Written by Guss Wilkinson 2003
As promised, here are some further thoughts on the subject of self-defence.
Dilligent and continuous practice of self defence techniques will increase a persons preparedness for situations where a defence is warrented. The defenders coordination will be fine tuned to a degree where opportunies will act as a stimulus for an almost automatic selection of an appropriate technique without too much of a thought process being involved.
Our training is very much geared for this. As many of you have heard before, I regard learning karate as being akin to learning to play a musical instrument:
The training of the basics gives us our tools to work with. Karate basics have been developed to maximise the effectiveness of stances (posture), movement, blows, blocks, kicks, locks, holds and throws in terms of power to effort ratios. This development has taken place over centuries and really is very clever.
The training of basics is a kind of brainwashing and can sometimes be very boring, but it is oh so necessary!
It is like learning and practising the scales using your musical instrument.
Kata teaches us to put together our basics into combinations, that we call techniques, in a long pre-arranged set. It teaches us how moving from one stance to another can increase the effectiveness of our basic techniques. It teaches us to move from one technique to another and how to breath when moving.
It also teaches us concentration, mental focus and how to coordinate all of the above into a seamless flow of movement.
It is like learning how to play tunes, melodies and songs.
Practising the applications of the techniques within kata is, for me, absolutely the most important aspect of Karate for self defence. It is what truely gives kata meaning.
These techniques need to be practiced a lot, and against a multitude of different partners. They need to be tuned to each individual – each individual needs to experiment with variations of the kata’s techniques so that they can find their own unique formula to make these techniques really work.
There is no right and wrong way of doing a technique and each bunkai must take into account the physical attributes and constraints of both the defender and the attacker.
It is like taking phrases out of a piece of music and learning to understand them: give them character. Once that phrase has been really pulled apart, perfected and understood – it can be put back into that piece of music: it is like breathing life into that tune.
Similarly, once the bunkai has been truely understood and put back into the kata, it is like breathing a very special life into that kata. The kata really does come alive and can now function as a library of techniques for the practicioner as well as an excelent prompt for what may need to be practiced.
This is why I feel that kata is not really about aesthetics (other than it does look great when watching someone who truely knows what they are doing) it is about functionality. Performing kata without knowing the bunkai really is pointless.
How can you inject the proper mood into a tune or a song if you don’t know what it is about?
This is where the individual is asked to make up their own techniques. We train this a lot, which puts us apart from alot of other styles of Karate.
We do this to encourage the practicioner to think for themselves: to question everything and to give them the tools to change and develop techniques.
We do not want our style to stagnate – it must be a living and breathing art that continues to develop. This is how martial arts developed in the first place and this development has been encouraged to stop when standardisation was introduced – a really bad thing in my eyes.
This type of training is like learning to compose your own music and if pracised enough together with all the other components mentioned in this article, it will lead to the ability to improvise.
The ability to make up a technique on the spot and on the fly – tailored to that specific situation surely must be the end goal of any self defence training.
Also known as sticky hands or pushing hands. This teaches us the ability to maintain contact with an aggressor when an initial contact has been made. To tune our own movments with thier movements using the sence of touch as the stimulus rather than sight.
This allows us to remain aware of our surroundings at the same and allows our sence of touch to detect opportunties that can lead to resolution. It encourages very close contact which allows our self defence to retain its effectivness in really confined spaces or when visibility is very limited.
This is an exercise that allows us to take the staticness out of our technique. It allows us to get used to and fuction despite aggression, dynamics, the fear of pain and sometimes even pain itself (although not often, I hope).
I like to think that our sparring looks very different to sports orientated sparring in that we encorage sparrers maintain a close contact, not to step back, not to rely on distance and we try to limit the rules to a bear minimum (only enough to ensure safety).
We try to conduct sparring in an atmospehere of learning where learning is the goal and not winning and we encourage sparrers to break when improvements in an opponents technique can be pointed out etc.
The links and the interdepenencies between all of the components mentioned above is very strong and very important to understand.
It is important to fight smarter, with economy of effort and energy. Otherwise we are reduced to trading punches were ulitmately the strongest and the fastest will always be the winners. If that were really true, then little runts like me or Helena wouldn’t stand a chance.
I hope that those that know us would be able to testify that this is not true: there is hope for us all!
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