Kata vs Pre-arranged routines?
Kata is any type of pre-arranged exercise. Maybe you don´t use the word kata but, is a fact, you use it. Boxers use, MMA pratitioners use it and you used at school to learn how to write and read man. Those pre-arranged situations of learning gives you the tools and strategies to REALLY develop the skills to deal with a one-on-one situation but...
Let´s get clear:
THE DOJO/GYM IS A LABORATORY, i hope that everybody agree. In your training you should be encountering, in a progressive approach, more and more adrenaline stress ´til reach the higher and closer level of reality. That´s it...if your training got this, ok...if not..ok...not everybody trains for the same purpose, some trains for social interaction, some for competition, for sport, for love of the MA...nothing prepares you for a real fight, nothing...your training, that will be the ideal, needs to adress a way to present "reality" factors as your skill progresses.
So we agree about first doing basic drills and then, progressively, adding more and more ingredients of "realistic" combat situations.
First learning the basics of the movement and mechanics of "what you want to learn"" (shooting, climbing, drawing, flower arrangement...) and then making the basics skills evolve to adapt, first to your body structure, then to your own idea of what are you looking for and then, final step, confronting a stressfull situation from the very basic stress to the higher stress( first sparring with a friend at the dojo or ring, climbing indoor at a local competition, doing your ikebana at a local flower arrangement championship. The the same thing againt the "TIME" factor, so you need to do it in less time but with the same level of proficiency and the, just to get over the middle steps, agains the higher stressful situation (climbing outdoors in deat valley at midday with strong wind, world kick boxing competition, shooting your weapon in a "90%" real situation at a SWAT training camp with people shooting at you, doing your Ikebana at the Tokyo Flower arrangement championships....) Generally speaking and not specifically about LEO, cops and soldiers, just to have a general view, ok?.
SO when MMA practitioners are training for a fight they are USING KATA, but they don´t call it Kata they call it "training routines", BJJ guys do the same when practising how to pass the guard from different positions or how to escape from a mounted position: a guy is working with you in a SAFE enviroment with a pre-arranged situation (somebody is with you and you are trying to learn how to escape/strike/evade/choke/kick/bite/spit/......from that PRE_ARRANGED situation).
Realistic training will kill EVERYBODY too fast, or anybody would be surviving a "realistic training" when training with edged weapons or firearms?? (as per example, Arnis or Eskrima or any LEO).
The thing is that people still believe in kata as "an individual fighting with the air".
This is a flawed view of the Kata; this shows a lack of understanding of what´s going IN and ON the situation of Kata study. KATA IS NOT A WAY OF FIGHTING, just tell any Karateka about it. Kata is A WAY OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION AND CODIFICATION OF THEORIES AND PRINCIPLES...no more but no less, and that is a really intrincate subject to talk about. And again, just using an example, calssical MA Kata are ALWAYS worked by pairs: look at Judo and Aikido for example, the same with Kendo (and those are forms of Gendai Budo) but the same with MMA, BJJ, Wing Tsun and so on...they have Kata but under different names.