Karate

Karate and Self Protection from John Titchen

tae kwon do

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.

Environmental awareness

Photo of scenario trainingEnvironmental awareness is a crucial attribute in self protection. It is also something that is often given lip service without further explanation of what people need to be aware of or indeed how to improve their awareness.

The majority of self protection lies in the assessment, avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation of aggression and situations where conflict is likely, but regrettably this is not always possible.

Training your physical skills against habitual acts of violence increases your understanding and recognition of their telegraphs, an attribute that can increase the likelihood of reacting in time to a physical attack or preventing one through pre-emption.   Scenario training can increase your comfort in dealing with verbal aggression and increase your ability to identify the behavioural precursors to a physical attack (if these are accurately replicated in the training).

Unfortunately we can often miss these indicators due to our focus on trying to resolve the situation peacefully.  Our brains can become overloaded by the tasks of watching the person in front of us, trying to hear what he/she is saying, trying to think about whether to talk or hit or run, wondering what our friends will do, or what our partner or children will do, working out what to say and watching other people etc… This means that despite our knowledge of the telegraphs – we often miss them.

One solution to this in regular training is to work pad drills from a fence practicing hitting (or ducking) while listening and talking and adding in additional distractions.

In this video students and instructors from a range of different styles get caught off guard and hit by role playing aggressors.  I hope the footage proves useful to you in your own training.

While training for event management is good, improving your ability to avoid the event altogether is more important. The ‘Driving School’ method of self-narrating what you observe in daily life and thus highlighting things that you might otherwise miss or dismiss is a good way to improve your ability to recognise potential dangers and to have greater mental stamina with regard to staying alert in public. I’m very bad at facial recognition until actively engaged in conversation so I tend to read people by body language and location rather than recognition of known versus unknown quantities. With practise and experimentation people will naturally gravitate to approaches that work best to how they think, and rather than being an intrusive or ‘paranoid’ approach this should become as background and unobtrusive in our thought processes as checking for traffic before walking across a road.