Working with kata

[Bill Mattocks]

If you can sometimes in the future, do you think you can post video of said Katas being performed? I mostly have only seen striking Katas and most kata I know of have little to no grappling.

Lots of striking katakana have grappling moves in them. Oyo bunkai.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

IMO, Besides "escape", there is "resist".

When your opponent resists against your force, you have to borrow his resistance force, reverse your own force, and throw him into the opposite direction.

For example, in one tournament match, I grabbed my opponent and started to run in circle. My opponent used his whole body weight to lean back to resist against my pulling. I let go my grip. Since his resistance force was too strong, his body flow back and landed on the ground. I won that round by not even execute a throw.

Another example,

- You push your opponent. He resists.
- You suddenly move to the side, pull his neck forward, and you can take him down almost effortless.

All good points, and I use drills to work on those, but they'll still produce the same result: the technique is aborted before being completed. This is especially true with "aiki" techniques, because we feel for even moderate resistance and move to a recovery technique immediately.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

This is the MA paradox.

1. A can use "foot sweep" to take down everybody on earth.
2. B can escape everybody's "foot sweep" on this planet.

The question is "What will happen when A meets B?"

There's no technique that isn't counterable. My point is that lifting the foot in our sweep requires we make a mistake much earlier or that we wait far too long to sweep. We either get that weight set where we need it, or we move to the next option. Ours is not the most versatile sweep, but I like that it's fairly easy to feel the counter and bail on the technique early.

 

[DanT]

And with the primary version of the leg sweep we use, their weight has to be set to that foot. If they could lift that foot to escape the sweep, it would be obvious the weight wasn't set properly long before the sweep, so even that one gets aborted.

What's the ranking system gonna be in this style? A couple of belts or many, or no belts at all? Also if you're wondering, I suggest the following traditional belt scheme:

White, pink, camouflage, neon orange, black belts for assistant instructors, an iron chain for instructors, and then the founder wears an invisible belt, seen only when one reaches his level.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

What's the ranking system gonna be in this style? A couple of belts or many, or no belts at all? Also if you're wondering, I suggest the following traditional belt scheme:

White, pink, camouflage, neon orange, black belts for assistant instructors, an iron chain for instructors, and then the founder wears an invisible belt, seen only when one reaches his level.

My preference is to use varying shades of chartreuse. It shows up nicely on the pink uniform.

 

[JP3]

A well-designed kata is like an onion, meaning it has many, many layers to peel back to get at what is beneath.

Some, however, are merely training tools designed to burn into muscle memory a certain set of basic movements and positions.

But... be careful... the ones you initially "think" are the latter often turn out to be the former once you've lived with them for a couple decades.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

A well-designed kata is like an onion, meaning it has many, many layers to peel back to get at what is beneath.

Some, however, are merely training tools designed to burn into muscle memory a certain set of basic movements and positions.

But... be careful... the ones you initially "think" are the latter often turn out to be the former once you've lived with them for a couple decades.

Mine actually are the latter. They're pretty much designed that way. There's no more digging to be done than is in the techniques, themselves.

 

[JP3]

Mine actually are the latter. They're pretty much designed that way. There's no more digging to be done than is in the techniques, themselves.

Keep working on them and maybe one day, hundreds of years down the road, maybe some goofballs on a mental-etherliquid web interface module will be arguing if the shojin-ryu the other guy learned is crap because it didhn't come out of O-Gerry's lineage. See how that works?

Today's training tool is tomorrow's quasi-theology!

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Keep working on them and maybe one day, hundreds of years down the road, maybe some goofballs on a mental-etherliquid web interface module will be arguing if the shojin-ryu the other guy learned is crap because it didhn't come out of O-Gerry's lineage. See how that works?

Today's training tool is tomorrow's quasi-theology!

Oh, I don't doubt that (assuming someone beyond me ever teaches Shojin-ryu) someone will come up with some depth I never intended. I hope they do a good job with it, because I don't wanna have to come back and haunt them.