Muay Thai View of Kata

[Thunder Foot]

Zero, you may have misinterpreted my post because I agree. As I previously stated, I think that a person of that type would merely be regarded as having less respect for the culture. But to expand on my point, in the instance of Fightstuff's example... there are thai people who don't do the Ram Muay before every fight, and that doesn't make them any less of a fighter. So while I may understand Fightstuff's frustration, I do not agree that lack of Ram Muay equals lack of Muay Thai.

 

[Kwai_Tua_Noi]

eeerrrm... traditional training techniques in MT (or better as Muay Boran) do have kata's.

Saddly sport version does not. It has the traditional aspects of wai kru and Ram Muay, but throws out all the other traditional aspects. Having the art watered down so much there doesnt even seem to be a need to have the MT kata's since most of the moves are forbiden in the ring

 

[kidswarrior]

This is an interesting thread, and after coming back to it now several moths later, find that I didn't give it a careful enough reading. Or, maybe it's that I've learned a little more in the meantime.

There are many interesting points, so many in fact, that there is a lot that could be mined here imho. But I'll focus on the one that jumped out at me on this reading:

back when I practice Kata, I always broke them down into smaller movements, but that would be no different than throwing a combination, depending on the style mentioned.

The first time I read this, hadn't actually started teaching this way. Suppose that in solo practice I did this, but not in teaching. Now, have been teaching this way for awhile, and it's quite effective. Pieces of kata actually 'become' techniques, or as Thunder Foot says, combinations. And just like combinations aren't set in stone (they're useful for practice, but the jab, jab, feint, hook which my old boxing coach swore by, he would also expect to be changed up in the heat of battle), so kata 'techniques', or natural groupings of movements which seem to go together to make up a combat 'combination', can and should be changed around depending on the circumstances in the heat of battle.

To paraphrase Iain Abernethy, we should no more be stuck with using kata movements in the order they appear, than we should be stuck using words in the order they appear in the dictionary. Breaking them into these 'combinations' allows us to realistically practice them solo, as well as train them against resistance (live).

 

[exile]

This is an interesting thread, and after coming back to it now several moths later, find that I didn't give it a careful enough reading. Or, maybe it's that I've learned a little more in the meantime.

There are many interesting points, so many in fact, that there is a lot that could be mined here imho. But I'll focus on the one that jumped out at me on this reading:The first time I read this, hadn't actually started teaching this way. Suppose that in solo practice I did this, but not in teaching. Now, have been teaching this way for awhile, and it's quite effective. Pieces of kata actually 'become' techniques, or as Thunder Foot says, combinations. And just like combinations aren't set in stone (they're useful for practice, but the jab, jab, feint, hook which my old boxing coach swore by, he would also expect to be changed up in the heat of battle), so kata 'techniques', or natural groupings of movements which seem to go together to make up a combat 'combination', can and should be changed around depending on the circumstances in the heat of battle.

To paraphrase Iain Abernethy, we should no more be stuck with using kata movements in the order they appear, than we should be stuck using words in the order they appear in the dictionary. Breaking them into these 'combinations' allows us to realistically practice them solo, as well as train them against resistance (live).

Very good point, and something that people who dislike kata because they think of them as nothing but martial folk-dances should bear in mind: the kata itself is nothing more than a compilation of representative techs for handling a variety of combat situations effectively, and the first subsequence in a kata is, as KW is correctly stressing, not necessarily any more 'prior', in terms of when you apply the tech package it encodes, than the last one is. The mistake that people make is thinking of the kata as a single text, rather than a series of independent stories each of which may be the very thing you need to carry out in any particular violent encounter. They're packaged together probably because whoever came up with any particular one of them thought that the sequence fit together well that way; you could probably take any of the kata, or hyungs of the KMAs, and rework the subsequence order within that kata, so that it conformed to the conventions of kata formation (embusen rule and so on)—and the combat content would be exactly the same. You'd still have the five or six combat scenarios encrypted in the kata, each standing on its own, waiting for you to carry out the realistic bunkai that will reveal it.

 

[DavidCC]

packaged together probably because whoever came up with any particular one of them thought that the sequence fit together well that way;

the movements, with multiple applications, fit together like legos

so a particular sequence of atomic movements might be part of 2 different, larger applications; so because these 2 applications share a particular sequence, they appear together in the kata.

turn, downward block left, step right, right outward block, strike with both hands

draw your grabbed left wrist up, collapse elbow with right hand, lock shoulder with left arm, right strike to collar bone

step right foot outside right punch, step behind your self with lef tfoot turning clockwise while you hook right arm with your right arm, continue ccw turn grabbng wrist with left hand, drawing down and the the left for armbar/throw

almost identical movements in almost identical sequence, in our most absic form, it is taught to yellow belts as "turn block step punch"