Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

martial arts

You can’t train with them!

You can’t train with them! You can’t be my friend if you’re their friend! This ex-instructor is stealing all our secrets! This ex-instructor is offering a lower quality product! You can’t train with anyone else but us!

It seems like it’s a playground out there. Not a nice one either.

What’s on my mind? I recently saw a letter that the JKA sent out to its members forbidding them from training with an offshoot organisation. A letter that also that also states that attendance at such seminars may violate their ‘ethics and discipline regulations.’

Wow.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen this behaviour before though: across Karate styles, in other martial arts, and in the ‘Reality Based Self Defence’ community. For my own part I’ve had an editor remove my name from a karate article that recommended me and I’ve known one instructor to imply that my decades of knowledge (and magazine articles and the karate system name in use before we even met) are based on the little common material he shared in two weekend seminars. I find it a shame that people can be so insecure.

There are good ways to attract and retain students and there are bad ways. There are good reasons to recommend someone not train with another group and there are bad reasons.

Let’s start with cross-training, that training element that probably every style founder and good quality teacher has in common. That training approach of taking and adapting good information from multiple sources that is best practice in every single physical discipline and common to all top tier professional coaches. After paying attention and putting in effort, cross-training is probably the single most important thing you can do (whether that is in person, online or through wider reading and research).

The only really good reasons to recommend that a group or instructor be avoided is if you have evidence of poor safety practices, fake qualifications, or knowledge of inappropriate behaviour that may put trainees at other risks (which, if held, should have been reported for investigation if it breaches any laws). It boils down to ‘Is there a physical or mental health risk or risk of abuse to my student?’, if not, it’s none of your business.

Any other reasons are probably bad reasons. If what is being taught elsewhere clashes with your organisation’s approaches it is up to the student to rationalise or compartmentalise such differences and to be able to separate them. If the process of doing so slows their ability to perform appropriately for gradings, that is their choice. If they decide to continue their training elsewhere and no longer train with you, that is their choice too. Students are not serfs.

If an instructor leaves an organisation and chooses to teach under a new umbrella, that is their choice. If they have been awarded grades then they are a reflection of that organisation’s standards. Those grades are not automatically invalid; they will always be an accurate reflection of how their skills and knowledge were valued at the time they were awarded. Organisations also need to accept that they may not have been the only source of an individual’s knowledge. It may be that a departing instructor is actually offering a more appropriate different training opportunity for other people. It might be that their choosing to move on should be cause for introspection rather than isolation or insults.

If an organisation chooses to ‘kick out’ an instructor for any non-criminal activity, or suggests they move on, that does not remove their ability to teach what they know. When an organisation seeks to undermine the qualifications of any former instructor or student they are actually discrediting their own current students and teaching. The martial arts are no different from any other walk of life; you will get ‘bad eggs’ and sometimes these individuals are very skilled at concealing undesirable traits and actions, but how long they are able to do so and how much responsibility they are given also says something about the culture of their parent organisation.

Students pay for the training and knowledge instructors provide. That information is already in the public domain, across multiple martial arts styles and in multiple publications. The information is rather like food; all teachers, texts and styles do is create interesting menus and dietary plans and recipes of dishes, they are not bio-engineering new crops or inventing new cooking methods and their organisations cannot trademark their techniques or knowledge because it isn’t new. Non-disclosure or non-competition agreements have no validity given that the techniques and information that are passed on can already be learned elsewhere. There is nothing new under the sun in thousands of years of human violence. The only thing that can be trademarked are logos and any in-house teaching terminology devised to describe pre-existing (and often common) concepts.

So how do you retain students if they are able to train with whoever they want? The simple answer is you make your club or organisation a place where people want to train.

There are many different reasons why individuals may take up a martial art, and their interests and aims may change over the time they train, but there some aspects that encourage people to stay that I think unite most:

  • good quality instruction in good quality material
  • a welcoming and supportive training environment
  • opportunities to progress
  • to get fitter, stronger and faster and be pushed but also to enjoy the training
  • good value for money
  • safe and hygienic practices
  • feeling valued and respected

These are not unreasonable expectations. It’s also not unreasonable for you to raise concerns about how you or anyone else are treated.

It is unreasonable to be told with whom you can or cannot train with in your own personal time. It’s okay for a supermarket to say that you can only use their rewards card to get discounts off their items, it’s not acceptable for them to attempt to forbid you from shopping elsewhere, from holding multiple reward cards, or to track your social media to see if you are shopping elsewhere.

Wherever I train I look first and foremost for the top item on the list above, but if the other items aren’t met then I wouldn’t stay. There is a world of amazing instructors out there that meet all those requirements. Find them and enjoy your martial arts journey.

Learning more Kata to live longer?

This year, like thousands of people, I’ve enjoyed watching National Geographic’s ‘Limitless’ with Chris Hemsworth. In this show Chris looks at his lifestyle and talks to a number of medical specialists about how he might be able to stay healthier for longer through a number of different approaches.

One of the elements the series touches upon is the importance of cognitive health. This is not simply the importance of reducing stress, or of endeavouring to have a happy outlook on life, but finding ways to increase and maintain neuro-plasticity to ensure that the brain continues to function at a high level throughout our lives and during aging.

(Note my PhD is not in any medical related discipline so please excuse any use of laymen’s terms.)

One activity that was mentioned as being studied as a potential route to maintaining good cognitive function was dancing, in particular the activity of learning and rehearsing new combinations of movements.

Dancing is not Kata, although the two have much in common. I would of course argue that if you do not know and cannot actively apply under pressure the movements of your kata against a resisting opponent then you might as well be dancing. That should not be a controversial view given its historical resonance. I also suspect (although I have no data to support this belief) that the understanding of kata movements and the ability to relate them to paired practice may enhance any cognitive benefits of their practice because of the greater connectivity between the movement and other memories of position combined with tactile and visual stimuli recall.

When I began Karate, with Shotokan as my foundation style, as part of my training process I learned as forms many as I could. I would normally learn a kata from a book and/or a Kanazawa video before doing it in class. In this manner I learned and was assessed on the majority of the 27 kata in the Shotokan canon.

Over time my training aims changed and as a Dan grade I have focused on training as few forms as possible. I can see the overlaps, variations, adaptations and redundancies between different forms and choose to maximise my training time and depth of understanding by working on a small number of kata. My emphasis is on drilling and rehearsing useful principles through minimal numbers of techniques rather than collecting more and more of ‘the same’ techniques and kata. I teach my Shotokan students what I consider to be a sensible slimmed down kata syllabus prior to their Dan gradings to ensure a depth of understanding and ability to apply in alive training. After their first Dan grade they are free to train as many kata as they want, I only ask them to undertake the discipline of learning and investigating one new kata per grading to ensure they understand the principles involved.

At present, in my DART Karate classes, I teach my own kata to condense further drills, lessons and technique coathangers on tight embusens that maximise the ability to rehearse a huge amount of material in as few movements as possible. DART students train my two kata, Initiative and Escape, and two widespread old and useful forms: Tekki Shodan and Seisan.

But am I going about this wrong? I’ve been focusing on condensing what we do in regular training for combative effectiveness. I have taught kata as a condensed way of rehearsing important principles and maintaining mobility rather than focusing on it as a longevity tool.

In my own personal practice, in my own dojo, I no longer use kata training as a visualisation tool. I neither focus on an intent for each plane of movement, nor do I shadow box with kata and swim freely through solo rehearsal jumping at ease from combination to combination depending on what I imagine. I can do these, but I don’t really need to as I am using my kata hands on (and watching my students do the same) for the majority of all my classes. When I move through a kata I feel as if I am gliding through a kaleidoscope of options. Without students or an audience, I simply use each kata to move and breathe, to maintain my mobility and balance while focusing on nothing more than the movement, my mind only focused on what I am doing.

But should I learn more kata to improve my neuro-plasticity?

Trawling through research published online it is possible to find studies such as ‘Effects of Dancing on Cognition in Healthy Older adults: a Systematic Review’ , ‘Dance for neuroplasticity: A descriptive systematic review’ , ‘Does dance counteract age-related cognitive and brain declines in middle-aged and older adults? A systematic review’ , and ‘Physical activity for cognitive health promotion: An overview of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms’  which suggest the activity probably will have benefits.

It increasingly seems the consensus that exercise (and in particular exercise that requires a range of movement, variability and cognitive engagement) is going to be beneficial for cognitive health. What is not so clear is whether the adaptation of continuously learning new routines is going to transfer greater benefits than the adaptation and variety of continuously applying existing routines on training partners or of recalling the stimuli of multiple applications while engaged in solo practice.

So the wheel turns once more to the question of how we train and how we use our kata. If your kata is a distinct entity from your kihon or kumite training then there is likely to be greater cognitive benefit in undertaking the challenge of learning and practicing greater numbers of kata, especially if the amount of time you spend responding to varied kumite stimuli decreases as you get older. If your kata already has the pliability and variability of being your primary kumite medium ‘built in’, then you are probably getting proportionally greater cognitive stimulation from rehearsing fewer forms. Regardless of how many kata you train, variability of stimuli and movement is good for neuro-plasticity so it would be good to have a kumite medium that you can engage in regardless of age (I have students aged 11 to 70 free sparring). In similar vein it makes sense that the more ‘open’ and variable the kumite is (striking plus grappling) the greater the cognitive benefits.

So, whichever route you want to take to better health, get out there and train!

 

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time…

It’s all too easy to put things off. Now, more than ever before, we are living in a world of distraction.

Engaging in a global world means that at any time, any person you know might be awake anywhere, and if your phone is online and messaging or email alerts are enabled, you can be distracted or woken at any time by either work or social messages. If that were not enough you probably have greater instant access to any book, periodical, paper, film or drama series you want at any time than anyone has had before you in history, and a more easily accessible range of physical diversions in terms of local clubs or facilities.

But often putting things off doesn’t simply delay them, it delays you.

When it comes to tasks or activities we undertake for health or self-improvement, the sooner we begin the odds are the more time we will have to enjoy it, benefit from it, or improve at it. Allowing ourselves to wait ‘until tomorrow’ is an avoidance strategy that has fewer rewards.

One of the biggest problems we all have is that we over-estimate what we need to do at any one time.

Going to a martial arts class is time consuming. To attend a one hour or ninety minute class you may have to invest two to three hours of your time including travel. That makes training only once or twice a week at a class very understandable for those with work and families to juggle, but training is not simply about attending class. You can get more from a class by training outside of it and that training does not necessarily require much time or flashy facilities.

Spiderman press ups alongside school homework.

I will the first to admit I probably spend too much time watching drama and documentaries. But at least half the time I spend doing that I will also be doing some form of push up, bridging, shrimping, planking, leg extensions, stretching, slow kicking on the spot, part or all of a kata or shadow boxing. I don’t have to break a sweat or be doing cardio to get in extra exercise that brings improvement. All I need is a small amount of ground space. I have a dojo, I use it a great deal, but I’m not going to sit still to watch or learn something if I feel I could benefit from more movement, I’m going to watch, listen and move.

That’s not possible for everyone, but even making a hot drink away from others in the kitchen can afford time or space for something. Every repetition counts.

What about training for your heart rate? Working sustained aerobic training does take up time and will build up a sweat, but you don’t really need to do that more than once a week and training for twenty minutes to an hour is fine. You could run, cycle, walk fast, hit a bag, run up and down stairs at a car park or block of flats, row or swim – the possibilities can be limited by your budget, but you should be able to do something each week. For intense cardio you just need to hit a maximum pace for thirty seconds to a minute a few times with rest breaks in between; you could be done in ten minutes, fifteen if you include a shower!

Kata in crocs outdoors.

Look at your routine, look at your environment. What can you add at no financial or time cost? What might require a bit of time but no cost? Try them. See how you feel for having done them. Watch for and note results. Just the act of doing more in the same time may itself bring immediate ‘feel good’ rewards, but when you start to notice the cumulative effects, you’ll wonder why you ever waited for tomorrow.

Tomorrow may be for big aspirations, but those are achieved by small time-achievable things we can do today.

Start today.

Spinning Plates

That was really hard!

That phrase, sometimes combined with an expletive, is usually the first thing one of my team says to me after I’ve asked them to teach a full lesson for the first time. Sometimes I’ve given them the chance to plan in advance, on other occasions they’ve just had a moment to look at the group dynamics and ‘go’.

A planned lesson is something I ask all potential Dan grades to do before I’ll put them forward to attempt the physical exam. On other occasions I might ask it because I believe the challenge of teaching will improve their technical ability and understanding. No-one gets thrown in the deep end without some experience; they’ll all have had to teach or supervise some element with a small group within the main class on a number of occasions.

I choose not to teach using line work.

I teach fundamental techniques against pads or partners in armour. For thin-air refinement of stepping, turning and techniques I use Kata. In addition to Kata and pad work Kihon is further reinforced and assessed through static, dynamic and alive Kumite which is taken directly from the Kata I teach. To do this I try to limit how much time I spend in class on ‘solo kata’ because I believe that when you have training partners you should be using them. Solo Kata in class is the teaching and assessment of a training method that I expect Karateka to be working on in their own time.

Students won’t always explain stuff the same way as you…

One of the consequences of teaching without line work is that there are always a lot of different activities taking place. Sometimes everyone is doing pad work or doing sparring at the same time, but due to the kit involved and the broad student age and grade range, no-one is ever going to be doing the same thing or working at the same level. We correct general points before and after a section of class, but in most lessons every student will get individual coaching feedback of some kind. The result of this is that while an instructor might not be training, they are constantly moving round the class talking to participants and demonstrating. It is physically and mentally demanding and an eye-opening experience for those doing it for the first time. They don’t realise how busy the instructor is.

Videoing coaching can help reinforce feedback.

Not everyone likes to teach or train this way. Some people prefer everyone in class to be doing the same thing or at least moving to the same count. That does make life easier for the instructor, it might also help those on the autistic spectrum. Personally, I have always felt that enabling students to set their own pace and explore their own options for the majority of the class allows for better learning opportunities. I was first exposed to this method in the years I trained regularly in Aikido and I chose to drop line work in my classes within a year of developing the Heian Flow System (now Pinan Flow System) in 2004. I don’t use line work in my Shotokan or DART classes.

Students can learn a great deal coaching under supervision.

One thing I do use is the instructor potential of my students. Is a 3rd kyu or 5th kyu going to instruct something as well as the Dan grade supervising them? No. I don’t expect them to. Are they likely to cover enough of the foundations of a drill or combination to enable a grade below them? Yes. If they weren’t they would not have been awarded that higher grade. Teaching may not be for everyone, and it’s certainly not something I’d expect anyone to do all the time, but it does show both student and instructor the scope of their technical knowledge. That is invaluable introspection. The junior grade receiving the instruction is not likely to take away any ‘more’ at their level from teaching by a senior instructor, developmental repetitions are more important than continuous coaching interventions, but the intermediate grade will benefit tremendously from having to teach. That creates a positive development loop.

Whatever the teaching subject area, kumite, kata, or kihon, any student can teach a pair or a few pairs with supervision from one or more Dan grades. You don’t have to change the training method, you can still use line work, you just split up the class into as many or few groups as you choose, for as much or as little of the class as you want, and supervise.

So, if you don’t do it already, perhaps it is time to get your students to spin a few plates.

the constant student

Last week I sat down and attempted to schedule my working hours to better accommodate the increased training time my changed weight training programme demands. It provided a refreshing opportunity to review how I allocate my time and brought me to a startling conclusion.

I invest more time each week studying to learn new useful information and practices than I do revising or repeating material I already ‘know’.

Like many people that took up martial arts at a young age, there are some things that I have practiced for decades. There are kata that I drill every week that I have known for many years. I may feel different when doing them, I may be more aware of what my body is doing, I might aesthetically look better, have better motor control and balance, but I am essentially ‘revising’ or refining my understanding of ‘old’ material. In similar vein, while there are some elements that I currently train in classes that I’ve introduced after a few months of trials in comparison with past approaches, there are other techniques and drills that have been a staple of my training for ten, twenty or thirty years.

Most of my physical training is spent revising and refining previously learned material.

Outside the dojo I’m constantly learning.

I will reread texts because as I learn and change there will be elements of other people’s work that will resonate differently with me. For example, from my own books, people with a narrow understanding of karate may sometimes be put off my application texts because the stances or kata are slightly different to their own. After gaining more experience they may see the parallels with older versions of the same kata as depicted in books or how other styles use the kata and realise that such details can be adjusted according to requirement. In similar vein some people may read one of my kata books and simply take a single application or two they like, whereas others might look beyond the techniques and instead adopt the flow system method of failure cascade that I’ve been using for over twenty years and apply that to their own sparring, with or without my actual applications. Others might take my training assessment criteria and apply them to their own repertoire to assess the efficacy of what they do as I did (with some tweaks) from Bill Burgar’s criteria.

The value of any book or information to a reader depends on the individual’s experience and understanding.

I’ve been teaching since 1989 and have formal teaching qualifications across a number of different disciplines, but I regularly look at how my own students teach, how other instructors teach and listen to podcasts on coaching to try and see how I can improve that element of my work.

I used to lecture on personal safety and self protection, but mainly now deliver information relevant to that vast subject through my syllabus and my sim days. It remains however the field where I still feel I have the most to learn even though I am currently writing a book on the topic. Over the decades the focus of my study has shifted and of course over the years I have been researching a number of my peers in the field have published their own books and the drive towards evidence-based crime prevention and policing has meant that the resources and information available to draw upon keeps growing. I do not anticipate ever reaching a point where I will feel I ‘know enough’ in this field.

I first qualified as a fitness instructor in 1995, the same year I was awarded my Shodan in Shotokan Karate. Sports Science is another continually developing field as we expand our knowledge of the human body and how we can enhance performance across multiple fields and recovery from injuries. I’m continuously trying to improve my knowledge in this field to see how I can enhance my personal training, my classes and the supportive information I give to my students in their syllabus.

I enjoy my current physical training and feel that in terms of what I do and what I teach I offer a useful holistic combination of skills to my students. My curiosity to learn more goes   beyond that. As I depend on being injury free to work, I am very cautious as to how I cross train these days; I’m wary of being at the mercy of a student with less control than an experienced instructor, but I do seek to learn more through watching others (and then trialling with my own instructor team) and through judicious cross training.

As teaching karate is my main occupation, I have the luxury of the time to continually endeavour to further my knowledge. Every day is a school day and I love learning. The thought of limiting myself by not continually seeking to improve my understanding of something is anathema to me.

I am always going to be a student and that makes me happy.

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’m lucky to have a well equipped dojo.

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.