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“I want to know why there are so many versions of Karate and so many different fancy looking uniforms and if any of your techniques pre date WW2. Are your Kata forms really going to do anything to help me defend myself? Because I took Karate for 4 years and found it useless there was no purpose to throwing a kick for 20 min just to make it faster. Do you do mat crawls? I used to do all those silly push up and sit ups.”




I look through my comments section usually once a week or so, most of the time I see spam like posts and ignore and delete them as quick as I realize they are for buying new flooring or a new kitchen…kind of funny because they forget that we have an international community here and I don’t think I am sending away to England for my new kitchen…I mean really what a waste of time!

On occasion I get challenged…sometimes I laugh them off as they are the kind of challenge that is not mental, they actually want me to fly some place to fight…morons. Yah, you got something to prove and an issue with a blog post or post on a web site and want me to foot the bill to fly to some back woods town in the South to fight with you to prove I am wrong…give your head a shake Bub.

Once and a while I get a email or comment from someone that actually has a few questions, like the one above. I love these, I get to think a bit, write a good reply and hopefully present a solid argument against the persons bias against Karate. But more importantly, he is not asking me to fly some place to do the argument with him. And they are rather polite.! Massive bonus!



So, my answer to your questions about the different kinds of uniforms and the techniques….well all techniques predate WW2, I mean we got our stuff from Okinawa, who got their stuff form China! And lets face it…like Bruce Lee said, “we all have two arms and two legs” so the types of movements we can make are kind of set in stone! As for the Gis, well I could venture a guess about the Gi colors of some groups with 1000000 patches on the damn thing, but really, they just kind of look silly to us. We wear traditional white with one patch or embroidery on the chest and that’s all. Different instructors probably thought that the Black Gis and multi-color gis looked cool or something. To me it more a matter of someone wanting to look a specific way and not caring about techniques over looks.



The next two questions are more about application. First off Kata does teach techniques and how to apply them. You learn different movement sets and hardwire in movement and technical ability by repeating the movements over and over. It helps build up strength and is a great work out to say the least. By repeating Kata not only do you get a great work out but you are also learning proper form and functionality in the kata. A massive benefit which I will get to.



Not only is repeating a kick 20-10,000,000,000 times a great benefit physically but it also helps you keep good form…why is form important. Well here is a perfect example. A friend of mine who trains regularly but has some form issue threw a kick at a partner and broke his toe because he did not pull it back and show good form and technique. Now, you could say that if he had practiced that kick a few million times properly he might have been able to do this without “killing his toe”. Further if he had to use the PROPER form in a self-defense situation he would have been able to execute it and not hurt himself.



Repetition of a technique with form in mind is much better than just sparring with no attention to details like form and functionality in movement. And who could NOT benefit from a faster kick and quicker reaction time? I get such a kick out of the MMA guys, not the real mma guys but the guys that play at mma and how they put down Kata and repetitions and try to tell me that putting on sparring gear and then going at it for a bit is better than learning form and functionality of a technique….then I watch them with their instructors doing drills and working a single technique or series of techniques on a bag or pads…..Dont they realize that is Kata and repetition???



I was also told by a MMA guy that they never do drills or Reps and they just like to fight…they learned Jitsu from an instructor and one day I went and saw the class, the instructor….yah teaching drills that looked a lot like mini Kata to me, and without a partner for the most part.



Kata is essentially a way of memorizing, internalizing and focusing on specific types of movements and skills. Drills do the same thing and they are the only way to go out and learn a movement pattern. If you don’t learn a technique properly it will never be as strong as you need it to be for sport or self-defense it will be awkward and unnatural and when the chips are down you will have to think far to much about what you are doing to be successful in saving your ass.



As for Silly exercises, one of the first thing you learn in Karate is that a certain amount of conditioning is needed to use the skills that you are training in. You have to push to be able to kick higher than your own knee and strength and conditioning will make you more able to train harder and use the skills you have. I often forget this point so I must thank you for reminding me for the silly exercises that we need to do.



An old saying is a skilled fighter vs a moderately skilled fighter comes down to conditioning and mental ability over functional tools. In other words you can be the best fighter in the room technically but if you run out of gas, are slower or have lost flexibility you will lose! Those silly push ups…may save your life some day!