QUOTE
September 19th, 2008
In This Issue
> Fast-Track Your Karate Progress
> Karate And Life
> myGKR Training Tip Sample
I would like to share with you some of my personal philosophies and strategies on the subject of karate practice, with specific reference to ‘accelerated outcome’ training.
When it comes to increasing karate skills, whilst I am a strong advocate for hard work and repetition, I also feel that we are sometimes too willing to accept that solid progress in technique and speed can only be acquired after many years and millions of repetitions. With the right type of ‘whole-body’ training however, we can accelerate our learning at an astonishing pace.
By ‘whole body training’ I am referring to the use of both our ‘internal’ and ‘external’ faculties to achieve great strides in technique, co-ordination and flexibility. The core message in this article is that how you practice is more important than how often you practice!
If you practice hitting a thousand golf balls every day but only really pay attention to two hundred swings, then you’re wasting eight hundred swings a day. In fact, those eight hundred semi-conscious swings may actually be doing you more harm than good because you can form bad ‘neuro-muscular pathways’ (or mind-muscle memories) without noticing it. The same goes for karate techniques!
Practice doesn’t make perfect – only perfect practice makes perfect. True learning is not just a matter of casually (or fiercely) performing a motion over and over. This may build stamina and muscles, but it won’t necessarily build the straightest path to natural ability.
Therefore to truly accelerate our normal rate of learning in karate, we require a strategy of training that employs insight and concentration in place of pure mechanical repetition. Here are some examples:
Strategy One: Over-compensation
When you’re performing a technique incorrectly over a period of time, you’re going to become comfortable with that pattern. Any change, even towards the correct pattern, is going to feel strange because you’re not used to them. When you’re wrong, what’s right feels wrong. Most often, any minor adjustments you try will tend to just cluster around the old habit.
Over-compensation means ‘working both sides’ or deliberately performing the technique incorrectly in the opposite way. For example; if you try to hit a tree with a rock from 20metres away and you constantly find yourself missing to the right side, then the most rapid method for hitting the tree is to try to MISS the tree to the left. In doing this you will hit the middle very quickly!
This can be particularly relevant when performing kata, where dynamic movements in low stances (eg: shiku-dachi) must transform instantly into a high stance (like sanchin-dachi). In these instances, we can often see students leaning too heavily to one side, or failing to step forwards or backwards in a straight line etc. ‘Working both sides’ operates on the same natural gyroscopic principle that allows a guided missile to home in on a target quickly, by moving from one side to the other until it finds the middle!
Finding the ‘middle’ is what effective learning is all about.
Strategy Two: Mental Practice
Your powers of imagination can help you enhance old skills and learn new ones. This is possible because of the interaction of mind and muscle ie: clear mental imagery can – even without actual movement – develop correct muscular responses. This principle can be demonstrated with a simple experiment:
Tie a small weighted object (like a ring) to a six-inch length of string. Let the object hang by the string, held by your thumb and first finger. Hold the string still, and then begin to imagine that the ring is swinging back and forth, back and forth. Continue too imagine this and watch what happens.
Next, while the ring swings back and forth, imagine that it is going in a circle instead; see the results.
This test demonstrates that for any image of movement there is a subtle, corresponding muscular impulse. If you relax the body and imagine yourself performing a movement correctly, the muscles respond. Of course the moral of this strategy is not that we should begin practicing kata on our living room lounge chair, but that mental practice can be a very useful supplement to physical practice. After all, in mentally rehearsing a correct movement or kata, we don’t practice any errors and this is what makes it possible to improve.
Strategy Three: Slow Motion Practice
This is one of the major keys to reaching the highest levels of mastery because it gives you the time to be aware of every part of a movement. When executing techniques in slow motion, you can clearly sense complex parts of the movement such as weight shift and coordination of body parts. Since most unconscious errors occur in the middle of a movement sequence, slowing the movement down can have surprising benefits in ease and speed of learning because mistakes that were formerly hidden can become painfully obvious.
After recently attending a black belt seminar, I was extremely impressed with the high standard of the students and instructors; and especially the way the junior level students conducted themselves and took it all in their stride. For most of us, I am sure you can remember the day like it was yesterday, standing there with the sweat pouring off you and your lungs on fire from how hard you have trained. You can’t wait to hear the sweet sound of ‘YAME’. And the only reason you’re still standing is because of your adrenalin and desire, knowing that each bout of kumite is one step closer to your dreams and goals of becoming a black belt.
I really took pride in being part of such an emotional experience, which to me when my time came, was a blur. Watching these junior students take it all in their stride also made me realise how karate doesn’t just develop us in a fitness or self-defence sense, but as people. It installs things like maturity, discipline, and confidence. I’m almost jealous of the head start a lot of our students have got. I can’t wait to see the standard of karate when these children become adults. The feeling I had at the time made me think to the olden days, when karate was taught in secret from father to son. Watching these children also brought home to me that we waste our whole lives worrying about things that might never happen, excusing ourselves and spending needless energy on finding reasons not to do what we really want to do.
In your own life, look back at the successes you have achieved. Can you remember someone who encouraged you at that point - a parent, a friend or an instructor? The first time you walked into a dojo, standing in line not knowing what to do, a parent looking at you saying, “You can do it” and encouraging you to believe? They were not shouting “Don’t do it, you’ll fail”, because they had faith in you.
In life that person may not always be there, so you must learn to encourage yourself. You can do it, if you really believe you can. Many people are born with remarkable talents and abilities, and yet they achieve nothing in life except the pain of regret for what they failed to do. Meanwhile, others of more average abilities somehow reach the dizzy heights of success. What separates them? The answer is simple - the will to win.
So overcome your fears. Most things we fear are never going to happen anyway. The way to do this is by challenging them, deconstruct them and replace them by choice. Focus on the outcomes, and that feeling of I did it! When you catch yourself responding automatically to a situation with “I can’t”, then think about the outcome and the feeling of “I did”. The more you do this, the easier it will become. So for all those negative feelings like “I’m not good enough”, or “I can’t do that”, understand that the only difference between us, is we probably had the same feelings as you, but had enough self belief to push through and feel the fear and do it anyway.
Spend some time watching karate-ka while they spar, and rarely will you see a similarity to their ‘basics’ or ‘kata’. Apart from the punches looking similar, more often than not, kumite appears more like a separate entity entirely rather than the third prong in the karate chain.
Some might argue that this is expected because basics and kata are the ‘traditional practises’ or ‘art form’ to karate, and designed to physically condition the body for combat. Kumite on the other hand, is a modern-day practise for combat.
While this holds some truths, it cannot be argued that basics and kata were both originally designed with combat in mind, so surely, there should be many similarities.
Over the next few weeks, we will discuss the ways in which basics and kata should appear in kumite.
Part 1. Stances
The major way in which basics or kata practise fails to show up in kumite, is through stances.
Think about it, people spend their entire time during combinations and kata in a deep stance of some sort. But watch people spar and they rarely spend any time in stance. Or if they do, the moment they throw a punch, they stand up straight afterwards.
Question 1:
During combinations practise or kata, when is the only time you are permitted to come up out of a stance?
Answer 1:
ONLY when our instructor calls “Yame” (finish).
Question 2:
If the philosophy for combinations and kata is to stay in stance until “Yame” is called, what is it trying to tell us about combat?
Answer 2:
That during combat, we should NEVER come out of stance! This is because, out of stance, we are more vulnerable to be tackled to the ground and struck, more open to be hit, have less reach and less power.
What this tells us is that during kumite, we should always be in a deep, long stance. Ok, it need not be as neat and impeccable as a traditional kata stance, but the principle remains the same. Stay long and low right throughout your bout. And ONLY straighten your legs when your instructor calls “YAME”
In This Issue
> Fast-Track Your Karate Progress
> Karate And Life
> myGKR Training Tip Sample
I would like to share with you some of my personal philosophies and strategies on the subject of karate practice, with specific reference to ‘accelerated outcome’ training.
When it comes to increasing karate skills, whilst I am a strong advocate for hard work and repetition, I also feel that we are sometimes too willing to accept that solid progress in technique and speed can only be acquired after many years and millions of repetitions. With the right type of ‘whole-body’ training however, we can accelerate our learning at an astonishing pace.
By ‘whole body training’ I am referring to the use of both our ‘internal’ and ‘external’ faculties to achieve great strides in technique, co-ordination and flexibility. The core message in this article is that how you practice is more important than how often you practice!
If you practice hitting a thousand golf balls every day but only really pay attention to two hundred swings, then you’re wasting eight hundred swings a day. In fact, those eight hundred semi-conscious swings may actually be doing you more harm than good because you can form bad ‘neuro-muscular pathways’ (or mind-muscle memories) without noticing it. The same goes for karate techniques!
Practice doesn’t make perfect – only perfect practice makes perfect. True learning is not just a matter of casually (or fiercely) performing a motion over and over. This may build stamina and muscles, but it won’t necessarily build the straightest path to natural ability.
Therefore to truly accelerate our normal rate of learning in karate, we require a strategy of training that employs insight and concentration in place of pure mechanical repetition. Here are some examples:
Strategy One: Over-compensation
When you’re performing a technique incorrectly over a period of time, you’re going to become comfortable with that pattern. Any change, even towards the correct pattern, is going to feel strange because you’re not used to them. When you’re wrong, what’s right feels wrong. Most often, any minor adjustments you try will tend to just cluster around the old habit.
Over-compensation means ‘working both sides’ or deliberately performing the technique incorrectly in the opposite way. For example; if you try to hit a tree with a rock from 20metres away and you constantly find yourself missing to the right side, then the most rapid method for hitting the tree is to try to MISS the tree to the left. In doing this you will hit the middle very quickly!
This can be particularly relevant when performing kata, where dynamic movements in low stances (eg: shiku-dachi) must transform instantly into a high stance (like sanchin-dachi). In these instances, we can often see students leaning too heavily to one side, or failing to step forwards or backwards in a straight line etc. ‘Working both sides’ operates on the same natural gyroscopic principle that allows a guided missile to home in on a target quickly, by moving from one side to the other until it finds the middle!
Finding the ‘middle’ is what effective learning is all about.
Strategy Two: Mental Practice
Your powers of imagination can help you enhance old skills and learn new ones. This is possible because of the interaction of mind and muscle ie: clear mental imagery can – even without actual movement – develop correct muscular responses. This principle can be demonstrated with a simple experiment:
Tie a small weighted object (like a ring) to a six-inch length of string. Let the object hang by the string, held by your thumb and first finger. Hold the string still, and then begin to imagine that the ring is swinging back and forth, back and forth. Continue too imagine this and watch what happens.
Next, while the ring swings back and forth, imagine that it is going in a circle instead; see the results.
This test demonstrates that for any image of movement there is a subtle, corresponding muscular impulse. If you relax the body and imagine yourself performing a movement correctly, the muscles respond. Of course the moral of this strategy is not that we should begin practicing kata on our living room lounge chair, but that mental practice can be a very useful supplement to physical practice. After all, in mentally rehearsing a correct movement or kata, we don’t practice any errors and this is what makes it possible to improve.
Strategy Three: Slow Motion Practice
This is one of the major keys to reaching the highest levels of mastery because it gives you the time to be aware of every part of a movement. When executing techniques in slow motion, you can clearly sense complex parts of the movement such as weight shift and coordination of body parts. Since most unconscious errors occur in the middle of a movement sequence, slowing the movement down can have surprising benefits in ease and speed of learning because mistakes that were formerly hidden can become painfully obvious.
After recently attending a black belt seminar, I was extremely impressed with the high standard of the students and instructors; and especially the way the junior level students conducted themselves and took it all in their stride. For most of us, I am sure you can remember the day like it was yesterday, standing there with the sweat pouring off you and your lungs on fire from how hard you have trained. You can’t wait to hear the sweet sound of ‘YAME’. And the only reason you’re still standing is because of your adrenalin and desire, knowing that each bout of kumite is one step closer to your dreams and goals of becoming a black belt.
I really took pride in being part of such an emotional experience, which to me when my time came, was a blur. Watching these junior students take it all in their stride also made me realise how karate doesn’t just develop us in a fitness or self-defence sense, but as people. It installs things like maturity, discipline, and confidence. I’m almost jealous of the head start a lot of our students have got. I can’t wait to see the standard of karate when these children become adults. The feeling I had at the time made me think to the olden days, when karate was taught in secret from father to son. Watching these children also brought home to me that we waste our whole lives worrying about things that might never happen, excusing ourselves and spending needless energy on finding reasons not to do what we really want to do.
In your own life, look back at the successes you have achieved. Can you remember someone who encouraged you at that point - a parent, a friend or an instructor? The first time you walked into a dojo, standing in line not knowing what to do, a parent looking at you saying, “You can do it” and encouraging you to believe? They were not shouting “Don’t do it, you’ll fail”, because they had faith in you.
In life that person may not always be there, so you must learn to encourage yourself. You can do it, if you really believe you can. Many people are born with remarkable talents and abilities, and yet they achieve nothing in life except the pain of regret for what they failed to do. Meanwhile, others of more average abilities somehow reach the dizzy heights of success. What separates them? The answer is simple - the will to win.
So overcome your fears. Most things we fear are never going to happen anyway. The way to do this is by challenging them, deconstruct them and replace them by choice. Focus on the outcomes, and that feeling of I did it! When you catch yourself responding automatically to a situation with “I can’t”, then think about the outcome and the feeling of “I did”. The more you do this, the easier it will become. So for all those negative feelings like “I’m not good enough”, or “I can’t do that”, understand that the only difference between us, is we probably had the same feelings as you, but had enough self belief to push through and feel the fear and do it anyway.
Spend some time watching karate-ka while they spar, and rarely will you see a similarity to their ‘basics’ or ‘kata’. Apart from the punches looking similar, more often than not, kumite appears more like a separate entity entirely rather than the third prong in the karate chain.
Some might argue that this is expected because basics and kata are the ‘traditional practises’ or ‘art form’ to karate, and designed to physically condition the body for combat. Kumite on the other hand, is a modern-day practise for combat.
While this holds some truths, it cannot be argued that basics and kata were both originally designed with combat in mind, so surely, there should be many similarities.
Over the next few weeks, we will discuss the ways in which basics and kata should appear in kumite.
Part 1. Stances
The major way in which basics or kata practise fails to show up in kumite, is through stances.
Think about it, people spend their entire time during combinations and kata in a deep stance of some sort. But watch people spar and they rarely spend any time in stance. Or if they do, the moment they throw a punch, they stand up straight afterwards.
Question 1:
During combinations practise or kata, when is the only time you are permitted to come up out of a stance?
Answer 1:
ONLY when our instructor calls “Yame” (finish).
Question 2:
If the philosophy for combinations and kata is to stay in stance until “Yame” is called, what is it trying to tell us about combat?
Answer 2:
That during combat, we should NEVER come out of stance! This is because, out of stance, we are more vulnerable to be tackled to the ground and struck, more open to be hit, have less reach and less power.
What this tells us is that during kumite, we should always be in a deep, long stance. Ok, it need not be as neat and impeccable as a traditional kata stance, but the principle remains the same. Stay long and low right throughout your bout. And ONLY straighten your legs when your instructor calls “YAME”
Any thoughts?
QUOTE
Stay long and low right throughout your bout
Not sure about this one... I'm of the opinion that you should use whatever works best for you, and if your Instructor disagrees with this, then try it on him!Tom.
