Continuing Steps in Karate

  This way of looking at karate is influenced heavily by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and Lynne Kelly’s Power and Knowledge in Prehistoric Societies (2015) and The Memory Code (2016).  What follows is where my thoughts on kata's purpose and structure have gone, based on the issues and concepts these texts cover.  Kata were created within the context of oral knowledge traditions as a means to retain, recall and transmit knowledge. They are a tool, a vehicle through which knowledge is conveyed, rather than being the knowledge itself.   Having said that, in order to use them effectively, we also need to have knowledge of the kata itself and the ability to recall and demonstrate it/run through it automatically and faithfully. In this regard, kata are a mnemonic device, with particular structure and knowledge features.  They: Are memory prompts - they do not demonstrate/shadow-box complete sequences of movement, just those bits that need recall or are t...

Following on from the previous post regarding the dual nature of uke-waza, most beginning and intermediate students find it possible to stop or at least weaken the strength of an attack, although this may not always be consistently possible.  What they do find very difficult to do with any reasonable probability of success is also weaken or off-balance the opponent at the same time. From trying to teach students how to effectively perform and use uke-waza over the last few years I feel two of the major reasons are the shape  of the arm and the direction  of movement. Shape Most beginners and intermediate students, in my experience, hold their arms too compactly.  Their elbow is too close to the body, and the forearm is held at about 90 degrees to the upper arm.  This shape is easy to collapse when force is applied to it, and the lats and shoulder girdle are not activated, meaning that it is only the strength of the arm muscles that can be applied....

Sorry about that (not that anyone’s probably reading this anymore). It wasn’t intentional, just life and family and work came between me and writing my thoughts down on this blog. But I’m back now, as fortunately karate didn’t stop for me, even if posting about it did. So what has happened for me in the martial arts since 2011? I have graded three more times: nidan in 2013, sandan in 2015 and yondan in 2019. I have set myself year-training challenges of 300+ days of training in three different years and was successful twice (pneumonia during one year stopped me in my tracks though). I have been to a number of seminars in silat, my parent school of goju and other styles of goju, a Patrick McCarthy seminar (highly recommended, might I add) and visited briefly a goju dojo in Carlsbad, California (living in Australia, that’s more momentous than it might otherwise seem). I have also become an instructor with our group, assisting with colour belt classes and running black belt classes. ...

Or, why it's not a bad thing if you don't get it right all at once. Two years ago, I learned my first bo kata, shuji-no-kon.   I learned it in a weekend and took notes and videos and have practised it regularly ever since.   These last couple of weeks, we have revisited this kata and in just two run-throughs with my sensei, I picked up two major, fundamental flaws in how I was moving and half a dozen smaller things to work on as well.   My initial thoughts were along the lines of - "I wish I had known/realised this ages ago", but my second (and subsequent) thoughts were - "I probably wouldn't have understood beforehand anyway". I'm seeing this in my empty-hand work too.   Improvement seems to happen piecemeal or in sudden jumps, when something that I have seen many times before just suddenly stands up, slaps me on the face and shouts "THIS is how you should be doing it!"   And the reason why, I think, is that the brain and body can only...

Recently (the last year or so), I started doing something different when effectively applying a technique.  I would get an image in my head of how the technique should feel - mostly as some sort of flowing line, combined with sensations along parts of the line.  Depending on the technique, there might be loops, a fulcrum or two, or branching or steps. It's very weird, but whenever I do the technique with that image in mind, it almost always works exactly as it should.  Now, when I am learning techniques, I try and work out what its image should be, and I find that doing so allows me to pick it up quicker - If an image looks forced or doesn't hang together, I tend to find that I'm doing the technique wrong. Mental imaging as a way of helping to understand and guide the body through a technique is something I have seen mostly mentioned with regard to kata practise, where one is often exhorted to imagine they are being attacked by opponents, and to work out how the movem...

Doing is easy, learning is hard.  In the martial arts, the teaching structure can too easily convince the student that how they are taught is how they should learn.  The act of participating can be confused with the act of learning. The Shorin-ryu practitioner, Pat Nakata highlights this issue in a recent post on Charles Goodin's blog, where he talks of the difference between training, and training to "get it right".  How we are taught or shown something is not necessarily the best way for us to learn it, or to learn from it.  Learning is ultimately intrinsic to the individual, and not something that can be delivered by anyone else.  I see this in my own profession of secondary education; in a classroom, students can all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that if they copy something down, they are learning.  It comes as a rude shock to their system when they find in an exam or applied situation that all they learned to do by copying, was how to co...