Hammers & Nails
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – Abraham Maslow
Many Karate practitioners see a great amount of value in their training. It can be used to improve fitness, an understanding of how the body moves, a sport or self-defense. Unfortunately, however, quite a few people seem to think that Karate techniques and strategies can be used as-is for nearly any self-defense situation. Although I would assert that Karate can be one of the best activities to help prepare for self-defense, it is not that simple.
First of all, self-defense is almost always more than simply physical movement and therefore movement training forms, such as Karate, can only help so much. For self-defense, we must also consider awareness, verbal de-escalation, visual cues, group dynamics, terrain, cultural dynamics, legal ramifications and more.
That said, even if we are to just look at physical training, there are many possibilities for physical encounters that would suggest we do some training outside of what is in the normal Karate syllabus. The answer to all physical attacks is not a punch. It’s not even necessarily limited to counter-attacks of any sort. The correct response is dependent on the situation and even in a given situation there may be multiple correct choices for a response.
Many instructors of traditional Karate these days are now looking into kata application. I have discussed this subject elsewhere in my articles. I started studying kata application in 1984 and before I moved to Japan in 1985 as a new black belt, I had already gone more deeply into kata study than all but a handful of the people I have seen today.
That is not to say that I have all the answers or am so far ahead of everyone else in this subject that I am beyond learning from others. I have picked up some good ideas from Senseis Elmar Schmiesser, Vince Morris, Iain Abernathy, Richard Amos and of course Steve Ubl. Most of what I have seen from them, I had already considered, as I am sure many of them would look at my kata application interpretation and also nod their head thinking “Yep, I saw that in there too” or “I see how that can work but I prefer my interpretation.” There are many ‘correct’ ways to interpret kata application possibilities. Mostly, it comes down to what can actually work without deviating too far from the kata performance.
But despite my experience and skill in this area, I would like to propose the idea that all of this is only of so much value and that if we are really interested in self-defense, specifically, we should turn this study on its head!
Rob Redmond and others in our old ‘AMAKS’ group of the late 1990s discussed the limitations of ‘reverse-engineering’ our kata to come up with applications. If we train only punches and kicks, we look for things to hit. If we study Judo, we see possibilities to throw & pin our attacker. If we do Aikido, we want to get off the line of attack and let the attacker fill the void. And so on.
Of course it is valuable to train specific responses to specific attacks. If someone comes in to kick you, blocking and countering with a punch seems like it could be a good response in many situations, whether tournament kumite or self-defense. If someone grabs your wrist, twisting out of it seems like a good response. I am not trying to suggest that we do not train such things. If you are playing chess and your opponent moves a certain piece to a certain space on the board and you instantly recall a similar play from the past, now you can use that experience and either do the same thing (assuming the strategy worked in the past and the situation is similar enough to use it). But how many times do we have the exact same situation in chess? I would think very infrequently. And self-defense has FAR more variations than chess!
So what do we do? How can we possibly prepare for all the possibilities? Should we come up with even MORE kata? Maybe 20-30 kata is not enough? Or should we just scrap all kata training and focus instead on training with partners?
I think the answer lies somewhere in between. We can certainly train some valuable responses to specific attacks in our kata (and other parts of our Karate training). But I think that for those who are interested in getting serious about self-defense, we should spend significant time thinking about situations the other way around. Start with a problem and then figure out a potential solution. Isn’t this how most of the real world works? If our regular commute is blocked, we may need to find an alternative route, as opposed to just waiting for the opportunity to go through our daily routine. We have to work with what we have. Preparation can help for certain situations but not all of them. So we should work on reacting to various possibilities rather than hoping that the self-defense situation we may find ourselves in suits our idealized Karate training perfectly…
