Martial Art-esque Techniques

Caveat: This post is mine and mine alone. I the author of this blog assure you, the reader, that any of the opinions expressed here are my own and are a result of the way in which my meandering mind interprets a particular situation and or concept. The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of other martial arts and/or conflict/violence professionals or authors of source materials. It should be quite obvious that the sources I used herein have not approved, endorsed, embraced, friended, liked, tweeted or authorized this post. (Everything I think and write is true, within the limits of my knowledge and understanding.)

I was surfing around some FB walls when one photo stuck out. It was a photo of an kata bunkai and since it was staged for instruction it had the karate-esque look to it and that made me ask myself, “In a real conflict with physical violence, is it even possible to assume such a stance and apply such a technique or group of techniques?”

The quick and dirty answer is, “No.” Even in most tournament and/or kumite contests the participants rarely and barely assume any kind of stance or kamae that is karate-esque/karate-like. 

I used to think in the early days that if what I applied didn’t look, feel or appear to match or at least closely match what we were learning and practicing in basics, kata and rarely kumite then it wasn’t karate, it wasn’t martial arts. That created a consideration on my part as to why we bother with all of that drills, practices and other karate-esque stuff if we are not going to use it in self-defense.

Wellll, it is like this, we aren’t actually supposed to “make it work” exactly or even closely like our kata, the karate techniques/applications, etc. The karate we see in kata and so on are not meant to be applied “like” it is practiced and if we try hard to “make it work” just like it appears in the kata, drills and such then we may be missing the boat. 

Remember, I often speak of kata as a method of transferring knowledge from teacher to student to teaching to students and so on so it will be passed down. I also state clearly that until those practitioners actually make it work in conflicts and violence they don’t know nor should the implement changes until that experience is achieved. One reason why remaining in contact with and having seniors, with appropriate real life experience, continually assess and modify training and teaching is so important. Until you experience violence and until you accumulate enough of it to make such decisions you have to assume you just don’t know. 

Martial Arts as a whole are simply a collection of experiences from those who came before that provide tools that we use to learn and encode things like physiokinetics along with their supporting theories, philosophies and techniques to achieve a level of body, mind and spirit ability to make our actions work especially in violent situations. We learn things like structure, like posture and like creating and applying power that often will not and never will look martial-esque or karate-like. 

When we are in a violent encounter we don’t assume seisan stances, we don’t chamber our hands to the waist and we don’t do the sport oriented fakes and dodges and the testing of an adversary’s abilities, we end up applying explosive, fast, hard and close actions that will meet our overall goals in self-defense - what ever they may be to each of us. 

What we should be getting out of our karate or martial arts is not how to make it look just like karate but how to make the underlying principles work when we are stressed, adrenal flooded, in pain, experiencing fear and apply an act of will tantamount to overcoming the brain lock, the freeze and trigger our “go button” so we don’t succumb. 

This includes seeking out those reality based no bullshit type of training environments that will expose your skills to the adrenal induced stresses and manifestations - mental and physical - that tend to make strict karate kamae not work. Things in the world of conflict and violence don’t adhere to such things, it is chaotic, messy and very, very dangerous. 

Remember that everything karate-esque is not necessarily the way it will “get-r-done” but will contribute a whole lot toward our ability to “get-r-done!” It is not a matter of right or wrong, good or bad, or even karate-like or not karate-like, it is about survival in conflicts and especially violence. 

If that kind of stuff actually exists it only exists in the movies and on television and in seminars and demonstrations. Really ….

As far as my experience, no one actually fights like this.