24 Fighting Chickens

I had a man say this to me once. He weighed about 160. He got behind me, and "choked me." The result is that for a while, he was hanging with his feet off the floor from my neck. When I got tired of it, I reached back, grabbed, him, and threw him feet over the top over my right shoulder and slammed him into the floor. Actually I would say a fist fight is the best option for a smaller guy. In grappling, size is almost everything. Use of footwork and other fighting skills is helpful, but not really as helpful as most kids would like to think.

This is the best post. For real Rob, does your son study karate? Nope. He's only two. He studies sidewalk chalk, bubbles, sandbox, slide, swing, and chase the ball. He won't study karate unless he requests, and if he decides to drop it, no problems here. I want him in a team sport where he will learn social skills, not an individual activity that focuses on the self almost exclusively.

When I first started taking karate, about the time the first Star Wars movie was released, it made me feel more self-confident, it gave me a sense of belonging, and I felt like I was learning some cool oriental high kicks like in the movies. Then, later in life, as a high school student, it made me feel tough, strong, and like I was taking great care of my body. As a college student, I thought it was helping me to connect with great people, and that I was learning to teach others what I had learned. I also thought that I was learning to control my mind and body with new ability. Then, as a married man with a job, I realized that karate had taught me to interact with people using force and a sense of entitlement coming from fighting ability and tenure in a karate club. I had to relearn what a lot of people had learned as youth - how to engage others in conflict using gentle persuasion, patience, tolerance, and acceptance. Karate does *not* teach that. It teaches the opposite: see a problem - punch it. See a problem person - dominate them with ability or your rank. Later, as my marriage progressed, I learned that karate had taught me that I should train a lot and focus on myself to the detriment of my family. So, I started training less, and as I did, I began to feel better and better. Karate had taken up waaaayyyy too much of my time for many, many years. And I began to realize that I had been training for so long and so often, I had never been *doing* life. Then I became a father. Karate finally had taught me something very important - that my son should play baseball.

That story is just a myth and completely untrue. The Japanese are very fastidious and while training there, I was forced to wash my belt regularly to keep it from collecting bacteria. The whole nonsense about colors of belts coming from stains on a white belt was made up by someone wanting to sell belts and make them seem "traditional." I have an article about that on my web site at: http://www.24fightingchickens.com/shotokan/101/19_belts.html

Some good internet research. While I lived in Japan, I found that most Japanese were not aware of any significance to the color of a karate uniform, nor did they know what colors were thought to mean. Probably only the Miss Manners of Japan knows or really believes this sort of detailed symbolism. Many karate clubs in Japan used black gis. Some use multicolored gis just like some clubs in the US do. White is more prevalent over there than it is here. But, and this is very interestings... originally karate was trained in without a gi. The use of the gi is stolen from Judo, and originally all karate gi were not white, but an off-yellow color like a judo uniform. So the "white" thing is fairly recent. Also, the original training uniform, back before the 1920's, was your regular clothes either with your shirt off or on. Pictures of Okinawans sitting around after practicing karate show men dressed in dark blue and black a lot. Not white. The purity of white is a recent contrivance. I think white is used most often because it stains more quickly and therefore will probably need to be replaced sooner - more money for the gi companies that already charge way too much money for what is essentially low-quality duck cotton canvas. (white blue jean cloth)

I've been involved in karate for more than 2 decades, and I'm saying that generally, in most cases, the smaller guy is screwed no matter what he does - depending on how much smaller he is. Many small men would like to delude themselves that they can take a class three days a week and go from 150 pound wuss to Arnold the Terminator in a few years. I have *never* seen that happen in two decades of teaching Shotokan. Now _that_ is true. Genetically, we are all limited in what we can accomplish. You cannot overcome your maximum potential. What martial arts - and any other sports training - does is help you to understand what your real limits are as opposed to your imagined limits. That doesn't mean you don't have limits, because you do. This is not the Matrix. It is the real world, and that world has rules, and they cannot be broken. One of those rules is that a man 1 inch tall cannot beat up a man 100 feet tall. That's just a fact of life. Everyone would agree with that, right? It is an extreme example to make a point. Size obviously does matter. No matter what I teach a 1 inch high man to do, a 100 foot high man is going to step on him and crush him like a roach. As the sizes get closer and closer together, the difference is less and less. If we are about the same size, then other factors besides size will be more important. But if our sizes are different by 20 pounds or more, especially 50 pounds or more, then size is just another advantage. You can bring up exceptions to this situation all the time, but they are exceptions, and the rule holds: size is a factor; size matters; size is an advantage; size adds to your chances. Now, if you want to drop the topic of size, we can talk about one of my more controversial beliefs... that training really is not one of the important factors. A mean, in-shape, untrained, football playing bully will whip the tar out of a highly trained chess club captain every time.

I must disagree with that - it's a common myth in the martial arts community that size is unimportant, and yet all evidence points to the contrary. Size is definitely a factor in any fight, no matter how it escalates. Consider this: a 50 pound 6 year old punches a 200 pound 35 year old in the ribs. Effect=nothing. 35 year old punches 50 pound 6 year old in the ribs. Effect=possible death. (let's leave the obvious moral issue with that scenario out of the discussion for now) Obviously size plays a role. What is that role? Being larger means you generally have several advantages: 1. Longer reach = you can hit someone when they cannot hit you. You get the first shot unless surprised. 2. Longer limbs = longer distance for techniques to travel = acceleration will create much, much higher velocity at impact. All great fast ball pitchers have long arms. 3. Potential for larger muscles = potential for greater strength = potential for much more hard hitting strikes 4. Larger size = larger bones = more force required to sustain a brute force bone break = greater protection from attack 5. Larger size = larger weight = more required of attack to sustain a shocking blow or injury. There are a couple of scales there that should be considered. Your size vs. the oppoent's size is one of them. The closer in size you become, the less size is an issue. The more size differential there is, the greater the problem. Does karate eliminate size differences? I used to believe that when I was a hard-training teenage karate monkey from hell, and I thought that I could kick just about anyone's butt. Now that I'm middle aged, I know better. I've beaten some big guys, but it took a *lot* of effort, and a couple of big guys have splattered me all over the floor just because I couldn't hurt them and they weren't incompetent fighters. Between two people, anything can happen, and a real fighting expert weighs all of the possible options and avoids underestimating the opponent and the potential to lose for various reasons.

That depends. In every karate class, there is a particular culture. So, you have to make choices between your dignity vs. the consequences of resisting other people. I personally prefer my dignity these days, but that's because the consequences for me are very, very low. I really don't need to be in anyone's karate club any longer. I have my own. So, if it were me, I'd probably confront the guy next time he did it and say something like, "Listen, I know you are trying to be helpful and fit in around here, but you know what? I don't remember hiring you to teach me karate. So if you don't mind, keep your opinions to yourself and buzz off." If I was new to the club, I would probably shop around for a club run by someone with the courage to discipline the other students when they tried to play at being "sensei." I think a karate class should be run like any college class. The teacher should come in, teach the class, and the students, no matter their level, should all take their direction from him. When one student tries to coach another - that's not a good thing. In a karate club, though, this tends to happen a lot because you mix in people who have been in the class for years with people who are just starting out, and commercial schools especially like to use assistant instructors who are just students because it lets the big man sit in the office and sell his classes to new people while they teach. A tough problem. You can ignore him. You can confront him. Or you can tell on him. Or you can do what he says. Each choice will have consequences, and you have to be brave enough to accept them.

If you are in a hurry, you won't like that particular page on my web site. I would recommend instead that you read each one of the Shotokan Kata pages. I translated each of the names one at a time for each kata, and also gave historical names that are no longer used where appropriate.

Yes, karate can be good for self-defense. But karate, like any skill you learn, cannot actually do anything for you. You are the one who does the karate. Your body, mind, and psycyhological profile will limit your karate ability in comparison to other people. The same way that some guys can throw a 100mph fast ball with very little practice, and other guys can never throw faster than 40mph no matter how much they practice, karate is "platform dependent." If you are interested, I have written two articles that address this issue. The first deals with karate as self defense. http://www.24fightingchickens.com/shotokan/101/06_defense.html The next article talks about platform dependency and why it is important. http://www.24fightingchickens.com/shotokan/belts/13_platform.html I have found karate useful for self-defense, but then I am 6 feet tall and weigh in at 210 pounds. A much smaller, less athletic, less mean-spirited person probably would not be able to train a martial art and successfully defend themselves against me. And no amount of training is going to enable me to defend myself against Mike Tyson. He's a bloodthirsty criminal who is significantly bigger, stronger, and meaner than myself. Ultimately, it is not the martial art, but the person trying to do the martial art. That's an ugly fact of life that not many people want to face. No one wants to believe that they are the way they are, and that they can only change themselves a little. Learning to accept the things we cannot change about ourselves is probably a much more noble goal that pursuit of any martial arts training for self-defense.