We are now offering discount for students driving 30 miles or more to come train with us. This offer is for a limited time only and will expire on January 10, 2010
I have been asked many times by many people if I would teach them just the kata or just the sparring. They wanted to cherry pick their lessons with me. I always refused to provide this service, insisting that I as the Karate instructor knew better than they did that the entire package was best consumed all at once. The kata and the sparring are tightly integrated, I believed, and all must be studied.
What a fool I was to believe this.
That isn’t why you have to learn it all. I’ve since successfully taught someone to win Karate competitions both in sparring and kata without them ever learning the other part of the supposedly indivisible triad of Karate training. While the common belief is that kata and sparring are tightly integrated, the truth is that Karate sparring has more to do with Olympic fencing or Kendo than it does with Karate kata.
Karate kata have more in common with gymnastic floor routines than anything in sparring. And if you start trying to create applications for them, you’ll find yourself in a jujutsu class, not a Karate class.
The truth is that you can win at sparring competitions with three techniques. You can win kata competitions without ever learning to spar. The two activities are almost entirely isolated and call upon entirely different skills and abilities. People talented at the one are rarely talented at the other.
Why do you have to learn it all?
The reason you have to muddle through the entire curriculum instead of being able to cherry-pick what you are interested in is because Karate is a sport. In that sport, there are two competitions:
* Kata (the routines you are sneering at that I was always very skilled at)
* Point Sparring (the sparring that uses those three techniques you are interested in
Karate instructors are essentially “team coaches,” and they know that if they let people cherry pick, that very few will be interested in the kata. Besides, Karate instructors are often almost religious in their self-delusion that they are gurus who know better than you do about almost everything in the world.
Note that I can publish an article in a business magazine challenging a one billion dollar business decision and receive rather light criticism and debate or shrugs from my fellow businessmen. But when I post an article on the ol’ 24FC about how focus doesn’t really work the way people think it does, I start receiving hate mail.
Businessmen are professional and keep the emotion out of their communications and decisions. They are mindful of relationships and networks, even as they try to screw each other to the wall. Karate players, on the other hand, are, from what I have observed running this website, of a lower order of society. They are emotionally unhinged, undisciplined, highly emotional, and excitable — almost like children in many regards. Perhaps more like foolish blue collar men in a bar yelling about which sports team is superior to which.
The gurus hate it when you turn your nose up at kata. After all, they invested so much of themselves in it that they cannot bear to have you decide it is of no value. Therefore, they will force it on you by demanding you choose to either train fully in all aspects of their teachings and not question them, or they will refuse to instruct you. Gurus need control. Gurus need to believe they are right. Gurus seek the upper hand. Gurus don’t want to offer you service.
Gurus are in it for themselves, which brings us to the other reason, and it is perhaps more powerful than the first.
Karate isn’t *just* a sport. It’s also an Historical Preservation Society… or a collection of them… run by Japanophiles. Those people are intent not on what you are able to accomplish with what they have to offer, but rather with what THEY are able to accomplish with what you have to offer.
Because the preponderance of karate instructors are self-appointed enforcers of the historical preservation society’s rules, you get stuck learning the whole thing. They are basically trying to store Karate in your brain and body and hijack you to preserve what they enjoy instead of letting you use the parts you want and walk away.
They create all sort of carrots and sticks to ensure you do what they want. They have a belt system which rewards historical preservation and repeating the company line. You will even see instructors blatantly enforce it by denying promotions to people not because of any lack of ability, but because of what they label “attitude”.
Really that is their emotional reaction to your desire to not be hijacked by them as a vessel for their sacred knowledge.
Sorry it works that way. To be honest, most Karate instructors really, really suck as mentors and businessmen because they prioritize themselves ahead of their students. They work to accomplish their own goals vicariously through others instead of asking others what they want and delivering that.
Most people can detect this – consciously or not – and are repulsed by it. It is my belief this is why traditional Karate has lost so much popularity. People are no longer impressed just because it says Made in Japan on it. Especially since so many Karate guys got clobbered by Royce Gracie.
I know a few Karate instructors who will practice kata with you if you like or who will spar with you if you like. Or they will readily admit that they dislike the one and prefer the other, and that they don’t see why anyone has to do both.
Obviously the belt system is designed to reward you for thinking like a customer on a cell-phone contract. You either eat the whole package and lock yourself in, or you go away.
That’s why you have to do it all. Bad instructors are threatened by you when you have the courage to decline to eat what they serve as a package. They don’t want you to part it out and pick what you want. That puts you, the customer, in charge.