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pboylan
5th December 2013, 22:00
This is kind of a follow-up to my post about kata being too mechanical and rigid, but includes a harsh swipe at the whole idea of sparring as a superior form of training. I'm arguing that compared with kata training sparring is entirely too limited and limiting. The whole post is at

http://budobum.blogspot.com/2013/12/what-kata-isnt.html

Aden
6th December 2013, 04:45
Agree with pretty much everything you say there on kata, I find koryu jo two person kata are a very different beast to the often put forward strawman of kata as a rigid flawed combat simulation - disgree on the sparring though, from a kendo rather than open hand background admittedly, your harsh swipe is too harsh, sparring teaches a lot of things well in terms of timing, distance, moving with others at live speed at a much earlier stage of training than you can safely teach in weapon kata - the limited / limiting is only true if you are using it as your only form of learning in which case of course whatever constraints are put on (usually for safety reasons) will limit it, and if sporterised the scoring rules will further distort and be very limiting in terms of behaviour.