HELLO, The question was ask about the future of martial arts? and I really believe Kata's purpose will change or be just for traditional training.
In a real fight? who fights like KATA"S...? .....Watch mix martial artist? Do they train in KATA"S ? Boxing? is Kata better than getting into the ring and box!
Ask a professional boxer, or a high-ranking amateur, if they learned to box effectively by just `getting into the ring and box[ing]'.
Look... Combat Hapkido does not have katas. And it is, as Gm. Pelligrini has explained repeatedly, strictly a practical fighting system. But if you look at many of the TKD hyungs, based in most cases very literally on the Shotokan katas, you see in the kata movements themselves many of the same combat patterns: deflect/trap/strike; pin/throw... in subsequences of standard kata.
Funny you should bring up the Pinan/Heian kata: I have three books and a long detailed DVD sitting on my desk in front of me now, each of which goes through the Pinans movement by movement and shows exactly how these are applicable to standard street-attack movements. The analyses by Iain Abernethy on his DVD are I think particularly effective. I hate to have to say it, but it sounds to me as though your views of kata are based on your having missed the past ten years or so of detailed research by experts on practical combat use of TMAs, guys like Geoff Thompson, Peter Consterdine, Peyton Quinn and others, who have been involved in hundreds of violent encounters in the course of their careers and who have a very good idea of what works and doesn't. You apparently weren't reading with sufficient care what Thompson said in the passage I quoted from him in my prior post, or you'd have noticed that you already
have and answer to your question:
he fights like the kata. Did you miss the part where he points out that the effective techniques that have emerged in `western boxing, wrestling, judo, Thai boxing etc.'
are built into the kata themselves already??
If you genuinely are `still learning', then I think you'd want to acquaint yourself with the huge, deep recent literature, based on first-hand hard experimental work, that has developed since the end of the 1990s on the combat methods encoded in kata. And I think you'd try to base your view of kata on something other than the now obsolete literal-minded assumption that the kata are to be taken literally: that a `block' is really a block, that a retracted fist is really a chambering move, that a crane stance is really a way of standing there (as vs. a knee kick to an assailant's forcibly lowered head/upper body, as a result of the previous kata moves). Try to take in some new information on the subject, before jumping to conclusions which ignore some of the best thinking that's ever been done on the technical side of the MAs. Take the idea of `still learning' seriously, and give some attention to, e.g., the following: Iain Abernethy's
Karate's Grappling Methods,
Bunkai Jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, and his
free e-books on the combat system inherent in the Pinan/Heian set, available
here (note the further link at the very top of the page)—as well as his detailed DVD on the same topic; Lawrence Kane & Kris Wilder's
The Way of Kata—they're talking fighting applications of Okinawan Goju Ryu kata, which should be of interest to you; Bill Burgar's
Five Years, One Kata, about the wealth of combat scenario he was able to extract from Gojushiho after studying only that one kata, exclusively, for five years; and maybe one of the other ind-depth study of the fighting applications of the Pinan/Heians... say, Gennosuke Higaki's
Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi. And that's just for
starters. If you truly want to be `still learning', then you have to pay attention to the new knowledge that the current generation of karateka and KMAists have discovered about the true meaning and intentions behind the form of the kata—why they are that particular sequence of moves, rather than something different.
And you also should look at some of the work that's been done on how the
system encoded in the kata should be
practiced for real-time use. They are not the same thing. Kata contain, e.g., a demonstration of how an arm pin followed by an elbow strike to the face can be `cashed out' as a finishing neck twist, bringing the attacker to the ground hard (the danger is that he will never get up again); but to learn how to actually get your own body to implement that series of forcing moves, so that the attacker, as noncompliant as he is, has no choice about what happens next, you have to move with precise balance, timing and accuracy, not `remembering' what to do but
knowing what to do. That is something independent of the combat scenario you're training; it's a matter of internalizing the movements so that you can do them in real time under the chaotic conditions of a real fight—which is what the last chapter in Abernethy's
Bunkai Jutsu, or his free e-book on
Appled Karate (also available at his website), or Peyton Quinn's
Real Fighting: Adrenaline Stress Conditioning through Scenario-Based Training, maybe the gold-standard work on this subject.
Or you can ignore all this work. It won't matter to progressive TMAists who see in it the
real future of the MAs, and who will work hard to develop the analytic skills and combat abilities that the sources I've cited inspire them to pursue. In his classic short monograph
The Pavement Arena, Geoff Thompson points out,
...for the karateka wishing to pursue knowledge of self-defense, kata are a treasure trove of hidden techniques that can be adapted directly to a street situation... it's a matter of perspective— if you want to see them as unrealistic and impractical you will. If however you are perceptive enough to see, you will find that they offer enormous benefits to the street-oriented.
A word to the wise, eh? And if you choose to disregard it, well, it won't hurt anyone else... the point is, the future of the MAs as effective fighting systems hardly entails throwing away the stored, encrypted knowledge provided by the past simply because we're unable, through lack of cleverness or deliberate blindness, to unlock the secrets that are waiting there, as Thompson says, to be discovered, does it? Again, I'd suggest you look over the MT threads I gave you the links to in my previous posts; if you do, you'll notice that the kind of claims you've made about kata have been made before, and have been refuted in detail. But again, if you choose not to, it won't hurt anyone but you.
It comes down to exposure. Used to be that martial arts was something that was hidden behind a tinted window or a garish sign in a low-rent neighborhood, but more people than ever are being exposed to it. They see that it's fun in the workout classes. They see how it works on television. And they see that there is a need for it through the news.
