Favorite Bunkai Partner Drills

[Makalakumu]

What are your favorite bunkai partner drills? What kata do they come from? How does the drill flow and what does it look like?

 

[Makalakumu]

I like to break down the kata and have students perform the bunkai back and forth on each other. I haven't really experienced some of the karate flow drills that Patrick McCarthy and other practice. I really like the punch, knee kick, trap and arm take down drill from Naihanchi shodan though. That's one you can start slow and then pick up speed as you go.

 

[dancingalone]

We do the formalized bunkai two man sets within Goju, but they are not the only type of exercises we practice. These are the longer kumite sets that we adopted created by Toguchi Sensei.

We also drill the shorter renzoku sets (like demonstrated by these gentlement) but I like to chain these together as longer sets rather than keeping them separated to 5 moves or so like the performers do.
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Finally, we have informal bunkai drills which I actually think are the most effective. After learning some possible applications to each kata, uke is attacked freely by tori in whatever fashion he chooses (straight blow, hook punch, front kick, etc.) Uke then defends against the attack in a free form fashion hopefully using something that follows the principles of our karate.

 

[dancingalone]

No more discussion on this topic? It's a worthy one IMO and I'd like to see it get more play.

 

[Makalakumu]

One of the things I really like about Goju and Uechi karate is that they have preserved the kata based partner drills. In a lot of Shuri or Tomari based systems, these drills have been forgotten, not been taught, and/or replaced with something else entirely.

The concept of ippon kumite is Japanese and was meant to recreate the zen like austerity of two person kendo kata within karate. Real karate drills have flow and direct applicability. I would love to see peoples ideas in regards to Passai Kata, Naihanchi, and/or Kushanku.

 

[dancingalone]

One of the things I really like about Goju and Uechi karate is that they have preserved the kata based partner drills. In a lot of Shuri or Tomari based systems, these drills have been forgotten, not been taught, and/or replaced with something else entirely.

The concept of ippon kumite is Japanese and was meant to recreate the zen like austerity of two person kendo kata within karate. Real karate drills have flow and direct applicability. I would love to see peoples ideas in regards to Passai Kata, Naihanchi, and/or Kushanku.

When I studied Matsubayashi, we did yakusoku kumite sets, but you're right those didn't seem to be directly linked to any specific kata. If you delve back to crane gung fu, it's filled with lots of partner exercises and duo sets though. Maybe that would be a good starting place for Shuri-based karate-ka to rekindle some of the old practices into their karate.