THE TRUTH ABOUT KARATE FORMS (KATA) — Patrick McCarthy

Do you know the purpose of Kata? You know, those traditional forms that we do in martial arts like Kung Fu, Taekwondo and Karate. Well, turns out Kata is much more than a meaningless choreography when you do it right. Keep watching. What's up guys, I'm Jesse from KarateByJesse.com aka The Karate Nerd. Recently, I attended a master class seminar by Sensei Patrick McCarthy, the western world's number one karate historian, researcher and author. During this seminar, I decided to ask him about the historical purpose of Kata. I mean, why were Kata created to begin with and why do we still practice them? Check out what he had to say. Oh, hey. So, Hanshi McCarthy, what is the historical purpose or reason for practicing the forms, the Kata, that are so common in karate? The Kata, my brother nerds, is the link between the old and the new. It's the bridge that links together the Kihon with the Kumite. It's the time capsules that contain the application practices against those acts of physical violence that are habitual in human nature. It pays a little bit of dividends to know something about what came first, the Kata or the application, the chicken or the egg. Think about this for a minute. How can you have a Kata, considering the fact that Kata contain the so-called secrets of the art, i.e. karate is Kata and the old adage, Kata is Karate, which without, you might have a fighting art, but you don't have Karate. And so, in this regard, the Kata then is supposed to contain the secret application practices against these habitual acts of physical violence. In that regard, it pays a little bit of dividends to understand a couple of things. Number one, we're not talking about weapons, we're not talking about gang fighting in a melee, mutual confrontation, we're talking about the art of self-defense. I'm not expecting trouble, I have a bag of groceries, I get into my car, I get jumped from behind. This is the contextual premise with which I'm talking about. And so, in that regard, the nature of understanding the final product lies in following the pathway from the re-enactment of that act of violence, which is habitual by nature. And in order to re-enact it, we tend then to quantify what it is, and by defining its dynamics, we're better able to understand why it's dangerous in the first place. So, by understanding why it's dangerous in the first place, gives us the platform upon which empirical observation and experimentation allow us then to discover which of these tools work best in the escape-encounter process. In doing so, we need a formula with which to practice, a pathway, if you will. Passive resistance is what we use in the beginning states to understand and feel comfortable with the initial process. And once that's established, then the gradual to exponential investment of aggressive energy, aggressive resistance, it really is the single thread that weaves together the fabric of our tradition, because it tests the veracity of your function. And then using line drills. Example, now I'm practicing a passive resistance with a beginner, and we work it back and forth until I find some form of familiarity. Now I have to step it up a little bit. My next partner maybe is not going to be as passively resistant or compliant. And so this gradual ascent to using aggressive energy continues to test the veracity of my application function. And while it worked great with these two people, then all of a sudden my next partner was, oh ----, not going to work so good against that guy. And week in and week out and month in and month out, and year after year, by continuing to practice the same acts of physical violence, deploying these application practices, I tend to find which way it works best for me. And then by separating the two people into the offensive and the defensive, it's entirely possible to ritualize that application or conceptual practice into a little template, a little ritualized template. So by linking together the ritualized templates into some geometrical configuration, we end up with something that's greater than the sum total of its individual parts. And therein lies this geometrical magical configuration called kata. So the kata then by itself was never really meant to teach you anything, but rather to culminate what you should have already learned in the pathway practice. So why, you ask, is learning the kata important? Why, it is the pathway. It is the art that brings us together. And I can assure you of this, that where, whatever you're practicing, and whatever the body of moral philosophy is surrounding that practice to make it different from the others, I can tell you this, that what brings us together in this wonderful art is far more important than anything that tends to separate us from a political point of view. I hope that helps. Thank you. Now that you know the theory behind why we practice kata, maybe you should know about the application or the functionality as opposed to the form. See, I asked Sensei McCarthy to demonstrate a couple of his practical applications, what we call bunkai in Japanese, to a kata known as ryushan. Check it out. We have dealt with a wonderful old exercise that you'll remember, of course I know you remember, called ryushan. Ryushan we believed handed down through oral tradition from the time of Gokenki. In a group of people like Gusukuma Shinpan, Tokura Anbun, Hanashiro Chomo, Dr. Chitose Tsuyoshi, Miyagi Chojin, we believe even took part of this. And this exercise was handed down to me through both Richard Kim and Kinjo Hiroshi. I want to look at some of the practices. Sorry, I'm not completely dressed for this. The first was the bear hug, under the arm bear hug. And in order to, you have a moment with which to deal with this, so the moment that you get seized, the first thing I want to do is drop my body weight and put my hands over the arms, my palms against the body, and a little quick, a bite into the fascia. It doesn't have to be, you know, the fangs jumping on an empty meat wagon and growling, just a little bite will give you that flinch. And as you get the flinch, I find my foot on top of his foot, and I push away, and I just want you to look at the back here. He's tightly gripped, but I create the fulcrum with my chest, hands here, and as I bite and push away, I break the grip. And in the moment that I break the grip, I bring my hands up over the top, slam into the ears, come down underneath, and move the arms up to the other side, during which time I'm going to move in to take him down, or exit and get out of dodge as fast as I can. The important part that we understand from our kata practice today was that movement went from here, went from here, and then it moved out to this position from here. So in an effort to better exemplify what the solo representation represented, we took the two-person drill and the bear hug first. We then went to the side and we looked at the value of a straight hand punch. So what I did was I checked, I trapped, and then I hit. Or I checked, I trapped, and I hit. So the concept of checking, and then trapping, follows this procedure. Now how you tend to follow that up depends entirely on what outcome you seek to accomplish. So we have a lot of little drills. We go to our particular number two. One, two, three. I hit one, two, three. So I can change that into a two-step program by this. One, two, hit this way. He taps it on the inside from there, he brings it back, and the conceptual practice remains the same from here. But what we were doing, we were looking at a kata from Seuchi, where he went to grab me, I checked, I pressed, as I leaned toward him, I turned the hand over, I started to seize the arm as he pulled away, and as he started pulling away, I choked that hand, so I wound up choking the wrist. As I drop my body weight, I then want to try to displace the elbow in a category three lever impact. The solo representation that once again was here, the check, the bridge, the seize, the pull, and then of course the impact. So you can recognize the movement. Now you see one of the contextual premise with which that can be used. We went from this, then we went into these movements where we step from here. We looked at the first variation of that from a double rear lapel control seize, and as he sees me from behind this way, I wanted to try to escape, but that generally creates a contraction. So as I contract, I wanted to turn one way, but I get stiff arm, so I turn the other way quickly, and I create the distraction with the finger flicks into the kohones. And in that moment of time, while I get that pain withdrawal reflex action, I sneak underneath and I come up, I lock his arm tight, I slide my other arm across the top from here, now you can see the arms are locked, and I shoot my leg into this gyaku zenkutsu dachi from here, and then all I do is I turn into the stance this way from here, and I turn. And as you can see the movement from here, all I've done is really displace the balance in a very simplistic balance displacement technique. And you see the movement replicated both ways in that solar representation. We also looked at, first of all, establishing why we use the right hand so much. And look at, I've got, we've got what, like a hundred people here. Here's, folks, how many left-handers do we have? Look, we have what, two or three here. We live in a right-handed world. Now knowing those odds are pretty good, especially if you're going to walk into a potentially violent set of circumstances, knowing that the right hand might be the hand that she's just struck with. I'm going to then, I'm already, he's loaded, he sees a hold of me. I'm doing something quite natural, instinctive. We refer to this in Okinawa karate, sometimes mi-otote, the mother and the child hand. The child never leaves the mother's side, so to speak. So when I get attacked, I tend to protect myself as quick as I can. For the lack of a better description of its modern terms, I use an overhook here. So as I protect myself, boom, there's my head and in the same way that I might turn from, in hand sandan, is I would protect myself here, because often if you try to just overhook the arm, you don't have a tactical advantage on the limb. So what we do is, when I protect myself, is as I come over the limb, and I start to do my hikite, I turn my body away first to get a good hold on that, and then I crank the arm. Now I have it in the position I want, but basically he has a free hand. So I want to take care of that hand before he can use it against me. So what I do is I take the hand, quick, go for the... Well, quoting a good friend of mine from Sweden, if I go to grab a man down there, and there's only one of two things he can do. He can either grab my hand or give me his phone number. So I grab the hand, or I grab the garment, whatever I get. I pull the hand back out again. Now I have a hyper rotation here, rotator cuff. That's painful, but I also have control from here. And then what I do is I either use percussive impact or seizing into the clavicular fossa or an elbow strike. We had been working with Naihanchi earlier. Yeah, you remember those. So what I did was, from here, is I impact the face, and then I lean on top of him from here, and then I slid my hand underneath. And I'll just say, as I slid my hand underneath, I'm going to come and grab my own hand like this, you see, to fortify the guillotine. Sorry, he's tapping. He's tapping from here. And then you notice the foot's here. I'm going to kick the leg up from underneath him. Force is mass times acceleration. So as that body's coming down, my knee is coming up. I'll just turn him back around again the other way. And after I knee, then I slam the foot down on top of his foot, and then I hyper avert, some people say hyper rotate, his ankle, causing a lot of pain there. Once again, when you see that rotation of movements from here, it's not difficult to figure out then that the solo representation is merely reenacting some of the principles that we've already seen. The other one that we worked on Wednesday was against the classic lapel. So I wanted to create a distraction. The real truth is that anybody grabs you like this is silly. They're wrapping up their best two artilleries by grabbing your body. Now, unless they've grabbed you and thrown you immediately or headbutt you or need you, the threat is offering you the opportunity to respond back. So in this case, I create the distraction, and I don't have to get a green one. A light one, a tap to the cajones. There's my ears if I want. One hand over the top, one here. I step back and drag him. I'm not looking to rip the arm off my lapel. I just want a pathway to his eye. I slide in, stick my finger in his eye. Okay, in the event he grabs it, I slide off the other hand from here, and then as I pull it back, I bicep bump him. I'm just going to turn him around the other way. I bicep bump him, and then I keep that hand trapped, hook the hand here, and all I really do is stick around, throw him down to the ground. Now, that's not rocket science for goodness sakes, but what it does exemplify, especially if you're a shotokan or a shorinru practitioner who's done goji shiho, then you see this movement from here, you see, and then the movement where I come down and throw the guy to the ground. And that, once again, helps those of us who haven't been fortunate enough to get the guidance to help us better understand, A, the contextual premise. Those are the acts of physical violence in domestic society that are habitual by nature, serve as the contextual premise by which these application practices then would become a means, better described as then a pathway. And that pathway, there's a wonderful quote made by Miyagi Chojun, who pioneered one of our modern traditions called goju-ryu, and he said in he said, you know, I'm, there are a lot of talk about the various styles of karate, but I'm at pains to understand what the differences are, unless it was the ways with which the same things are being taught. And in that regard, I see a wonderful opportunity to look at the things that tend to separate us are not anywhere near as important as the things that tend to bring us together. And I hope a little look at some of the application practices that we did today in review might hope to open a little bit of a doorway for you fellow nerds to come on in and have a practice with us. Thanks very much. And that's it. I hope you guys really enjoy this deep dive into the practical application and functionality and purpose and meaning and history of kata. Because once you start exploring the depth of kata in itself, it is such a rich and fascinating subject, especially when you think about how they're supposed to be used in self-defense. Do you have any more questions about kata or traditional karate? Leave a comment and let me know. Until next time, train hard, good luck, and have fun.