Why Kata Work

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

First, don’t make the assumption that I mean they work in a fight because, in my opinion, that is not the purpose of kata practice and training. Kata consist of patterns and pattern recognition is a part of human evolution, etc. To understand what I will drive toward consider that pattern recognition in human evolution matters for, “Ethnography, Anthropology, and Society.” 

1. Ethnography is the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.
2. Anthropology is the comparative study of human societies and cultures and their development. 
3. Society is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community, an organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity. 
4. Patternality is the ability to discern (and ultimately make) new patterns in the environment and is common to all life forms representing a deep instinct, a drive, a need to impose order on the world so as to make it usable and survivable. 
5. Patternality shapes how humans, all species, make sense and meaning of our environment within which we exist and the world within which we live. 
6. At a biological level, it drives … wait for it … SURVIVABILITY!
7. At a cognitive level, a level at which humans learn, and a social level, it drives learning and meaning-making for humans as well as many other species. 
8. We use our sensory systems/organs to detect patterns.
9. Pattern detections is present-oriented and descriptive, matching sensory capacities to particular configurations of things in our environment. 
10. Cognitively speaking humans are concerned with making symbols and establishing categories and coherent “mental models” that we use as templates in making sense of our worlds. 
11. The differences found in these views is between processes of recognizing existing order and then actively imposing them in our lives. 
12. Patternality is a process that humans use to ‘slowly’ build our world by what is called, “Conspecifics: individuals who belong to the same clan, tribe or group,” and who experience similar environmental, etc., conditions. This drives us to a common, consistent, and coherent interconnected meanings that are constantly ratified through a process of analysis, hypothesis and synthesis. 

Note: the above is derived from quotations from chapter 12, Pattern Recognition in Human Evolution by Brigitte Jordan. 

Now, with all that provided, and it is not complete and/or comprehensive, you can begin to get the gist to my article today, why kata work. Kata are made up, configured as and representations of certain physical skills used in hand-to-hand fense (fence = defense, offense in fighting or combatives or competitions, etc.). 

Read also “One Strike in Karate - Revisited”

Kata are tools and because they are set in patterns and patterns are a survival tool of the human species we relate patterns through pattern recognition to things in our environment as well as cognitively to other actions that are prompted by the teachings of kata, i.e., methodologies, force types and sensory stimuli. You have read my stuff before on how principles are also taught through kata and the patterns, symbolism, rhythms and cadences when performed, practiced and applied lead the practitioner to the actually methodologies and force applications. 

Kata are not meant to be mimicked in prices forms and ways as fense applications but rather a way to achieve methods and forces in a way that apply them with productively, proficiently, and with power and force regardless of whether the actual kata move is done according to some arbitrary demonstration and performance rules of competition. 

Remember also that patterns once encoded into procedural memory sub-routines, tapes, that they can also work against any fense goals you have because if not properly trained in proper context and reality-based ways they will fail to work just as well as they will succeed. Practitioner beware!

Bibliography (Click the link)

“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)