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Thread: The kata-speed used in the Koryu traditions

  1. #16
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    Some far more qualified folks have already chimed in, but I'll toss my 2 cents in anyway.

    I've always thought that it isn't necessary to strike your opponent as fast as you possibly can, just first. It's a subtle distinction, but a very important one.

    I also think that some folks see Iai practitioners moving relatively slowly through most of a waza, and miss the fact that the cuts themselves are very sudden and very quick.

    There is also a general feeling that if you learn to perform the techniques correctly slow, you will be able to speed them up under pressure and hold onto most, if perhaps not quite all, of the accuracy.
    Charles Mahan

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    and building new ones.

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    Iwata Sensei says "Anyone can do waza fast......and make a mess of it"
    Hyakutake Colin

    All the best techniques are taught by survivors.


    http://www.hyoho.com

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    Very, very true, Hyaku.

    There's an underlying "rhythm" in MJER waza, at least as it's taught at our dojo. As I help the newer students, probably the hardest part is convincing them that they don't have to yank the sword out of the saya as fast as possible & then try to break the sound barrier with their swing. Not only does it look ridiculous, but they're a definite hazard to themselves & the other students! And to me!!

    Maeda-Sensei always teaches us to "tell a story" with each waza, so that anyone watching will understand exactly why each motion is being performed. So the speed at which we perform each waza varies from dead-slow to extremely fast. Trying to be consistent is, for me, one of the most difficult parts of MJER. Oh, & of course there are other minor issues like ma-ai & zanshin to remember....
    Ken Goldstein
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    Judo Kodansha/MJER Iaido Kodansha/Jodo Oku-iri
    Fencing Master/NRA Instructor

    "A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it'll annoy enough people to be worth the effort."

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    So many good replies so little time hehe

    I'm gonna take it all in and see if I have more questions. If not, thanks all
    Fredrik Hall
    "To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous." /Confucius

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    Quote Originally Posted by wmuromoto
    I usually don't post, but this is a problem among many of my own (few) students; they equate speed with competence. I tell them over and over again, form is first. Then comes speed, then strength.
    I'm reminded of the phrase Dai Kyo Soku Kei. That's the natural progression of technique from utterly unfamiliar and rough to completely familiar and smooth. First comes dai (big/correct technique), followed by kyo (strong), then soku (speed/timing), then kei (light/smooth). Each step includes the characteristics before it. So by the time someone gets to the last step, his technique is altogether big and technically correct, with the exactly the required amount of strength and good timing. Based on this, I reckon it's never a good idea to skip over any one of those steps when learning stuff.

    Logic dictates that those are captivated by speed invariably end up sacrificing all the other elements and perform techniques that aren't particularly big, strong or smooth.

    Michael Hodge
    Last edited by Michael Hodge; 27th July 2007 at 14:23.

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    I find this topic very intriguing. As someone who trains in mostly empty handed arts (I've only been studying TSKSR for about a week, but have a decade or so in a few empty handed styles), training drills with aliveness is a critical part to maintaining practical technique. You'd be foolish to think that by training with correct technique every time that if you were to be stuck in a real fight you can execute the same technique, since the massive levels of adrenaline and the fear tends to make your tried and true technique in the dojo go wonky. Training realistically, with speed, will prepare you much better than only going through kata without intensity. Doing free sparring or even drills against a resistant and unpredictable opponent is good training.

    As a very low level Koryu practitioner, I can't begin to imagine how this methodology of training transfers to sword arts. But surely, by practicing without high speed in the dojo it seems unlikely you can suddenly do a much better job in a pitched battle without training for it beforehand. Hypothetically of course, I don't think any of us are about to go fight in a duel. Then there is the problem of safety. But my question still remains.

    And I can't access my UserCP in the past few weeks for some reason to change my sig to my name.

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    Default Nii

    Since you've stated that you have been training for a week, your ignorance is understandable. Training at speed is useless without technique. I doubt very much that say a boxer learns how to punch really fast without first learning how to properly throw a punch. Training at speed is also pointless without understanding distance and timing, and there is no way to learn those at speed without getting a solid foundation in the basics, slowly and carefully.
    Eventually, advanced practitioners move at speeds too fast to be believed:
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=QyS5roV6Q3Q
    But it takes quite a while to get to such a level, if at all.

    Regards,

    r e n

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    Something I've been told quite a bit is that it isn't about speed, but timing.

    In order to disrupt your opponents timing, you have to recognize it. Training at a variety of speeds is not only telling you something about your technique, but about the inherent components of meeting technique of different speeds. I think a lesson here could be that if he is really fast, you don't have to be faster necessarily; you just have to see the timing (ma-ai since distance is a part of this calculation) and get inside or outside it.

    With proper timing, it can seem as if your partner just disappears or his weapon comes out of nowhere. Without the proper timing, the "speed" can become a liability. Speed doesn't exist in a vacuum, but should be in relation to the threat. As a training paradigm, I think it is a good idea to train at different speeds on your own or informally with a dojomate.

    I think we have some general principles we can bat around, but every school is going to have it's own spin on this that outsiders may not be able to fully grasp. Some schools may have sets that are always done within certain speeds due to internal pedagogy; other schools may vary the speed with the level of the student.

    It's tough to really judge whether or not a technique is "fast" without understanding it's relation to the rest of the ryu. "Those guys do that movement very fast," could be that outsiders are simply seeing a training exercise that doesn't necessarily have great bearing on the combative philosophy of the ryu. Or, more likely, you are seeing students that understand timing and the raw speed isn't a fast as we think it is.

    It also may be misleading to compare relative speed across schools, because as I said, each school operates according to it’s own internal logic.

    Kevin Cantwell

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nii
    ...the massive levels of adrenaline and the fear tends to make your tried and true technique in the dojo go wonky.
    This I believe is one of the main arguements for massive repetition of correct technique. If you have to go slow to get the correct technique, great go slow. The more times you perform something correctly, the more likely you are to be able to do it correctly under stress. Massive repetition of poor technique(which is what you get when you're newish and trying to go to fast), is not going to help you when the pressure is on.

    Swords are fundamentally different than unarmed combat. This stems margin of error is zero. A flubbed block of a punch will get you punched in the face, or might even still work a little and end in you taking a glancing blow. A glancing blow from a sword can still maim or kill you. And a maiming cut is usually fatal since it will be followed up by another cut.

    This fundamental difference is why there are some differences in the way things are taught and the general mindset in which you must approach certain aspects of sword training.
    Charles Mahan

    Iaido - Breaking down bad habits,
    and building new ones.

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    Finally saw The Shooter last night on DVD. One of the lines used in the training of the actor Mark Wahlburg, and which he uses in the movie with the FBI agent he is training as a sniper is "Slow is smooth; smooth is fast." It relates to not rushing things which leads to fumbling hands when the adrenaline is pumping.

    I am not in any position to speak credible for iai, but I have often been corrected that when I try to do techniques "fast," I tend to lose the timing that is needed. I am going back and trying to develop the timing, so that whatever "speed" a technique is done at, it is correct.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Hobson
    Finally saw The Shooter last night on DVD. One of the lines used in the training of the actor Mark Wahlburg, and which he uses in the movie with the FBI agent he is training as a sniper is "Slow is smooth; smooth is fast." It relates to not rushing things which leads to fumbling hands when the adrenaline is pumping.
    Reminds me of Little Bill on gunfighting in Unforgiven.

    Here's a question for the koryu experts on the forum. When watching any kind of live fight; boxing, MMA, judo competitions, kendo competitions, fencing, etc, it seems to me that the rhythm and pace is relatively slow for most of the fight, followed by spurts of flurries of action. It's circling, circling, circling, looking for openings, and then BAM-BAM-BAM, some kind of exchange, punches thrown, or a takedown attempt and counter, and so on.

    Could it be that the slow-slow-fast speed in many koryu be a result of an Edo-period shift to a duel-oriented focus? OTOH, with a battlefield art like TKSR or Jigen-ryu, long sustained action might be more applicable for the milieu they are training for. That sound more or less feasible to anybody?
    Josh Reyer

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nii
    training drills with aliveness is a critical part to maintaining practical technique
    At any speed, it's up to you whether or not your training drills have aliveness. I'll pull out a quote I read that helped my own training:

    To practice whatever you do the same way all the time is a must. To practice a technique only halfheartedly builds bad habits, and lessens one's practice time of the proper technique. Remember that the context here is life and death swordplay, with razor-sharp, four-foot long lengths of steel. Remember also that dishonesty to oneself was bad discipline.
    Adam Westphal
    http://adamjiro.net/

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    I'm certainly no expert, but I'll give it a shot.

    Here's a question for the koryu experts on the forum. When watching any kind of live fight; boxing, MMA, judo competitions, kendo competitions, fencing, etc, it seems to me that the rhythm and pace is relatively slow for most of the fight, followed by spurts of flurries of action. It's circling, circling, circling, looking for openings, and then BAM-BAM-BAM, some kind of exchange, punches thrown, or a takedown attempt and counter, and so on.
    I think that may be due to the inherent rules of competition. You are only allowed certain techniques, so you have to wait that much longer for the opportunity to arise to execute them. For example, a guy may be in perfect ma-ai and just asking for a kick in the jewels, but you can't do that, so you continue to work for the jab or legal takedown.

    I happened to catch the Couture-Silvia championship match on replay this last Friday. Couture knocked Silvia on his duff in the first five seconds then went to work smothering him on the ground for the rest of the fight. He kept working for takedowns and when he got Silvia there, he just worked him, all the time soaking up the clock. So, it was a slow and deliberate action due to the nature of sport and rules. (I don't mean to imply that Couture was stalling. Quite the contrary. It's just that Randy's "style" was more time consuming, which is perfectly acceptable under the rules of UFC.)

    If you are talking real combat, there are probably only one/two flurries and someone is going to eat it. (For example, if every target were open to Couture, the encounter would have been over as soon as The Maniac went down. Still, if every target were open, maybe Silvia wouldn't have been taken down in the first place. Hypotheticals are so......well, hypothetical.) You also see this sometimes in competition, when one guy really steals the timing on the other and ends the fight right-quick.

    Could it be that the slow-slow-fast speed in many koryu be a result of an Edo-period shift to a duel-oriented focus? OTOH, with a battlefield art like TKSR or Jigen-ryu, long sustained action might be more applicable for the milieu they are training for. That sound more or less feasible to anybody?
    You still want to finish your guy off as quickly as possible and I think stamina is important no matter what art you are training in. Even in a duel, I would imagine you have to get the weapon to bear with some speed. I think jo/ha/kyu is just a training mechanism. Jumping right to kyu would bust a lot of saya nowadays. In the old days, when you had people using swords on a regular basis, the stages may have been compressed or done away with totally.

    Plus, I think this notion that there are objective speed measures by which we can classify ryu is a bit specious. Is one ryu really "faster" than another? If you saw two high level practitioners do ran-ai in SMR, you might say, "Wow!! Those guys are really fast." Then, if you watched those same two guys do omote technique you would probably see a change in speed. It's all relative to the pedagogy of the ryu.

    When the time comes to move, you move with alacrity, but I don't think one school's alacrity is really faster than another's when it comes right down to it.

    Kevin Cantwell
    Last edited by K. Cantwell; 28th July 2007 at 23:11.

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    Could it be that the slow-slow-fast speed in many koryu be a result of an Edo-period shift to a duel-oriented focus? OTOH, with a battlefield art like TKSR or Jigen-ryu, long sustained action might be more applicable for the milieu they are training for.
    As far as I am aware, all sword arts were primarily duel-oriented from their inception. While a number of the koryu still have some training oriented toward an armored opponent, the vast bulk of all sword training predisposes an unarmored opponent. This is due to the fact that the sword was very seldom used in warfare. Distance weapons and spears were the primary weapons, and swords were only used as backup.
    Paul Smith
    "Always keep the sharp side and the pointy end between you and your opponent"

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    Default Don't quite understand the reasoning...

    Quote:

    "...You'd be foolish to think that by training with correct technique every time that if you were to be stuck in a real fight you can execute the same technique, since the massive levels of adrenaline and the fear tends to make your tried and true technique in the dojo go wonky. Training realistically, with speed, will prepare you much better than only going through kata without intensity. Doing free sparring or even drills against a resistant and unpredictable opponent is good training."

    So....rather than try to do the right technique first, before you work on speed or strength, you just want to do it, even if it's WRONG? Then at least if you go into a "real fight" then you can do it FAST and WRONG at the same time?

    Okay.

    You are basing your ideas on the notion that kata are to be done without intensity or intent and that all free sparring is done with intensity and intent. That's kind of like a bad kurottee notion of kata. And while I respect the endurance levels and speed of sparring-type folk, not all the sparring I see in televised public access karate type tournaments (or amateur MMA bouts) are really that intense.

    I don't think any koryu wonks here would argue that doing "free sparring against a resistant and unpredictable opponent" is NOT good training. It's just different training. Oh, but say if you did some karate sparring, how did you learn to do a kick right without falling on your rear end? Hmm? Start slow, huh? Learn the form first? Learn how to kick right so you don't hurt yourself...THEN you go into sparring. That's a kind of forms training before you do resistant training, isn't it? Kihon, or even simple basic punch-kick movements are a form of kata training. Hitting a speed bag. Hitting a punching dummy. Kata geiko.

    Whew. Sorry for the rant. I actually kind of sort of can see what you mean, but you need to think this through. If you throw every idea of developing good form out the window, you'd have a brawling style of fighting based on sheer brute strength and meanness. The only way you would train for that kind of style is to go into a bar and pick a fight with the meanest guy there. That's not a bad idea for learning how to survive a bar fight, but I don't think it'll make you popular with the police and the women (after your face has been rearranged a couple of times). That's because you're saying there's nothing to be learned from repeating forms, drilling and building up from experience. All that works is just fighting and fighting and more fighting.

    Maybe it would work for you if you're big and mean enough, but for average Joe Schmoe's like the rest of us, we need to learn how to first put one foot ahead of the other even before we learn how to raise one foot up to kick, never mind the adrenaline rush in a "real fight," or whatever. We're not natural born fighters. The rest of us have to learn how to form a fist, then deliver it to the right area without hurting ourselves.

    As others have said, repetition drills such as found in properly executed kata build reflexive movements that are meant to help you do things naturally, reflexively, so that you CAN overcome that "flight or fight" rush of adrenaline.

    There is also an odd assumption that if you were in a "real fight" you would jump right into a kata. Kata, as I think Dave Lowry once wrote in a magazine column, are building blocks. They're not the paragraph, let alone the "novel" of a "real fight." They just develop base level skills in terms of ma-ai, timing, rhythm and reaction.

    (Lest you think I'm one-sided, I've done my share of sparring-type budo, including judo and karate, and even high school wrestling and American football, and found them to be very, very good at building endurance, reaction and reflexes. But even at that, I found that I could do better if my techniques were cleaner and faster...by doing forms and repeating uchikomi over and over, or in the case of football, hitting the training dummy over and over again. Those are forms of kata training.)

    Now, additionally, perhaps this may not be as relevent in unarmed combative methods, but as far as armed fighting arts go, kata are necessary because any attempts at modifying a killing weapon for sport necessarily puts certain targets off limits, and they would not be in a "real fight." That could develop bad habits that can get you hurt. For example, in karate tournaments here, some players would turn their bodies so that their sides and back are exposed, because those areas are off limits as targets in point fighting. But that exposes your kidneys, back, face, and inside of your knee. That might be good gamesmanship but very poor self-defense-manship.

    As far as katageiko being totally useless, I can only say that I've encountered instances where this notion was disproved rather hilariously. In one encounter, before a naginata practice, a kendo fellow was saying how kata geiko didn't take into account his own super-duper speed. He would just tap away my bokken and jump in for a men strike and beat me. I guess I didn't look all that impressed, so he asked me to help him demonstrate by going into chuudan no kamae. He then slapped my bokken aside and jumped in for a men, but because of all my kata practice, my bokken snapped right back into chuudan no kamae, without me thinking. I really didn't mean to do that. He ran his throat right into the tip of my bokken and fell backwards on his rear end. I just retargeted my bokken to the center line naturally because of so much kata practice.

    In another incident that happened here a couple of years ago, one jo practitioner was getting very belligerent, for some really odd, inexplicable reasons. He was a pretty good jo person, but somehow he decided in the middle of a kata practice with a menkyo-holding partner, he would just go "free sparring" with his bokken at the guy to prove some kind of idiotic point. --Maybe your point about free sparring. Well, there's no "free sparring" in Shinto Muso-ryu jo, but as soon as the guy "broke" the kata, as soon as he stepped in with a yoko men uchi instead of the actual movement, the menkyo partner instantly and intuitively, without even thinking about it, reacted, spun the jo around and slammed it down on the bokken wielder's head, cutting short the yoko men uchi attack. The very tip of the jo, the "cutting edge" hit the fellow right in the bridge of his nose, knocking the person straight down on his rear end and very nearly knocked that fellow out. Years of kata training had instilled an instinctive reaction to a yoko men uchi.

    In both cases, the instantaneous reaction came without thinking. I would imagine that's why kata training (with serious intent) is actually an aid in preparing for a "real fight." Much like free sparring "with intent," proper kata training builds reflexive and reactive, instinctual movements and reactions that help circumvent the "freeze" that can happen in the heat and danger of such a situation.

    When I was learning jo, I had to learn things slowly because I didn't know what the heck I was doing and had to think too much about my movements. Then, gradually, as my form improved, the speed went up. By the time you get to menkyo-level in jo, you're pretty much doing the kata at "real" speed, at real distances. Watching a jo kata done well is scary, because the tip of the jo stops only a few centimeters from the target area, and after years of katageiko, the practitioners are extremely precise. So there's a lot to be said about training in kata for weapons work. And there's much to be said about doing things right to start with. Speed and strength come later after it's done right.

    That said, I do understand there are different goals when one considers koryu katageiko style training and the MMA/free fighting stuff. If you don't agree, then let's just agree to disagree.

    The goals of koryu kata training are not just for "real fighting," it's for codifying a system of body movements and passing it on, generation to generation, not really for tournament sparring or fighting in a ring. If you want to do that, then do that, don't do kata training. If you want to train for self-defense, then train for combative self-defense. There's no substitutes for training appropriately. Kata training alone, admittedly, will only take you so far if your goals are purely self-defense and MMA-style fighting.

    So here's another story: one of my fellow practitioners teaches kata style martial arts in San Francisco. He recently kicked out one of his students. Why? The guy learned how to do our slightly modified type of uraken, walked into a bar, picked a fight, and with one punch, knocked out somebody's entire front row of teeth, knocking the guy out cold. Rather than praise the student for testing his skills in a "real fight," my friend kicked him out of our ryu. Why? The goals of our training is not for picking fights and then hurting people. We just have different goals, is all. Yours may be primarily for fighting. Ours isn't. That's just how it is. We sign a keppan that says we are not supposed to learn our stuff and then go out hurting other people. So we actually discourage those kinds of things.

    Because we have different goals, I won't argue that someone who does kata geiko exclusively could prevail in a caged death match with some MMA fellow. That's not the point of kata geiko. If you want to do MMA, then you train in MMA. A person who trains only in kata training is, in that instance, not truly competent for that kind of fighting, nor should it be expected of him. Yes, yes, we're wimps. Your daddy can beat my daddy. Can we play nicely now?

    Oh, Renfield: nice videos of Kuroda sensei. I never realized that he could move that fast.

    Wayne Muromoto

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