Do you still remember and practice the early kata?

[baronbvp]

Good idea, if the students know them well enough to do them on their own. I have seen some lower belts do them incorrectly and with no one watching, it is easier to get bad habits. But you have to practice at some point, so . . .

[benkendrick]

Good idea, if the students know them well enough to do them on their own. I have seen some lower belts do them incorrectly and with no one watching, it is easier to get bad habits. But you have to practice at some point, so . . .

One thing we used to do in my TKD class when doing Forms practice was to have the whole class line up and start with our first form. When that was done, the white belts would break off to the side and work on their form individuallly for a moment, when the rest of the class finished the second form (The yellow belt form) my instructor would send a yellow belt or other randomly selected senior to work with the white belts. while the rest of the group would go to the third form.

We'd continue this process until we were working on the form for the highest ranked students in class. The good part about this was that everyone was "forced" to keep up on the lowerbelt material. An additional benefit was that everone had the opportunity to become the "instructor" when they were randomly selected to lead a group of juniors.

This in itself kept you sharp because nobody waned to look stupid in front of a bunch of juniors much less our instructor.

[Shorin Ryuu]

Maybe your sensei did bang them out every day for 20 years. A bb doing a white belt kata and a white belt doing a white belt kata are two different things to behold.

Precisely. I've often brought up this point many times in the past. If a master does a kihon kata, is it really "basic"?

While I do "simpler" kata like the Pinan kata less than I do more advanced kata, I still do them each around at least 6 times a week. I do the kihon and fukyuugata far less often.

But the basic point still remains. (I won't belabor it, as it's been agreed upon, pretty much)

[baronbvp]

Guess I'll be starting at Kihon 1 and working up from there!

[solar_kid]

There is an "onion peeling" feeling about the kata for me... As I learn more, I feel that I get a better understanding and/or better performance of all of the katas. Then, from time to time, I'll start to get this feeling like I'm not really improving on the old katas anymore, or I'm not sure what to improve or do differently. Inevitably though, something clicks in my mind and I realize that I'd been doing some aspect of the lower forms incorrectly or poorly, and that I can do better.

And, I have to say, I still find heian shodan quite challenging. Easy to learn, but difficult for me to do well.

[baronbvp]

I am still a yellow belt beginner. I find pivoting on my heel to be new and unfamiliar. I've never used my feet that way while fighting. But it works great to keep balance, especially when pivoting more than 180 degress and dropping into forward stance.

[aefibird]

My dojo is small so classes have mixed belts from white belts to nidan, the upper belts always practice lower katas with the lower belts, so they get to do Heian Shodan jsut about every single class.

Often Sensei will ask them to concentrate a particular aspect of a technique, and once in a while he'll have them do them differently, for example mirror image (start to the right instead of the left), or with eyes, closed, do them in super slow motion when the lower belts do it at normal speed, etc...

He always seem to find something for them to improve on...

as the class progresses the lower belts progressively move to the back of the dojo until the black belts are the only ones left doing bb katas...

We do similar things in my dojo too. We tend to train in kata most lessons, so the higher grades in a class are constanly getting practice of Kihon/Taikyoku and the Heian kata. We often have a "kata blast" where we start from Kihon kata, work through the Heian series and onto other kata. If beginners/lower grades want to stay up and train in kata they don't know then they are welcome. We go through kata non stop, one after the other until we have run through the all the ones trained in in my dojo or until we get to a kata that no-one knows or only one person knows (depending on who is in the class at the time). It's a great way to practice and train and it means that we're always going over "lower grade kata" so that we practice and learn something new from it on a regular basis.

[parkerlineage]

If you want to stay proficient at the advanced kata, you better practice your basics, too.

After all, what do you build off of if not the basics?...(isn't that why they're called that?)

In our dojo, we start with Short Form 1 (White belt kata) - everybody, even the black belts - and work our way up through Long Form 3 (Green belt kata) (Short 1,2,3; Long 1,2,3). We don't even get to Long 4+ - you have to practice those after class if you want to do them.

Basics are your base...without a base, you're...baseless.

(This has been Zen Quotes That Go Awry And Mean Nothing)

Peace;

Parkerlineage

[cathal]

I find even the advanced kata still have a lot of basic techniques in them.

[CrippledFingers]

I didn't right up untill I was called to demonstrate one of them and messed up half way through.