Forget Karate Techniques! | ART OF ONE DOJO

So you join the karate school and spend hours a day, days a week, and years of your life devoted to the art, learning the curriculum, practicing, and perfecting. And then the moment comes where you actually have to use this. So what should you do? Forget it. And I'll show you why. I have to wonder how many haters right now are laughing and saying, yeah, karate sucks, throw it away. The thing is, what we're talking about today doesn't only apply to just karate, but kung fu, jujitsu, kenpo, BJJ, and yes, even MMA. That's right. Forget it. But for those of you who are return viewers, you know that we always have to set the context for these topics. So what do we mean by this and how does it apply to you? There are three ways I want to approach this question. The first one is forget your curriculum. Look, when you train in the martial arts, it doesn't even matter which art you're training in. There's going to be some sort of curriculum. Curriculum is important. It gives structure, teaches concepts and ideas, and hopefully gives a student a core understanding of the system. Now, curriculum is great, but when it comes to a real situation, how does this actually help you? This is a teaching tool, a textbook, a learning guide. You can read this book all you want, but how does it help you in a real fight? Curriculum is often complicated and fancy. I know, I know, hypocrisy. When it comes to curriculum from any art, it's not about memorizing it, but understanding it. Extracting the education and nuggets of experience placed there from our predecessors. Curriculum teaches us how the arts work, but in an emergency situation, you will not have the time nor the opportunity to stop and flip through the mental rolodex to find the proper response. If the lack of time wasn't enough, throw in a dose of adrenaline. The part of the brain that retains or recalls knowledge is different from the part that acts in a pressured state. This isn't Sherlock Holmes where you're going to be able to retreat into an analytical state, visualize the situation, and game plan a sequence that you're going to execute as you scroll through a mental syllabus. You have to act faster than you can recall information. The benefit of curriculum comes before a situation occurs. Its value lies in the days, weeks, months, years of training beforehand. Once a situation goes live and the heat is on, curriculum, forget it. And that segues into our next point. If curriculum doesn't help in a fight, well then why study it? Well, because of the aforementioned information that it contains. It's not a movie. You can't pre-choreograph a fight. Yes, yes, yes, I know. But it's not about copying and pasting complex sequences. It's not about memorization, but rather utilization. Truly understanding what those movements are teaching, why they are constructed that way, the context in which they are used, and then apply it on a partner. Strong emphasis on applied. Techniques can teach a lot of practical ideas like angles of attack, counters, submissions, identifying targets, and all of that. But when applied extensively on a partner, you start to develop a feel for positioning. You will start to recognize particular opportunities and you'll begin to learn how to read the other person just by feeling their action. If you understand the material and extensively apply it on a partner, preferably with resistance, then if you get into an altercation with someone, you may get into a clinch or a grab and suddenly your body will recognize the position and you won't even have to scroll through that rolodex. You'll just act. It'll be familiar, second nature, and it might even happen before you realize it's happening. I've certainly experienced it in sparring and randori, gripping the other person and then just suddenly feeling their response and then it just happens. BJJ is a great art that teaches this. You can do this drill in class where the person is on top of you and you practice this sequence in which you're twisting and tripping and wedging your knee in between them to create a gap, doing an escape, grabbing their arm, pulling a reversal, getting on top or into side control, and applying a submission. Now it might work great on a partner and you may have it smooth, but in a real life situation, you're not going to be laying there and playing out the steps in your mind. If you've practiced enough on a person and you find yourself in that position, your body will recognize it and you can just respond. Now maybe you don't do that particular sequence, but when you get the distance and then suddenly they react differently, but you've realized that you've practiced the material enough that you can just feel their movement and you can react with a different response, possibly from a different drill. It's muscle memory, however you want to define it, and it's a real thing. It's a phase of your martial arts training that transcends the curriculum and you're working off of recognized root responses instead of trying to recall a preset curriculum. Some training programs out there actually capitalize on this and they put you through high pressure, stressful situations in order to cultivate these responses. So basically the idea is to learn how to apply your material so well that you don't even have to think about it when the situation happens. You learn it so well that you forget it. Now all this might seem hypocritical coming from a Kemple guy as we are absolutely known for our complicated curriculum and sequences, but it applies to us too and in a moment we'll talk about how you will know if your Kemple is going to work or not. Since we're on the topic of remembering, if you like our content, don't forget to hit that subscribe button and hit that notification bell so that YouTube can remind you when a new episode drops. So to transcend even this stage of awareness brings us to the third phase and that's reading and anticipating. To put it quite simply, action is faster than reaction. When we recognize a person's action, they've already started the process and no matter how we react, we're moving after they are. Now many arts teach little tricks and responses to this, stepping certain ways and little maneuvers that can gain distance or buy you a split second opportunity. But when you truly become proficient at the martial arts, you can flip this around. You could be the one to act first as a reaction to an action you read. Think of it like this, have you ever known a person so well that you finished their sentences for them? As you get experience, you learn little tells. You get really good at reading body language and you can often see what they're about to do before they actually do it. So your reaction is to act first and cut it off. Look at boxing. Look at the precision and timing a professional utilizes. A professional heavyweight match is a lot more than just two guys swinging wildly. They look for small twitches, tells, telegraphs and they respond. They see a twitch in the shoulder that tells them a punch is coming and this opens up that precision window of slipping it and counterpunching. At this moment, they aren't trying to recall a shadow boxing drill or any number of combos that they practice. They are reading and responding. So one of the biggest complaints about Kenpo is that it has all these complex and unnecessary technique sequences that will never work in a fight. Now I'm not going to dig into the depths of how Kenpo is structured here. We've done that before and you can find a link to that discussion in the comments down below. But let's get to the question. At what point will you know that Kenpo will be functional for you? The short answer is when you can graft. Grafting is being able to seamlessly move from one technique sequence into another, combining them, responding on the fly and initiating another response. Kenpo techniques are not designed to be copied and pasted into a fight. They are textbooks. They are concepts, ideas, rules and responses and they need to be applied vigorously on a partner so that you can feel the application. Now there is also usually a connective tissue between the techniques. So when you understand why the curriculum is written the way it is and you understand the relationship between the moves and you get used to applying the individual moves on a resisting partner, you start to develop an advanced sense of spontaneity. If you have to stop and try to recall which technique to pull off as a response, it slides out. It won't work. But when you've practiced enough that you can switch to any other portion of another technique on the fly based on your partner's response, then you've embraced grafting. And that's the same thoughtless response that comes into play. So long story short, your martial arts works for you when you train it to the point that you forget it. So tell me what you guys think. At what point in your training did you know that material was working for you or when it wasn't? Do you have any experiences where you just reacted without having to think about it? Please share all your stories below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching.