As with most karate practitioners tend to remain within the basics. Drills are one of those fundamental practices that tend to teach then stagnate the practitioners progress toward mastery. You might be saying about now, “This guy is full of crap.” Regardless, stay with me and you will see what I am saying about drills.
Drills are like kata. They tend to have a pattern, a rhythm and cadence when performed at the initial stage. What happens when a person has ingrained the drill they are then able to “predict” the next move. They become conditioned to that pattern, rhythm and cadence. Fighting and combat are not fought in such a set routine. Drills, like kata, are meant to get your mind wrapped around the fundamental principles of martial arts along with creating the knowledge and experience that you mind uses to extract appropriate actions in a fight or combat.
In order to create that mind-state where chaos is countered with chaos from your mind, i.e. the mind is able to separate every move you make into a atomistic encoded action that when chaos is encountered your mind instantly extracts those atomistic actions and inter-connects them into appropriate actions. Using drills and kata encode a variety of techniques into those patters, rhythms and cadences that then have to be blown apart into minute individual actions that are distinctly separate but capable of being blended instinctually into one thing or a combination of things.
By remaining within the drill and kata’s set patterns, rhythms and cadences you fall into a false sense of confidence and this means you rely heavily on them to do the job when in actuality you need to forget those techniques at the conscious level and focus on bringing them out through your strategies and tactics. Strategies and tactics should NOT be about specific techniques against specific attacks but a goal, if you will, that you have a plan to accomplish by means of any and all encoded actions that are created through drills and kata. Drills and kata that lose their connectivity so that you can create, on the fly, any and all appropriate atomistic actions of any technique or techniques necessary to find safety from damage.
Let the strategies and tactics as they form from the conflict encountered so that you create individually creative actions in response whether they are actions that provide avoidance or actions that provide action against the conflict.
Drills are great but breaking the drills and kata are the next step in the evolution toward expertise, efficiency and ability to apply you strategies and tactics as appropriate to any given moment. This is the tuff part, this is the way of the martial arts, this is how we travel through the stages of “shu-HA-RI!”
Hint: after you begin to master the kata and drills have your uke improvise within the two-person kata practice and the two-person drills. If you have several distinctly different drills like separate kata then you can make sure the technique or tactic used when uke improvises is independently chosen, in the moment, to respond. Make this a part of your training “after” you have encoded your kata and drills. This process will require your human, thinking, brain until it becomes natural and instinctive taking that slow human thinking brain out of the equation. It is like looking first directly at something then learning to naturally detect that something using your peripheral vision. The peripheral vision takes the slower direct vision out of the equation allowing the mind and body to act quicker. Same principle.
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