but i'm just saying, kata will help you get your technique improved but how does it compare to get you ready for a fight liek sparring with someone or doing some bag/padwork will?? Get where i'm comin from?
I do see where you're coming from, but the problem is something like, you're equating the
score of a musical composition with the
performance of that composition. If all you do is study the score and try to visualize what the notes would sound like if someone played them, then sure, no music. But if you think of the kata as a series of instructions on how to respond to specific attacks, then it's up to you to actually `perfrm the score'—in other words, to carry out those instructions. That means: realistic training with noncompliant opponents who do their best to simulate a violent, dangerous attacker who doesn't have MA training but uses the standard streetfighter's bag of tricks to hurt you as badly as possible. The final chapter in Abernethy's masterpiece,
Bunkai-Jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, gives a detailed plan for how to do this realistic simulated street combat—it's not conventional sparring, you can bank on that!—so that the moves extracted from careful study of the kata and experimentation with them can be field tested in a down and dirty way that no ring sport can match. Abernethy himself has had bones broken doing this, even though his group try to adhere to the training format he outlines—it's rough, and you can get hurt (but not nearly as badly hurt as if you get into a real streetfight with no preparation).
That's I think the main point at issue here: whether kata
by themselves are sufficient to ensure that you'll walk away in one piece. Clearly, no—any more than the musical score for the concert, or the script for the play, are in themselves a night's entertainment. You need musicians and actors; but they themselves are useless without a score or a script that they can perform. That's what kata are: a score or script for response to a variety of nasty street attacking moves. It's up to you to train their performance. And no one is more insistent on that than the `realistic bunkai' crowd—people like Abernethy, Burgar, Anslow, O'Neil etc.—themselves.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding of words. IMHO, I agree with both Exile and MMAfighter. Shadowboxing was mentioned. Yes, if that is all thats done, no sparring, no bagwork, nothing, then yes, getting into the ring and trying to apply technique, may prove pointless. Whats needed is a mixture of both.
Now we move onto kata. I personally can't see how kata, in and of itself, will help someone fight. However, if the kata is broken down, the moves are extracted, and worked live, on a partner, then that is a much different case and yes, then it would be more apt to work.
If we really look at kata, to me, it seems like a bunch of SD moves compiled together in one long series of movements. As I said, its up to the student to extract the moves. 
I may be totally off base with my assumption of your posts. My appologies if thats the case. I'm just trying to p
ut down what I think you're both trying to say.
Mike
You are not only not off base, you are in the dead center of the bullseye. Your observations—expecially the part I've bolded—are exactly right so far as what kata, hyungs and other TMA patterns are. That's what struck me about the Combat Hapkido stuff—each of the drills was like a single subsequence of some kata or hyung. The reasons for putting a bunch of them together in a single form was to have at least one technique for each of the small number of major attack moves you're likely to encounter. Two or three kata would cover just about anything you were going to encounter, which is why, back the day—
way back—the great Okinawan masters only focused on a few kata, and studied them with a doggedness and intensity almost unknown today. Those two or three kata constituted pretty a whole comprehensive martial art in themselves—something some of the earlier Okinawan masters were quite upfront about.
jks said:
As you train, do you shadowbox? Do you throw combinations in the air to develop fluidity and skill in throwing them and to examine your footwork?
That's "kata training", you just don't call it that.
Is practicing kata alone enough? Not for a beginner. Beginners need to condition their body and eyes in various ways, such as partner drills or bag work. But, for more advanced practitioners? Yes. Kata becomes something of a "Cliff's Notes for fighting" because the kata contain the instructions and the methods of combining techniques or movements of the style.
Another bullseye, jks. You and Mike have pretty much nailed the whole story. Unfortunately it's still an unfamiliar story to a lot of MAists...
It sounds to me like you don't really understand how kata fits into the bigger picture of training.
Kata is like a catalogue of the techniques contained within the system. It is a way to transmit the knowledge to the student, a way to work on improving the techniques in the ideal and abstract level, and it is a way to practice WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE A PARTNER TO PRACTICE WITH. However, as Exile has pointed out, you need to have an understanding of what the kata contains in order for the information to be valuable to you.
But kata is only one part of the training regimine. Application (bunkai) of the movements found within the kata MUST be practiced on a training partner, in a realistic simulation of combat. Keep in mind, ALL training is nothing more than a simulation of combat. If you had real combat in your training, then someone would go to the hospital or the morgue every training session. So once you understand what the movement in the Kata are teaching you, you must train to apply that teaching on a resisting partner, so that you can actually use your knowledge.
In addition, you must spend some time conditioning your body and developing your power on things like heavybags, wooden dummys, sandbags, or whatever else your art uses. And sparring, if done in a qualitative way, can also be a useful tool, but in my opinion is not the pinnacle of training that many people believe it is.
So if all you ever do is kata, never condition your body by striking something solid, and never train your application on a resisting training partner, then yes, your fighting skills will probably be lacking. But when used as a part of a larger training regimine, kata is one of many extremely valuable tool in passing on and training the material contained in your system.
And a third bullseye for FC's post. The points raised here were well understood by the karateka of a century ago. The idea of a resisting opponent, and of hard conditioning, would have been taken for granted by them. That was something which was lost when the line-drill approach to training, the kihon method that Funakoshi pioneered in Japan, became the norm. But the kata weren't designed for that kind of approach, which turned a fighting art into a kind of martial calisthenics. If you want to know what kata are really good for, you have to go back to the source, which is what the modern realistic applications people have done...
