DaveB

Do you think you can walk into a fencing class and just start fighting? Or be a soldier by picking up a gun? Because it doesn't take a.lot of training to mimic a movement, doesn't mean that the mimic has the strength to be effective, the speed to land the attack, the coordination to respond in any situation or that the information is sufficiently ingrained into their brain that it.doesn't fall away when fear and adrenaline smack him upside the head. That's why part of the training in traditional ma is technically specific aerobic drills that you repeat over and over again until you can't loose them and when you are scared and caught by surprise you fall back on them until your brain re-engages.

Personally I feel it is better to teach movement and coordination before teaching and drilling fighting methods. There are a lot of people who have no body awareness and only experienced martial artists will have all the movement skills required to make effective use of the art. Learning to channel your whole body into all your movements fluidly, quickly, powerfully and with complete adaptability is the most difficult part of martial arts and the longest to learn. Therefore we should start it before everything else. I feel all MA skills should be trained intensively to achieve a good level before moving on and incorporating new skills.

I'm as cynical as they come, but this is too little information to make judgements on the motivation of the teacher. I voted yes, but it's not really my style to hold an absolute position on something like this. My thinking was that this comes down to what rank really means. So long as they are not handing out instructor grades for kempo karate it doesn't really matter because a karate rank qualifies you for nothing of importance or value. It's not like you're going to let anyone with a purple belt fix your brakes or perform bypass surgery. They get to stand in a different place in the line and do slightly different combination drills. Sometimes. That's not to say they aren't valuable to the holder, but then that's probably exactly why this was done: to avoid depriving people of something that they personally value. The issue will be what those students are required to learn before they progress to the next rank. That will determine the standards of the teacher. Letting them hold a rank is just a friendly gesture. After all, it may be that they are all higher standard than the kempo grade equivalent requires and pick up the syllabus in no time. What then? Is he a money grabber for promoting them quickly or a money grabber for holding them in their transfer grades for longer than needed because they didn't come up in the same system? To me the latter is the far bigger crime.

It's the dojo!

Thanks for this. I understand the concept you put forward, but as I learned things, if you are performing one of those less.direct manoeuvres it should be because to not do so would get you hit or at best nullify your own attack. What style of karate do you practice?

That's going to be my answer for everything... Who shot JFK? It's the dojo!

Yes, but for everything there is a time and a place.

I have no problem with people re-enforcing their knowledge through academic studies and research. In fact, in some of the oldest Japanese traditions it is not only encouraged it is expected. However trying to explain things like strategies of fighting on forums like this is a waste of time. They can only truly be learnt and realised in the dojo. As far as my given systems are concerned, Reg Kear writes on his website about the stratagems and principles of Wado-ryu here... http://www.sannoya.com/principles.htm But it's a bit like learning how to be a potter or bowyer. Whilst you can read about how to do, the skill is only acquired through experience. K. Surely the only person qualified to say whether a question is pointless or not is the person asking. After all you are presupposing much to make that statement. I have no interest in learning wado, if I did I would not come here to do so. However I do have an interest in the various strategic approaches taken by different karate styles. I especially enjoy learning how these relate to kata. Hence the discussion. The link you gave is a somewhat contradictory proposition: X can't be written about - here's someone writing about X... That being said I see the details on that page as tactical elements, not strategic. Strategic for me would be the.guidelines about how and when to use/combine those elements in order to achieve victory..

My own contribution : Shotokan (non "traditional") - We learned to take angles when receiving heavy attacks and to try to press forward against anything else; to drive through with powerful counter strikes and joint lock anything that is either causing an obstruction or that has been left unattended. Chung do Kwan Taekwondo - Evade and counter: Keep out of range and kick anything that moves into range, straight energy for intercepting, round for exchanges and clinch with anything that gets too close Southern Tiger-Crane kung fu - keep square to the opponent, drive forward and work in close, use the waist and hands to deflect and generate power; forces coming at you are turned aside, angles are taken to support attacking. If their defence is good move to penetrating and disrupting structure before finishing shots.

In a word "Sente" (先手). In Japanese budo this means to "seize the initiative" - in other words getting the jump on your opponent. K. So then, let me reply with a word: how? By creating opportunity! As Maybetrue has said - the real answer has to be felt, realised and experienced rather than told. K. If science can explain in words how the universe was created I for one refuse to believe that there is anything in martial strategy that cannot be explained. Please don't think I am pressing you for more information, I am not. However I reserve my right to disagree.

Somewhat of a moot point for a Web forum and pretty irrelevant to a discussion that is trying to avoid talking about training. Why do Web forums always attract people who want to tell you how pointless discussion is?

There's no such thing as an effective style, only effective training. Your goals and how they match up to the specific school are all that matters. Try it out and tell us what it's like and what your goals areand maybe more insight can be given. In general though JKA karateka have very solid and powerful technique and a good grasp of the basics of combat. It is an excellent foundation for most martial arts goals.

I agree completely, but that is part of what I found unusual about the strategy you quoted. I've not seen much in Shorinot ryu kata that suggests drilling through the opponent with machine gun striking. Can you elaborate on this kata connection to your strategy?

In a word "Sente" (先手). In Japanese budo this means to "seize the initiative" - in other words getting the jump on your opponent. K. So then, let me reply with a word: how?

Interesting, I've never heard that in relation to Shorin ryu before. Thanks.

Hello, Can you describe how your ma style fights (not how it trains)? In particular I'm interested in the different strategies or game plans advocated/taught/developed by the various components and methods employed in your art. Please note, adapting to the opponent is not in its self a strategy, (every punch that flies to your opponent's head height rather than your own is an adaptation), so if that's what you feel your style gives you then perhaps you could give examples of how you adapt and to what. Thanks.

Your problem is common in martial arts. You haven't been taught how to fight. Options: 1. lots of pre-arranged drills. They will ingrain patterns and options into your body. Repetition is the key here. Note this is still a training step and much different from what you need to do to fight in a ring or in self defence. 2. Take up a combat sport. A good school will teach you to fight and a less good school will still expose you enough to people trying to hit you that you will get an idea how to react. Note: whatever you do the answer is based in repetition. Practice not study.

I'll bet a months wages that it's Niseishi rebranded.

If it exists at all it is probably a modern invention since the name Nijushiho is a Shotokan rebranding. Either that or it is one of the Shorin Ryu versions of the kata (called Niseishi) that has been recently "added" to the syllabus of one of the Shotokan organisations.

Just further proof that karate instructors are just people, not the great bastions of morality and virtue that is in the advertising. Gamesmanship occurs in most sports to some degree or another. Everyone has seen football players rolling around on the grass hoping for a free kick or penalty. Karate tournament is nothing more than a game and so winning is the ultimate aim. If you are into that side of karate expect to encounter it. That this stuff happens is one of many reasons not to take sports karate too seriously. Personally it would not be my choice to conduct myself in that way in a tournament and if my opponent did then the match might get a little heated. If it were my instructor telling me such things they would not be my instructor for long.

I think stripping down to technical basics is a very good suggestion. Another idea though is to take the opposite approach and forget the theoretical ideals and adjust your technique until it feels comfortable for you. It could be that your body type is just not suited to the standard technical approach. Also moving on or supplementing your training with something like boxing that has similar technique but very different teaching/learning methods may help. The only other thing I can think of is practice more. I remember frequently falling into patches where it felt like nothing worked properly. I found I just had to train through it. Also more sparring, partner drills, bag work and shadowboxing to take your mind off technique and make your body flow more naturally. If you are over-thinking things this might help.

I agree with the above but would add a couple of points: The key point of stances for me is the alignment of your body in order to apply weight. Once you master the alignment of each stance, the length of your stance is irrelevant. You will shift your weight correctly from a natural (ordering a drink in a bar) stance just as effectively as in a long dojo stance. The second point is that the transitions are more important only when thinking of fighting with distance. Once the fight becomes contact based with an element of control and wrestling, then stance and balance become important in their own right.

Yeah, that's not right. Shotokan traditionalists love to try and twist things around to justify their own practices, but actually Funakoshi was saying, "when you stop being a beginner you should stop doing long stances." He never did long stances, no Okinawan did. They were a modernisation to make karate easier for Japanese who often had kendo backgrounds. Gigo Funakoshi also liked the idea of adding load to his training, i,e, mnaking life harder in training so it would be easier in reality. The trouble is no one got around to teaching the JKA first gen that next step, so it never changed. If you are a beginner though, none of that matters. do your long stances, get strong legs and learn to move as quickly as you can like that. What you do when you're not a beginner anymore (not something that usually happens in Shotokan schools), is up to you. As to why don't senior karateka don't use the idealised stances in sparring/competition? Because as I said above, they never learned what applied karate was supposed to be like, so the fighting style of "traditional" Shotokan evolved in a vacuum. If you have the base of long stances, kendo fighting strategies and tactics and someone else trying to hit you who will stop after one solid blow, over time you end up with Shotokan kumite. That is not a put down. There is nothing wrong with that style of fighting except that it is a little incomplete because it exists for competition. Boxing is just as incomplete for the same reasons. But the question you asked will soon be followed by, "how come I almost never see back stance in sparring but spend half my kata time walking in it?". More similar questions will follow and the only true answer that gets to the heart of it is that the seniors of Shotokan were not fully taught karateka because cultural revolution, war, death and change happened. They did their best with what they had and they filled the needs of their students as they saw them. What more can you ask of a senior karate instructor.

The answer to every "Why don't karateka do x?" question is the same: Karateka are creatures of habit who by and large revert to how they were taught. Since the milenium everybody from every school has always trained with a complete and contact centred bunkai curriculum, but before bunkai was a big deal everybody trained with an emphasis on technique and application (kumite) secondary unless they were a competition school. With a technical focus there is no need for tactical concepts. Shotokan (the style I trained) was notorious for the fluff and filler invented to cover a lack of application knowledge. What was described in the video was what I call tactical principles. It is one third of what makes a fighting style, the others being mechanical principles which describe how you use your body and strategic principles that bind it all into a map to winning/surviving confilcts. Karateka and MMAists with non traditional backgrounds are the worst for approaching fighting with a jumble of techniques that they throw together. Sparring becomes a trial and error process rather than a means to practice what you have learned. It is true that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but its also true that we cannot possibly train for and absord every possible eventuality. Only by having an understanding of fighting and one or more guiding strategies that we can apply in any scenario can we really be confident in our combat ability.

Kata are not a performance, they are training. When training one has to ask what it is that one wishes to develop and train accordingly. Thus a beginner might stick to one steady pace, focusing on technique, but the intermediate and advanced students should not need to train this way but occasionally. Training kata at speed simulates (however loosely) fighting. It tests the technique built in earlier stages by increasing the forces acting on the body. It also helps foster deeper understanding of the form, as the momentum of a body at speed can offer up different ideas and even highlight links between techniques previously thought of as distinct. Training with various speeds and rhythms can be a useful way to develop skills from fluidity in motion to broken rhythm in combat to the ability to alter a technique's purpose in mid motion.