Kata in the traditional sense, is usually with much extra fluff....partially meant to stretch out the curriculum in order to sell belts/rankings, IMO. Some of it is also about differentiating family styles, lineages, or even just for looking pretty.
Shadowboxing, gets right to the point; training how you'd actually fight w/o the added fluff.
Sure kata works; it's basically shadowboxing with a lot of extra fluff that may get you KO'ed in a real fight if you used it all...that's why you don't see Machida nor Wonderboy nor Karate Kickboxers using even 50% of their kata in real fights. So why did they make people learn all of that Kata? Prob. b/c they want to keep paying students, paying....knowing that less than 5% would want to actually fight in the ring; thus the highest level of training. Otherwise, what would be the continuing goals if not, a ton of kata?
There is some truth in some instances in what you say here, but it is in no way true across the board. I have trained in systems in which I felt the kata were poorly designed or poorly understood or poorly integrated into the structure of the system as a whole, or all three at the same time. My personal opinion is that not all kata were created equal. Some are unsalvageable and were just bad ideas that ought to be discarded. Some were designed for performance and were never meant to be a tool for building combative skills. They were simply meant as a display of athleticism to impress an uneducated audience. This would include the modern XMA forms tournaments, as well as the Chinese Modern Wushu created in the 1950s by the Chinese communist government as a national cultural spectacle and competition format. Aesthetically beautiful stuff, demands a high level of athleticism and rigorous training, but only distantly connected to real combative methods. I have also trained in systems that had a huge curriculum that included countless kata, and it may be that it was built up so large as to keep people paying forever for classes. That goes against my grain as I feel martial training should build skills that you own and you should not be forever beholden to your teacher. At some point you need to stand on your own two feet. I don’t train those systems anymore. There is definitely a lot of junk out there, no arguments from me.
But that is far from all of kata. The kata built for the traditional fighting methods were never meant to be performance art. Nobody was meant to even see them because they are not meant be viewed as a “product”. They are a tool used (as one tool among many) in building skills. The only people who would actually see your kata are your teacher who taught them to you, your classmates who train with you, and your students to whom you teach them. They were never meant to be put on a stage and performed. They are a work in progress as there is no completion to them. They are simply to be practiced, continually as a way to hone one’s skills. To ask to see someone’s kata is like asking a builder to look at his box of tools before you buy a house from him. The tools are not the end, the house is. The kata is not the end, the skills are. A kata is like a hammer. You use it to keep building.
So I get what you are saying, but this is a common misunderstanding. The forms that I practice are not filled with fluff. They intelligently build the foundational skills that are important in the approach to fighting that is consistent with a particular system. Forms can look unusual to those who do not understand them. I understand this very specifically because the system that I train looks particularly unusual to most people. But I understand the reasons why we do what we do, and they make perfect sense to me. I don’t expect others to understand them if they have never been properly instructed in our methods. That is my experience.
When you announce that combative martial sports are the pinnacle of training, then you are taking your own values and assuming that everyone holds your values in common. That simply is not true. Ive never held much value in martial sport, never felt a need or compulsion to prove myself to anyone, and never held any interest in even watching it. I actually tried to watch some of the karate, TaeKwon do, and judo competitions in the summer Olympics. I was uninterested out of my mind, and not impressed by what I saw. But that is just me and is not meant to tell anyone else how they ought to feel about it. So as far as what Machida or Wonderboy are doing with their time, well I only just recognize their names. I know nothing else about them and honestly don’t care what they are doing. It has no bearing on what I do.
