Problems with "traditional arts" part 2

[TSDTexan]

I don't think you can, You as the teacher can set things up but it is up to the individuals to put into it what they want, You cannot force them to go harder or longer or faster etc you can advise cajole and nudge but in the end it their choice and their path, you only provide the route map

I have found that a Good martial arts curriculum and pedagogy is a sorting table for minds. This is a byproduct. But it can be a useful one.

The mind that is hopeful it can do it

The mind that says I can do this

The mind that doesn't care how much it hurts, its going to get done.

The mind that gives up under adversity

The mind that is here to be entertained

There are some mindsets that hinder their growth.
While it is certainly true that we cannot make anyone do anything.

That doesn't mean we cannot act in an effective manner to address this.

A student can be admonished: The intensity is going to go up! When it does they have 2 choices. They will grow and push through or they will become upset and drop out.

This can be especially challenging if you run a martial arts afterschool daycare to pay the school bills. Fun was never a necessity in training for self defense.

But it is helpful, almost absolutely necessary for the engagement of the child or adolescent mind, that classes are fun, and lightly challenging.

 

[TSDTexan]

Warning wall of text follows, but this is pointed back at the OP on page 1:

One thing about Karate tma.
and it can apply to many other martial arts.

There is the acquisition of general knowledge and there is knowledge mastery.

In the system that I currently crosstrain (I am only half way through the kyu belts) that general knowledge is huge. Count yourself blessed if your tradition is not over 12 to 18 forms.

It takes on average three years to be read to test for Nikyu (1st brown.) Then at least a year to test for Ichikyu (2nd brown) Then another year to be ready to test for Shodan. Most don't get promoted.

One of the Yudansha in the dojo took 10 years to get his 1st BB.

We have about 110 Kata that are "active" but the Big Cheese has more, that are not currently being taught, and haven't been taught in a long time.

Twice a year, once in the Spring and once in the Fall, He flies to the US and teaches a special training.

That let's us know the current curriculum and any revisions. It's a 4 day training. We will do everything, all active Kata.

By the time you are 4th dan you may have all the Kata sequences down.... but you still have a ton of Bunkai to still memorize for that kata. A shorter kata may only have 5 to 15 bunkai. Some kata are 108 movements long. You dont want to know how many bunkai exist for that.

Thankfully, there exist a bit of redundancy between a fair number of NahaTe, ShuriTe, and TomariTe kata, so that reduces the bunkai count.

But we just to get a solid handle on the curriculum we are looking at minimum 30 years worth of training.

This is what I call general knowledge.

Then there is what I call Knowledge Mastery.
It is when you have done a technique 10,000 times.
It is so drilled it, it requires no conscious thought.

You strike as a flinch, or you flinch into a specific posture or stance and react without even "meaning to".

You have done it so much, it is forgotten. In a sense. You sometimes forget exactly how it was taught to you So you teach it slowly movements broken down
and you under and perceive the principles that are at work. To beginners you may even exaggerate certain movements to get the point across.

You can tell at a glance, when someone is doing it biomechanically incorrect, even if it superficially looks right. It is an extension of yourself.
It becomes how you walk, breath and stand.

It affects your anatomy.

But it is a DIY process to convert something from general knowledge to personal mastery. In fact, the methods of converting kumite into street fighting were sometimes withheld and it was left to the student to weaponize the information himself.

This was the case of Choki Motobu... His teacher did not give him the Honto Kumite or Jissen Kumite because the teacher was concerned that Choki was going to go out an start hurting or mauling people with it. Even as a youth he had a propensity for getting into violent altercations.

His teacher Itosu left him up to "Develop your own jissen methods" which lead him to Kakedameshi or streetfighting in the red light district of Naha.

If he lost it would have brought severe shame as he was from a noble family. He didn't lose in the streets. He found how to apply his training.

By the time he had fought the western boxer he was 52. Given that he started with his brother when he was age 12, that left a span of 40 years of training.

And he trained very hard. As a youth he set his goal of becoming the strongest man in Okinawa. He was reportedly striking the makiwara 1000 times a day, and doing Nifanchin as many times as 500 a day.

The point being that out of all the kata that he knew, he chose one and developed personal mastery of it.

Developing his own real world fighting bunkai, and turning that into two man drills.

A point that Patrick McCarthy has made repeatedly was that Kata was never meant to be just a solo form, but was the summation of all the two man drills that you already were supposed to have learned.

TL,DR version
General Knowledge acquisition from the TMA is only the beginning.

From it, it is up to each practitioner to determine what to master and weaponize for real life fighting. It is up to you or I to make it ours.

That is the difference between hobbyist and a lifestyle practitioner. And this distinction is a point that traditional martial arts critics don't under.

 

[geezer]

There is the acquisition of general knowledge and there is knowledge mastery.We have about 110 Kata that are "active"...By the time you are 4th dan you may have all the Kata sequences down.... but you still have a ton of Bunkai to still memorize for that kata. A shorter kata may only have 5 to 15 bunkai. Some kata are 108 movements long. You dont want to know how many bunkai exist for that.

Well, even accounting for those "redundancies" you mentioned, if you have an average of 15 bunkai per kata between the shorter and longer forms, and you have110 active kata you have well over 1650 bunkai. Now let's say you practice each one 10,000 times to gain mastery, that's 16,500,000 reps. But I suspect that's really not nearly enough reps to be a true master.

For example, about ten years back when I was in my early 50's, I would do sessions of between 1,000 and 5,000 Ving Tsun chain punches in a single session, about 3 or 4 days a week, for over a year. So I wore out a couple of wall-bags doing some 300,000 total punching reps during that time, ...also doing no favor to my hands, and after all that, still I am by no means a master.

So the OP has a valid point. If You are looking for something to keep you busy for your whole life, this TMA approach is great. On the other hand, if you are looking for an efficient path to functional fighting skills, it leaves much to be desired.

Then there is what I call Knowledge Mastery.
It is when you have done a technique 10,000 times.
It is so drilled it, it requires no conscious thought.
You strike as a flinch, or you flinch into a specific posture or stance and react without even "meaning to".

Like many of us, I've actually experienced what you describe above, although not with the consistency and frequency of a "master". So, I do know what you are getting at. As I noted above however, in a system with fewer techniques, a capable person will reach that level sooner. In a system with a huge number of kata, techniques and bunkai, few will ever attain that level of spontaneity except with the more common techniques. That's reality.

Interestingly, it is widely believed Wing Chun evolved from earlier arts that were much more complicated and, at least from a WC point of view, less practical. One of WC's strengths was it's relative simplicity compared to these ancestral forms, probably including southern shaolin and fujian white crane (also the ancestor of Okinawan Te). Our origin myths tell us of our supposed founder, the elderly nun Ng Mui who developed a simpler, more practical kung-fu system. Her first student, from whom the system takes it's name, was a slight young woman who learned enough in a short time to best a local bully in combat.

However improbable the tale, the meaning is clear. Unlike your stories of Okinawan Te, the best Wing Chun should be simple enough to be learned in less than an entire lifetime, and efficient enough that even an old woman or slightly built young girl could make it work. At least that was supposed to be the idea!

 

[TSDTexan]

Well, even accounting for those "redundancies" you mentioned, if you have an average of 15 bunkai per kata between the shorter and longer forms, and you have110 active kata you have well over 1650 bunkai. Now let's say you practice each one 10,000 times to gain mastery, that's 16,500,000 reps. But I suspect that's really not nearly enough reps to be a true master.

For example, about ten years back when I was in my early 50's, I would do sessions of between 1,000 and 5,000 Ving Tsun chain punches in a single session, about 3 or 4 days a week, for over a year. So I wore out a couple of wall-bags doing some 300,000 total punching reps during that time, ...also doing no favor to my hands, and after all that, still I am by no means a master.

So the OP has a valid point. If You are looking for something to keep you busy for your whole life, this TMA approach is great. On the other hand, if you are looking for an efficient path to functional fighting skills, it leaves much to be desired.



Like many of us, I've actually experienced what you describe above, although not with the consistency and frequency of a "master". So, I do know what you are getting at. As I noted above however, in a system with fewer techniques, a capable person will reach that level sooner. In a system with a huge number of kata, techniques and bunkai, few will ever attain that level of spontaneity except with the more common techniques. That's reality.

Interestingly, it is widely believed Wing Chun evolved from earlier arts that were much more complicated and, at least from a WC point of view, less practical. One of WC's strengths was it's relative simplicity compared to these ancestral forms, probably including southern shaolin and fujian white crane (also the ancestor of Okinawan Te). Our origin myths tell us of our supposed founder, the elderly nun Ng Mui who developed a simpler, more practical kung-fu system. Her first student, from whom the system takes it's name, was a slight young woman who learned enough in a short time to best a local bully in combat.

However improbable the tale, the meaning is clear. Unlike your stories of Okinawan Te, the best Wing Chun should be simple enough to be learned in less than an entire lifetime, and efficient enough that even an old woman or slightly built young girl could make it work. At least that was supposed to be the idea!

The goal wasn't to have mastery of all of your general knowledge. That's simply for transmission of the art to the next generation.

Let's say Joe enrolls, spends 15 years and is exceptionally motivated. He hits 4th or 5th dan.
He learns about 80% of all the Kata.
But what bunkai will he learn and transmit first?
The Kata groups that he learned first.

So He may fall deeply in love with the Pinans. He drills all five so good, that other instructors will comment... "If you want to see Pinan done right go talk with Joe. He knows the Pinans".

That doesn't mean that they dont know the kata, or its bunkai. It means that his depth of knowledge is a lot deeper.


The problem (as such) is my style contains multiple styles or traditions of Te.

We have the majority of each of the following systems kata.
NahaTe.

TomariTe.

ShuriTe.
And each could be viewed as a separate system.

Then we have 25 Kobudo forms. a separate art.

We have the 7 kata of Kyoku series which my teacher says that Kanken Toyama said could alone be taught as a style of karate by itself.

[What just blew my mind as I was looking over the 2016 Honbu Curriculum kata list.... is we have dropped Bassai/Patsai. Both Dai and Sho are missing.]

Well the short of it is...
There is a university with many colleges of Te in the brand of Karate.

No one is expected to PhD in every college/discipline. having 6 different associates degrees, and 3 bachelors, and two masters degrees should be enough.

I envy the guys who do Uechi Ryu.... they only have to do Eight different Kata EVER. I wont lie.

There are 14 Kata just for our 1st Brown belt (NiKyu) curriculum. And we are expected to learn it in about 12 months.

Sometimes I wonder what I got myself into and feel like second guessing myself. But I knew full well that it would be a lot, so I am committed. I guess that I am an idiot.

So it's not really just one art. Like Wing Chun.
It's like 10 different lineages of wing chun, with other stuff thrown in.

 

[hoshin1600]

I envy the guys who do Uechi Ryu.... they only have to do Eight different Kata EVER. I wont lie.

This is true. The modern curriculum has 8 but traditionally there are only three. Many seniors and myself only do the three. I dropped the others because it was too much to remember. Lol lol lol

 

[TSDTexan]

This is true. The modern curriculum has 8 but traditionally there are only three. Many seniors and myself only do the three. I dropped the others because it was too much to remember. Lol lol lol

I knew that. Well... Pangainoon had three. Word is Kanei Uechi and some of Kanbun's senior students created the rest.

Also.... I hate your guts .

Not really. But damnit.... this is so unfair.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

The goal wasn't to have mastery of all of your general knowledge. That's simply for transmission of the art to the next generation.

Let's say Joe enrolls, spends 15 years and is exceptionally motivated. He hits 4th or 5th dan.
He learns about 80% of all the Kata.
But what bunkai will he learn and transmit first?
The Kata groups that he learned first.

So He may fall deeply in love with the Pinans. He drills all five so good, that other instructors will comment... "If you want to see Pinan done right go talk with Joe. He knows the Pinans".

That doesn't mean that they dont know the kata, or its bunkai. It means that his depth of knowledge is a lot deeper.


The problem (as such) is my style contains multiple styles or traditions of Te.

We have the majority of each of the following systems kata.
NahaTe.

TomariTe.

ShuriTe.
And each could be viewed as a separate system.

Then we have 25 Kobudo forms. a separate art.

We have the 7 kata of Kyoku series which my teacher says that Kanken Toyama said could alone be taught as a style of karate by itself.

[What just blew my mind as I was looking over the 2016 Honbu Curriculum kata list.... is we have dropped Bassai/Patsai. Both Dai and Sho are missing.]

Well the short of it is...
There is a university with many colleges of Te in the brand of Karate.

No one is expected to PhD in every college/discipline. having 6 different associates degrees, and 3 bachelors, and two masters degrees should be enough.

I envy the guys who do Uechi Ryu.... they only have to do Eight different Kata EVER. I wont lie.

There are 14 Kata just for our 1st Brown belt (NiKyu) curriculum. And we are expected to learn it in about 12 months.

Sometimes I wonder what I got myself into and feel like second guessing myself. But I knew full well that it would be a lot, so I am committed. I guess that I am an idiot.

So it's not really just one art. Like Wing Chun.
It's like 10 different lineages of wing chun, with other stuff thrown in.

I’ll be honest, I don’t see the value in that many kata. At all.

 

[TSDTexan]

I’ll be honest, I don’t see the value in that many kata. At all.

You move ALOT. Good Cardio.
You dont get burned out.
There are lots of treasures to mine, and polish.

Well... blame Kanken Toyama. He started it!
(Points at a non living historical figure.)


But if I could... I would go to a Mutobu Ryu dojo and learn Channan... and drop the five Pinans that Itosu created out of it.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

You move ALOT. Good Cardio.

Well... blame Kanken Toyama. He started it!
(Points at a non living historical figure.)

Stop throwing dead masters under the bus!

Seriously, I consider that a value of kata, in general. But after maybe the second dozen, I don’t see the value in more of them. It starts taking time from learning to actually use the techniques and movements. It limits the time you get to spend on one kata to improve it.

But that’s me. And I think that was the point of your earlier post.

 

[TSDTexan]

Stop throwing dead masters under the bus!

Seriously, I consider that a value of kata, in general. But after maybe the second dozen, I don’t see the value in more of them. It starts taking time from learning to actually use the techniques and movements. It limits the time you get to spend on one kata to improve it.

But that’s me. And I think that was the point of your earlier post.

Yeah which means you get double work.
general knowledge preservation duty, and then specialization duty.

The stuff that you need to do to make it work.

Thankfully I am many years deep into nihanchi kata.
But I have about 16 or so Korean Hyungs stuck in my brain. I have been working with em so long, that I can't shake em.

My Shihan says the Doshinkan method forces you to develop the ability to learn fast. Eventually you can pick up and catch a new kata by observing and doing them three times.

if I ever create my own art... I think it will only have 2 short forms. Sanchin, and Nifanchin/Nihanchi and 3 long forms, to be determined. and that's it. No more forms and bunkai beyond that..
5 is enough.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Yeah which means you get double work.
general knowledge preservation duty, and then specialization duty.

The stuff that you need to do to make it work.

Thankfully I am many years deep into nihanchi kata.
But I have about 16 or so Korean Hyungs stuck in my brain. I have been working with em so long, that I can't shake em.

My Shihan says the Doshinkan method forces you to learn fast. Eventually you can pick up and catch a new kata by observing and doing them three times.

if I ever create my own art... I think it will only have 2 short forms. Sanchin, and Nifanchin/Nihanchi and 3 long forms, to be determined. and that's it. No more forms and bunkai.
5 is enough.

Interestingly, that’s exactly the number I decided on. I’d created others - some of which I really like (and might go back to practicing for my own pleasure), but more than 5 seemed too much time and focus away from more flexible work, and too little in common among students of different levels.

 

[TSDTexan]

Interestingly, that’s exactly the number I decided on. I’d created others - some of which I really like (and might go back to practicing for my own pleasure), but more than 5 seemed too much time and focus away from more flexible work, and too little in common among students of different levels.

I would ditch the jumping and leaping stuff, & Kicks to the head etc. No flashy dashy.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

I would ditch the jumping and leaping stuff, & Kicks to the head etc. No flashy dashy.

If we had that, I’d keep it as optional study. Some folks really enjoy it, and it’s good for developing the body.

 

[pdg]

I would ditch the jumping and leaping stuff, & Kicks to the head etc. No flashy dashy.

That's fine for you

One person's flash is another's ideal range.

On the whole, I can kick with more power and accuracy in mid/high (stomach to head) than low (waist down to floor), and do so faster. I guess I'm just built and wired that way.

Jumping and leaping? I can work with those too. Get both my feet off the floor for a turning kick or side kick and power wise it's on par (or even slightly higher). Plus, my standing leg can't be swept because it's not there.

That could be self confirming because I rarely try to train lower, or it could be playing to my personal strengths - without cloning me a few years ago and running opposite parallel training ideas I'll never know...

 

[hoshin1600]

Word is Kanei Uechi and some of Kanbun's senior students created the rest.

true.

the entire original Uechi curriculum is very short.

7 strikes, 2 kicks and knees , 1 circle block
3 kata
kotekitai (arm pounding exercise)

is it any wonder they added a bunch of stuff. the extra forms are good but they dont actually express any new principals or concepts. its just the same re hashed stuff from the original three. this is why i decided to drop them, at least for my own practice.
for myself i found not having a lot of material led me to go down a historical archaeological rabbit hole of discovery. how did the seniors do this kata in the past? how did the founder do it? how did his Chinese teacher do it? were these the only kata? what original Chinese style was this? what other styles are related and how do they do similar moves? what other forms do they do that might have other principals?

at the end of that rabbit hole i end up with..how do i want to do the kata? then i spent 20 years pulling apart and dissecting every aspect of the kata and the meanings that lie underneath. and Dog gamit i ended up right at the beginning. lol

 

[KPM]

Warning wall of text follows, but this is pointed back at the OP on page 1:

One thing about Karate tma.
and it can apply to many other martial arts.

There is the acquisition of general knowledge and there is knowledge mastery.

In the system that I currently crosstrain (I am only half way through the kyu belts) that general knowledge is huge. Count yourself blessed if your tradition is not over 12 to 18 forms.



That is the difference between hobbyist and a lifestyle practitioner. And this distinction is a point that traditional martial arts critics don't under.

Yes, back to the OP.....we need to add a #6, and it does easily apply to TCMA as well as other "traditional" arts.

6. "Traditional" arts sometimes have very long curricula containing many forms that take multiple years to learn. These forms are often redundant and unnecessary, given that there are only so many ways a human body can move, and such extensive material is not really required for fighting. This is not an efficient way to learn to fight. Modern successful sports competitors will invariably tell you that they have less than 10 "go to" moves that they have mastered and used regularly to win fights.

I think these very long curricula may be a way to keep people interested and coming back for more and more instruction. Or it may be that over generations subsequent masters have felt the need to put there own "stamp" on the system and so added more and more forms. Or sometimes several "traditional" systems have been combined into one and each of the system's forms have been retained. Bruce Lee saw this and commented on it as well. It was part of what he referred to as the "classical mess." That is why one of his key approaches to martial arts was to try and simplify things as much as possible by using guiding principles and concepts that could be applied in a rather open-ended fashion rather than accumulating more and more techniques and applications.

 

[Flying Crane]

There is something to be said for getting more mileage from less material.

My experience with a system with a very large curriculum tells me that you reach a point of diminishing returns. Eventually, all the good ideas have been done and much of the new material is just plain bad ideas, or else it is simply redundant and repackaged.

When a system becomes so large that it requires training for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, that is unsustainable. It is physically and mentally exhausting as well as isolating and is a recipe for burnout. There is too much material to train any of it with sufficient intensity to actually benefit and develop any level of mastery. It becomes a race to do it all just enough to not actually forget it.

There should be more to life than simply training.

A very large system seems to me to try to teach every possible scenario, and in my opinion that is a poor design. Instead it should teach you principles and strategies and a reasonable body of techniques that you then learn to use spontaneously and creatively to answer what problems may come at you. If you haven’t learned how to do that with some reasonable amount of material, then piling on exponentially more material is unlikely to help you.

That is my opinion. Ones mileage may vary.

 

[pdg]

I’ll be honest, I don’t see the value in that many kata. At all.

As someone who enjoys doing patterns (kata/forms/whatever), I agree...

But as always I have to introduce a complication

We have 24 patterns, sort of increasing in difficulty as you go through them.

If it were up to me, I'd add more.

But, at the same time I'd only keep the lowest/easiest for as long as they're useful to the individual.

I mean, there's only so many ways to interpret repetitions of punch/block/kick, and those are incorporated in higher patterns anyway, so use them to begin with but I can't see the harm in stopping their practice later as they're 'outgrown'.

And there's the possibility of either rescripting other arts' forms, or creating your own if you want to try other transitions and combinations, but that would be for their own sake in a way.

 

[TSDTexan]

That's fine for you

One person's flash is another's ideal range.

On the whole, I can kick with more power and accuracy in mid/high (stomach to head) than low (waist down to floor), and do so faster. I guess I'm just built and wired that way.

Jumping and leaping? I can work with those too. Get both my feet off the floor for a turning kick or side kick and power wise it's on par (or even slightly higher). Plus, my standing leg can't be swept because it's not there.

That could be self confirming because I rarely try to train lower, or it could be playing to my personal strengths - without cloning me a few years ago and running opposite parallel training ideas I'll never know...

Well, Not everyone is Andy Hug... and Yes its good to be limber enough to Ax Kick.... but that doesn't mean that every high kick has to be in the forms.

Ideally the forms should be achievable from age 14 to 94. Any "high kicks" would be at sternum height in the kata.

Here are 200 kicks. Not a lot of them are what I want to be doing at 94.

I don't want doing a kata that has kicks that wear out hip or knee joints.

We are just talking about kata. There is a lot of kihon basics that is outside of kata.

 

[pdg]

Well, Not everyone is Andy Hug... and Yes its good to be limber enough to Ax Kick.... but that doesn't mean that every high kick has to be in the forms.

Ideally the forms should be achievable from age 14 to 94. Any "high kicks" would be at sternum height in the kata.

Here are 200 kicks. Not a lot of them are what I want to be doing at 94.

I don't want doing a kata that has kicks that wear out hip or knee joints.

We are just talking about kata. There is a lot of kihon basics that is outside of kata.

So instead of specifying a measured height (for higher kicks, like "your head") have a little flexibility to be able to say "high for you".

If the sternum is high for you, do it there.

If you've already got hip or knee issues, then waist might be "high for you", so do it there.

If I'm still (a) alive and (b) capable at 94, I'll still be going high for me

Don't oppress my range, man