In a recent roundtable podcast one of the participants said something like, “Techniques learned by ROTE wire the wrong part of the brain.” It was also stated that the focus on making sure a technique “looks right” is not correct. The techniques must be about working right along with a knowledge of its depth and breadth along with its shortcoming.
Does the instructor focus on such things as:
1. Whether you are doing the technique right?
2. Do they work on how well a practitioner is doing vs. what they are doing wrong?
3. Does the instructor focus on how well a practitioner moves, how they feel the movement, etc.?
4. Does the instructor focus on how well the technique actually works.
5. Does the instructor focus on actually practicing sparring, drills, etc. at the proper range or do they tend to test out techniques, etc. at a sport oriented distance for competition?
6. Does the instructor use a form of measure for testing where they correct and quantify toward a curriculum vs. actually how well it works in reality?
7. Does the training and practice have practitioners hitting or being hit, does it induce both fear and anger along with the adrenal stress releases, and does the training result in common injuries to that particular training, practice and applied techniques in paired practice?
8. Does the training actually cover all aspects of violence and force?
9. Does training actually train and practice avoidance such as seeing, detecting and then “turning and leaving” as a viable option in SD? Do they also reward practitioners when they use “walking away” from conflict and violence as an intricate part of training and practice?
10. Do the instructors provide training and practice in coupling judgement with skills?
11. Is the system trained under an “operant conditioning” model/system?
12. Does the training actually cover and train for the “experience threshold,” i.e. that in empty handed systems for SD often it takes up to twenty or so encounters before skill is finally coupled with training, etc.?
13. Does the training cover the “freeze” as to both benefits and obstacles in SD and MA?
14. Does the training and practice work toward utilization of the lizard brain vs. the thinking and monkey brain?
15. Does training and practice cover the disparities between the monkey brain and the lizard brain?
This brings me to the subject of this post, kata being taught, trained and practiced in a ROTE manner. ROTE is a fixed, habitual, or mechanical process or routine that can describe how kata are taught and trained. This can come from the more sport competition side of martial systems where the look and feel of the kata carry more importance than that kata’s application in conflict/violence.
Often kata becomes this form of practice that is done mechanically and repetitively so that it becomes habitual, i.e. ROTE performance. ROTE performance is not taking kata and other types of drills and combinations toward the ultimate goal in SD and MA. It is easier and a measurable that can be tested but the true test is when such things actually work in a stress adrenal induced chemical dump scenario/situation where your health and well being are endangered.
Looking at the fifteen above, by the way an incomplete listing of questions on this subject, you must have this in your training and practice to even have something from that training and practice available to the lizard brain after the three to five and most often the twenty encounters necessary to achieve proficiency in both MA and SD. Does this make sense?
Can you ask and answer these and other questions as a part of an analysis and discovery process to ensure what you are training is what you are training. Luck can only carry you so far and for the professional it is absolutely critical as they are the only ones who will actually encounter three to five to even twenty encounters of violence in the performance of their duties.
Marc MacYoung, and others, will tell you that it is what you don’t know that can really and truly hurt you. Do you want to be one of those? Then there is the before and after that can take that hurt into other areas other than the direct physical application of violence or SD.
Kata to be useful must address and consider all these things and when practiced must go outside the barriers ROTE places on them if they are to apply toward reality. There is a point where ROTE patterns must be broken, mixed and matched in a fluid way to achieve not only proficiency in application but to encode it so that it becomes a lizard function in the heat of the situation.
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