Spending most - or even half of every class on kata is not going to get you the same fighting ability level as spending the time actually applying moves under stress and finding out what it actually means to hit someone in a particular way or to be hit.
Zero, I'd rather not repeat my points from the earlier kataless karate thread; I've pointed out in
http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35565&page=7&highlight=kataless why this is an essentially false distinction you're making. AlwaysTraining, you have to realize that kata have nothing to do with spirituality/philosophyy/mysticism/choreography or any other red herring of that sort. They are compact summaries of fighting skills `written' in body-movement at a time when people, for familiar reasons, liked to avoid committing MA techs to writing. Skill
does flow from kata, but only from kata analyzed into the most realistic practical bunkai and trained for oyo under uber-realistic conditions. Not sparring, not one-steps (though one-steps are useful as `slow-mo' versions of what you need top be able to do under high speed conditions) but realistic training conditions of the kind that Iain Abernethy described in his chapter on bunkai-based training in his book
Bukai-Jutsu: the Practical Applications of Karate Kata.
Check out Bill Burgar's
Five Years, One Kata to see what Burgar, a sixth dan in Isshin-ryu karata discovered after spending five years working out the bunkai of a single kata, Gojushiho, and learning how the techs encoded in that kata apply to the most common initiating acts of violence in street conflicts; or Rick Clark's
75 Down Blocks for insight on how to read individual kata moves, as their inventors intended them, before they were repackaged as relatively innocent blocks and punches. What you'll see is that trying to learn effective karate practice for street use (regardless of the karate style, Japanese, Okinawan, Korean (TKD and TSD being legitimately described, as in S. Henry Cho's great textbook on TKD, as Korean karate) or whatever)
without kata is similar to trying to learn a language you've never heard before by just standing there and trying to make sense of people talking to you in that language. Using the kata as the basis of fighting techs is like using sophisticated 2nd language training techniques
in addition to full immersion in the language (the analogy being to Abernethy-style realistic training). There's no guarantee, on the first approach, that you'll
ever get it, because you have no clue about the rules of word combination that yield sentences, and their meaning, in the language you're trying to learn. On the second approach, you get skeleton keys to those rule that let you bootstrap your understanding of what these at-first meaningless bursts of sound are so that they become intelligible—
if you also participate in conversation in an immersion setting. The two approaches not only complement each other: they form a completely unitary approach to language learning. And the situation is exactly the same with the kata-bunkai-training relationship.
Please don't shortchange yourself by adopting the know-nothing position that kata are just a ritualized dance unconnected to actual combat. The guys who created modern kata—Bushi Matsumura and Anko Itosu in particular—were completely no-nonsense guys who fought dangerous streetfights for much of their lives and were, by profession, the chief bodyguards to the last king of Okinawa; their kata were their manuals for success in those fights, `written' for their students and the training of other fighters in their group at Shuri Castle. Philosophy, spirituality and so on were the last things on their mind; Matsumura's linear karate—and in those days, as Abernethy and Burgar explain carefully, the kata weren't simply part of the jutsu art, they were regarded
as the jutsu art—was a brutally effective innovation that displaced the chuan-fa-based MAs prevalent in Okinawa at the time and gave the king's bodyguards and LEOs a new and scarily effective fighting system, which they used pitilessly and convincingly.
Somewhere in Karate Valhalla, the shades of Matsumura, Itosu, Motobu and other great fighters are listening to your query and urging you to study the approach to kata they pioneered and and train what you learn in their own hard style of training.... don't ignore the lessons they're trying to teach you... :wink1:
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