Polishing Kata

Well, there have been numerous blogs out there talking about 101 ways to practice your kata.  I just wanted to share a little bit of Taika’s Polishing Principles that I was lucky enough to take part in.

Learn the Skeleton

When first learning the form, get the basic patterns down.  The floor map, basic directions faced, which stances are used, just the general form.  Taika sometimes called this the skeleton form or scaffolding or even foundation.  At this stage things don’t need to look pretty, in fact they may be somewhat awkward or ugly.  Get the pattern down and memorized.

Pick a Piece to Polish

Taika would stress this and luckily my first instructor passed that tidbit on to me from him before I even met Taika.  It sounded to me, a musician for probably 15 years at the start in this particular art, common sense.  As an instructor I don’t see it as common sense for all of my students, but I’ve had different life experiences that most of them. 

As a musician, you would sight read a sheet of music.  You would most likely find problem areas in that song that were difficult.  Let’s say measure 24 of the song Tom Sawyer by Rush was a booger of a drum fill, striking multiple toms in rapid succession with quite a bit of cymbal and foot action going on as well.  As a musician I was taught by various instructors over the years, to just work on that part for next week.  I would work on that part, nice and slow, dissecting it.  I might write down some sort of analogy or mnemonic to memorize the pattern and/or timing of it.  I might write out a sticking diagram that worked best for the situation.  I would dedicate time and energy working on that one little measure out of several hundred in a piece of music.  Then I would try to play the whole thing, and most likely find another spot that was ‘lacking’.

It made perfect sense when Taika shared this with his students.  If you learn a brand new kata, whether open hand or with a weapon, you need to polish the little pieces.  After they have the skeleton, I tell my students to pick that piece that feels uncomfortable and work on it.  Only after it begins to feel smooth to them, should they then perform the whole kata again to see if that helped.  Bit by bit, brick by brick you build something.  If you try to tackle the entire thing all at once, you cannot help but choke on it.  Taika was the greatest, most talented, most natural life protection practitioner I ever met.  Taika did not choke on a kata.  He took it one bite at a time.

Take a Piece in a New Direction

So now you took that piece and polished it within the kata.  Now it is time to take it out of the kata you found it in and polish it in other directions.  I just did this in my last Bo Kihon session with a new student.  He was working on some hand changes, trying to make them polished.  I then had him, as he knows Renshu Dai Ni (Exercise 2 for those fans of Tasshi Logue’s blue book), use the footwork from that exercise.  So now he is practicing the hand changes with the three bo strikes/captures in the four basic directions.  North, South, East, West. 

Now that was his homework till the next bo lesson.  As you can imagine, this can be challenging.  You are now stepping in different directions, left 90, right 180, left 90, and right 180 over and over again.  This is different than the kata, you repeat the snapshot of the kata till it starts to feel smooth and then you pull it out of the kata and into this pattern.  This will pull you out of your comfort zone.  I think one thing Taika did as an instructor with us on a regular basis, if not always, was keep us out of our comfort zone.

Now this new student knows Renshu Dai Ni, but he is way too new to know any of the various Spider Web patterns.  For anyone not knowing what Spider Web is, it is a series of exercises that Taika learned as one long exercise.  The exercise was designed to be a way to essentially go in about any imaginable direction, with about every possible hand/foot combination you can imagine.  So I will give him a portion of the footwork, when he next feels comfortable.

Above we have a tiny portion of one of the Spider footwork patterns.  This is just the North Side of the Mid-Line facing out.  You can do this entire drill starting facing the north side of the midline, the south side, the east side, the west side, or even at the angles.  There are a myriad of other patterns and those within this system know this is but the tip of the iceberg.  There are patterns facing out of the web, patterns facing in, and every combination imaginable.  So if we again have the student take that piece of the kata they are working on and do it over and over again.  They will eventually get thousands of reps in of the hand changes, strikes and joint locks they are practicing with the top body with every possible combination of the bottom body.  They should be refining and polishing that technique for thousands of reps.  Now put it back into the kata.

Once you are comfortable with any of these foot patterns, most likely you have only been performing the feet in one simple way, for instance, stepping forward each time.  Now start over with the first pattern stepping back each time.  When that gets comfortable, step forward, step back and change that pattern up to your hearts content, or until nausea is induced.  All this can be quite mentally challenging.  Then try it with ‘switch foot’.  That will tell you great things about the power you have in your upper body.

Off the Grid

Now they are getting proficient at 45, 90 and 180 degree angles.  Well, it is time to take them off the grid.  One exercise Taika had us do in class back in 2012, as we were working on a whole slew of ‘upgrades’ to what he called Technical Application Tomari Seisan, was point us in a new starting direction.  That direction wasn’t necessarily 45 or 90.  It was amazing how much this could throw you off when you had been performing that kata in the same dojo, always starting facing east for over a decade.  East was the direction his chair was sitting.  So that was naturally the direction we faced when we would normally start, bow to him, and begin the kata.  Of course, there was some confusion as we attempted Seisan at an odd angle.  You would feel yourself, at least during the turns if not the three strides in each direction, trying to realign yourself with the world.  You wanted, craved those 45 or 90 angles.  Once you started to get the hang of it, but nowhere close to being polished, he would change things up again.  You would come to your first turn and he would give you a different angle to go than was preprogrammed into your head after a couple of decades of practicing the kata.  In Tomari Seisan your first turn is normally 180 degrees, then your next turn is 90, then 180, then 90, then 180 then retreat 90.  Try it 90, 45, 90, 45, 90.  Or worse yet, 45, 120, 90, 45, 90, 120.  You can see how this can get quite challenging. 

Summation

I believe Taika was trying to prepare us for any situation, and push us way beyond our comfort level.  A real encounter will most likely not be be comfortable and at precise, pre-planned angles. I don’t think there was ever a time training with him, that I felt I was even nearing a comfort level.  It wasn’t until feeling the loss of this great man, that I realized how well he had pushed me.  During a class I would, if lucky, just start to formulate a plan in my head as to how I can practice whatever he was teaching me.  I would know that there was no way I was going to leave his class with any comfort in the pattern or technique.  And just as I began to formulate a plan for later training that night when I got home or the next day, he would change it.  He would pull the rug out from under me.  This forced me to (and others) to persevere and grow.  Thank goodness I kept great notes.