am not working through something different from the direct influence of someone else, or that is inspired at a tangent from something that has cropped up while experimenting from cross training. I’ll do this in class, in mental rehearsal through movement and tactile imagination in my dojo, or through bag work. It may be months or even years since I had the original lesson in person or online; I work on things over long periods of time and I revisit lessons when current stimuli bring greater relevance. It ceases to be cross training when it is so ingrained in my practice and integrated into my approaches that it is part of my Karate.

For me the point of cross training is exposure to an alternative perspective to further my understanding. That can be my understanding of things I know, things that I only think I know, things that I know that I don’t know and things that I didn’t know existed. It can be with another instructor from the same ‘style’ but different background or current approaches, it can be from a separate system with a similar focus, or a discipline with a completely alternative emphasis. For me doing that is fun, and that alone is reason enough to do it.

Beyond the value of perspective and fun you may have particular goals. I chose to take up Aikido to develop a particular skillset and incorporated that into my own Karate. With far less direct coaching but for roughly the same number of years I have been drip-feeding myself cross training in two other disciplines with the express purpose of refining and expanding another part of my repertoire. That’s an ongoing process and I anticipate that that cross-training and integration project will last at least another decade. Over the last few decades, I’ve benefitted a great deal from numerous focused cross training dips into other approaches through seminars, videos and books. You do not have to stick with cross training in one thing only for years to gain insights, especially if it is closely related in form or focus to your own experience. Sometimes a single seminar or book can open the door to decades of study if you are observant.

How accurate and sustained your visual and tactile memory is will affect how much you may benefit from cross training and what form might best suit you. For those that need multiple repetitions to learn or understand or integrate an element, attending or watching regular classes may be best. For some this may mean having to attend a class every week, for others with an established relatable visual, physical or tactile memory set, observing a video or referencing a text book may serve the same purpose. Anything relatively close to my knowledge base I can see or experience once and have enough ‘memory’ to work on that for a long time (on my own or with partners) without further reference, like attending a seminar which uses the same movements as me but for a different purpose. With things that are on the fringes of my experience or completely outside my knowledge I’ll need to revisit the source again and again. That almost always means dedicated repetitions with a training partner and access to the source material (so regularly attending a class or training with a video or book with a good training partner).

For me cross training is when I am working on material from an external source or a different perspective to my current training.

I find it invaluable. Even when I make the decision not to attempt to trial what I have seen or experienced, even when I discard something after a trial rather than choosing to integrate it, I think the exposure to different approaches makes that choice to continue on my own path a more educated one.

I believe that cross training is a form of expanding your knowledge and ability that is accessible to everyone. It could be attending a seminar, having a guest instructor, visiting another class, working from concepts from a book or from an online video. It does not have to be ‘outside’ your own style: instructors vary enough within any system to give you valuable alternative perspectives. There is a wealth of material out there and the more you access it and cross train with it to your chosen purposes, the less easily will you be misled by lower quality choices.

Now go and cross train.

Circling but never landing

I don’t like flow drills.

Wait a moment, haven’t I written 5 books on Flow Drills? The (out of print) Heian Flow System and the four books of the Pinan Flow System?

Yes, I wrote those books. No, they don’t contain Flow Drills, they outline a Flow System.

What’s the difference?

I see a Flow Drill as a fixed sequence of moves, generally performed as a cycle of one person’s actions requiring a fixed response from a partner, sometimes involving the participants swapping roles on a fixed regular basis.

A Flow System by contrast is a training methodology designed to help users flow seamlessly between grappling and striking options in accordance to the dynamics of their sparring. While there may be static ‘fixed’ responses the first time a combination is introduced, extra variables are quickly added so that there really isn’t anything ‘set’ and the open-ended training is only limited by the experience, skill and imagination of the participants. Limiting yourself to only moves in the Heian / Pinan kata (which not all of my Shotokan students do) is hardly setting tight constraints.

So why don’t I like Flow Drills? Why am I so unreasonable?

Flow Drills is a blanket term. In principle I am in favour of any form of training that develops skill sets and attributes. I am in favour of any training exercise that is enjoyable (because people are more likely to show up to do it). I am also wary of anything that has a tendency to lull people into metronome-like behaviour and to become too accustomed to set responses to set stimuli. Like many instructors I am concerned that often people can fall into a distorted focus on becoming fast and proficient at the drill (the set sequence of movements) rather than proficient at using the techniques independently with a working understanding of how and when to use them and how to adapt them.

So like everything in the martial arts, whether flow drills are good or bad depends on their use in the overall structure of training, too much or too little of any training method has the potential for health or harm. If you continuously circle but never land then you are setting yourself up to crash. If a Flow Drill is fixed then it should probably be short. If points in one flow drill match up with points in another then students that know both should actively be encouraged to randomly switch; the more ‘overlaps’ and thus switch points the better because a Flow Drill will instead evolve into dynamic sparring or even alive sparring (if anything can be done). The more time in class we ‘lock’ students into fixed combinations the more we limit their ability to become skilful in recognising opportunity and proficient in adaptability and improvisation. Those traits must not be sacrificed for rigid training in the name of ‘skill development’.

Switching things up

It began with the warm up.

I can still remember the familiar routine of my first karate classes.

Star jumps, diagonal star jumps, running on the spot and bouncing in a ‘fighting stance’. Then would be the mobility rotations, neck, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles. Having ‘warmed up’ we’d all then engage in static stretching for about 10-15 minutes before engaging in syllabus drills.

The remaining class would be split in three pretty equal slots. We’d start with marching up and down in lines furiously drilling against thin air in ever more complicated (and often ridiculous) but fun and technically demanding combinations. We would then pair up and do fixed sparring drills. Finally we’d finish with kata. Whether it was the two hour class (I’d do six of those a week) or the one hour class (I’d do five of those a week), the template didn’t vary much. It was a practical way of addressing the demands of that syllabus. That’s not necessarily the same thing as addressing the needs of the individual students.

Expressing attitude and about to do one step sparring as a teenager.

At other Shotokan clubs that I trained with the pattern was fairly similar. As a fairly mobile military dependent I trained at six clubs across five associations before being awarded my Shodan. A number of clubs curtailed the thin air work on a regular basis in favour of hitting pads. Often the length of the three-way split would vary so some sessions might be almost entirely sparring while others might be mainly kata, and then there were occasional ‘thin air beastings’ of hundreds of kicks or punches against thin air for football match lengths of time but without the injury breaks or half time. Quite standard stuff then and for a lot of clubs it’s still the norm.

Aikido was different. The soft art? Pfft. Attack, boom on the deck, jump up, attack, boom on the deck… and repeat. Even mats hit hard when you’re hitting them about 12 times a minute for about half of a 2 hour class. Jumping to your feet again, and again, and again is a really good workout. Warm ups were rolls and breakfalls and then the entire remaining class was sparring. The feel was very different to the distanced Karate classes. A hand- on art required more hands-on coaching, so instruction was far more individual to sparring pairs rather than ‘front of class’ demonstrations.

Aikido may be ‘gentle’ but equally keen training partners mean you hit the mats often and hard!

I’ve trained with a lot of people from a lot of different systems and I’ve also been taught in a lot of different ways in a lot of different fields myself. In my own background I’ve been qualified as a fitness instructor, a karate instructor, a secondary school teacher, a university tutor, an obstacle course instructor, a weapons instructor, a low and high ropes confidence course instructor, a physical intervention and restraint instructor, a conflict management instructor, a first aid instructor, a casualty simulator, a self defence instructor (3 different external groups to my own system), and have held military and civilian qualifications in risk management. I’m not afraid therefore to switch things up, draw on ideas from different fields, and vary my teaching and training methods to try and optimise the opportunities for my students.

Over the years I’ve changed almost every element of what I do in some way. Whether it be techniques, combinations, drills, training methods or ‘warm ups’ everything is subject to a continuous assessment process. When it comes to training and teaching, I am not a sentimental person.

Over the last year, since resuming ‘in person training’ since the last lockdown, I’ve been devoting the majority of my classes to sparring with reduced time on pads and on forms. That’s not surprising given how much time we’ve all had to do ‘thin air’ training whenever guidance has forced us to train online, on pads only or to work with limited numbers of partners.

What I have also changed in the last year is the weighting between static, dynamic and alive sparring. Static being a single attack and response (ideal for learning and refining movements), dynamic being fixed (or multiple choice) failure cascade options such as punch to tackle or boxer’s hug or clinch (ideal for improving positional recognition time and response), and alive being ‘anything goes’ from their repertoire within the compromises set for safety. I changed the weighting of those three from being 40/40/20 to about 20/40/40.

The greater amount of time spent sparring, especially free sparring, over the last year has seen students at all grades improve in position and option recognition and adaptability, in fact it has shortened the time required to gain particular levels of ability across a broad range of skill sets. That’s a strong argument for spending more time sparring.

In my classes kata tends to get squeezed in at the start or the end. I don’t like devoting large amounts of time to the solo rehearsal of movements my students employ in sparring when they actually have training partners to spar with. I’ve been doing kata to teach it and to assess it and expecting students to work on that in their own time at home. I do a lot of kata on my own at home. Examining their kata has shown that for the majority that hasn’t been the case. Even without watching the kata I can generally tell in sparring who will have good kata or not because those that do have greater precision and better biomechanics in the close quarter stand up sparring.

Pad work is a training medium I rate highly. It is so important to hit pads and to learn how to effectively deliver and control force. It is equally important to hold pads, to absorb the impact (and to give accurate and appropriate resistance, not to be a brick wall), to ‘spot’ the striker and to learn to recognise the telegraphs of different movements and to understand angles. Pad work is often be far more physically demanding than sparring because you are actually hitting a target with everything you have again and again. Done correctly it refines skill sets, improves speed and develops stamina.

Using pads in some of my venues is not a problem, they are already kept on site. In other locations I can resemble a squire from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, walking into a Leisure Centre weighed down with kit. This has meant that I don’t always do as much pad work as I’d like in those classes.

I’d arrive at class like a Python Squire.

It is all about balance. The increased sparring has been great. It has enabled rapid attribute development, but at the slight expense of some of the skill refinement I want to develop. I want both. It’s time for a change.

So what am I doing?

I’m not making permanent changes. Not yet. What I’m currently doing works, it just could be better.

That leads me to believe that rather than introducing permanent lesson format changes what I should do instead is run ‘boot camp’ style ‘Switch Months’ where the lesson format and weighting is altered for a few weeks to help me address a perceived problem or enable students to refine particular skills that they can then hone better in our current format.

So, what am I going to do?

The recent April to December 2021 lesson format has been:

10% Forms

20% Pads

70% Sparring (20% Static, 40% Dynamic, 40% Alive)

The Switch month format will be a three-station rotation in each class:

33% Forms and Ground sparring/rolling (50:50 split)

33% Pads

33% Sparring (25% Static, 25% Dynamic, 50% Alive)

Crucially the grade range of the club will be split each lesson across the three concurrently running stations so that the pace and standard in each element can be influenced by the most senior grades.

How often will I do it? That will be result driven. I anticipate one month in four, but what we do will be driven by how the different training routines reinforce each other.

Karate Doesn’t Work!

“Karate Doesn’t Work!”

Heard it before?

How about “Tae Kwon Do doesn’t work”? “Wing Chun doesn’t work”? “Tai Chi doesn’t work”? “Aikido doesn’t work”? “BJJ doesn’t work?” “Traditional Martial Arts don’t work”?

You get the idea.

To me it’s akin to saying “Cars don’t work”. It’s a statement so broad that it’s nonsensical. Occasionally people might narrow it down, “BMWs are rubbish!” – okay… all BMWs? Rubbish for what? Is that what that particular model is designed for? Is it the car of the type of driver it attracts?

Returning to martial arts, the two biggest critiques that frame such broad condemnations tend to be the contexts of either use in MMA or Self Defence or both. Dig a little deeper and it quickly becomes obvious that in some respects these arguments are built on sand.

As many exponents of traditional martial arts are quick to point out, it’s very difficult to find any move in an MMA competition that isn’t visible in the forms or drills of a traditional martial art. It’s also easy to find people with solid TMA backgrounds successfully competing in MMA. I doubt anyone has ever been bored enough (sorry, dedicated enough), to draw up a spreadsheet of every move used in any decade of any particular multi-discipline combat sport competition against the syllabi and/or forms of a broad range of martial arts, but I believe that if they did they would find that most traditional systems include somewhere between 60-90% of what has been utilised. Not 100%? Well if you study any particular competitor you’ll find they don’t use 100% of the compiled list. In similar vein there are a number of things you’ll see in some TMA syllabi that you won’t see used in a competition format, but you might see on video in effective use by Law Enforcement groups that invest in Ju Jitsu or Aikido training.

The elephant in the room here is of course the word ‘include’. The kata of karate are a comprehensive catalogue of physical movements that can be interpreted into techniques and combinations. It’s therefore easy for someone to read one of my books, watch one of my videos, train internationally with me, or with any number of the excellent seminar instructors from the thriving British Karate scene, and look at something in MMA and say “Oh we have that too in Karate”.

But do you?

You’ve only ‘got it’ if you train it regularly with partners and you can use it in live practice. I can see lots of sequences in Karate forms that can be interpreted as hip throws, but I don’t personally teach hip throws. My training journey has led me to prefer distal unbalancing, leg reaping and unbalancing over the leg to hip throws – so those are the unbalancing methods I teach, all of which I can relate directly to sequences in traditional kata. When it comes to my students, we don’t ‘have’ hip throws even if some of the kata they practice do.

But efficacy is not just about techniques though, it’s the training methods employed that build the mindset and the ability to effectively use physical skills appropriately. The technical differences between martial arts are minimal because we’re all working with the same problem of human body against human body – that’s a broad canvas that can be viewed from multiple angles, but we’re still painting on the same canvas. It’s less a case of “Art X doesn’t work!” and more a case of “Training method Y is less efficient!”. It’s not just the car but whether you’ve been taught how to drive it in different conditions.

But can we separate pedagogy from ‘style’? If we’re all doing pretty much the same motions with our arms and legs, isn’t how something is taught the only way to determine differences and apply ‘style’ labels?

Well yes. And no. I don’t think it’s that simple.

I’ve been around the block a bit over the years. In my core original art I trained regularly in seven clubs across six associations before I gained my Shodan and in the decades since then I’ve not only taught multiple people from multiple styles and associations, I’ve trained with, learned from and talked with instructors and students from a huge range of arts and professions all across the world. One of the things I’ve learned from this is that ‘styles’ tend to be illusory branding because once you really scratch the surface you’ll find more commonalities than differences. While some teaching practices are more common in some arts than others, or with some age groups than others, you are always doing a significant number of practitioners a disservice any time you attempt to pigeon hole any martial art by pedagogy.

Another thing about having ‘trained around’ for a long time is that whenever I see “ X doesn’t work!” I study the list of ‘reasons why X is bad’ and then the list of ‘why Y is better’ and strangely enough I’ve experienced multiple examples of clubs in Y doing what X is condemned for, and multiple clubs of X doing what Y is praised for.

Thus rather than write about ‘why Art X doesn’t work’ I think it’s more productive to write about techniques and training methodologies and the contexts in which they excel and why. That way we can avoid the obfuscation of stereotyping and pigeon holing and focus on ways to help each other improve.

The Kata teaching experiment

Last month I had the pleasure of teaching the Malta Karate Federation nine practical karate seminars over the course of six days. This was the fourth year that I had been visiting and so when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to test on a different group something I had found to be true on my own students.

On the Thursday night by request I introduced one of the core kata for my DART system students. I taught this in the manner I had originally learned kata in my original core style of Shotokan and how I had learned weapons kata in Aikido.

Teach a small sequence, repeat as necessary. Add another sequence, repeat… Once we’d done the sequence a few times I showed some ways to use that part of kata. Admittedly that wasn’t the way I was originally taught: I had to go out and make sense of the kata I was taught in my own time, but the point was to put form first.

A functional seminar and combined with a series of impact and reaction time pre-emption exercises I covered the first half of the form.

The next day I had a private class with two instructors and committed to finishing teaching the form. This time however I decided to take a different approach.

Here’s a paired drill; this is the threat/attack, this is a simple response. Where time permitted, I might also explain the underpinning fundamentals – the ‘why’ a particular movement is done. With each drill I’d occasionally illustrate the response without the attacker to illustrate the mechanics in a clearer fashion before returning to the paired drill.

After going through several of these drills with the instructors working them together at varying levels of intensity, I then got them to go through the already practised movements solo, one after the other. We thus completed the form.

Both instructors had begun their karate journeys learning kata in the same manner as me: form first, function later. Afterwards I asked which of the methods used on the two days made the learning process easier, form first or function first? In both I had essentially given both elements in the same session, but I wanted to know which made the learning process easier.

The unanimous answer was what I expected: function (drills) first, form later.

This was not a surprise. It’s easier to form positions if you have experience of using them, and applied physical practice is easier to remember than seemingly random movements pieced together.

So why teach the form first?

Most forms, even the fundamental ones taught at the start of a syllabus, are packed with movement and multiple possible applications. To cover every use of the form (assuming of course you are using the form) before teaching it as a memory exercise for solo practise at home is impractical. There is an argument that in a mixed ability group it is difficult to find time to train just one application drill for each sequence before you get to a stage where you want the students to be able to go through the entire form, but then so long as they have experience of part of a form they can work that while more experienced grades cover longer sequences, and as there is no physical contact in form work there is no harm in cycling other instructors or more experienced students through the counting/demonstration of the shorter sequences.

Over the years I’ve tried form first, form and function side by side, and function first, form later. I’ve found the last approach gives me the best results, whether I’m looking at developing skill sets in drills, developing impact power against pads, or in developing aesthetically pleasing form performance. If you’ve got the drills, why not try giving them the lesson before setting the homework?

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