Karate Nobody

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What Happened to Karate?

There’s been a lot of online discussion lately about what has happened to karate, always from the perspective of degeneration. Clearly, karate has become diminished and lost something since its Golden Age, right? ( I haven’t seen it specified, but I think this Golden Age is either the 1960’s-1970’s when karate was taking the West by storm or possibly the 1860’s-1870’s when it was a pure backyards-and-graveyards art for self-protection from thugs and pirates.) Today everyone thinks karate is for children. No one thinks it is deadly or powerful anymore. Thanks Daniel LaRusso! If you can’t tell, I’m on the opposite side here. I think karate training today is the best it has ever been. We are living in the karate Golden Age right now! The art has grown, it has been refined, but still has preserved its spirit. Even more importantly, I think students and teachers are more empowered in their training today than they ever have been. Of course there are problems. I don’t think every sing

Karate Lessons - Strategic Thinking, Calculated Risks

One of the more startling things I took away from my second-to-last conversation with my old Sensei – one of the things that made it the second-to-last conversation (see The Schism ) – was when she asked me how I was incorporating karate into my life outside the dojo. It is a good question, but what startled me was that my sensei even had to ask it. It showed how far apart we had become in our practice and how little involvement they had in my day-to-day. Let me start with inside the dojo – we were a few years into COVID at the time of this conversation so my training was entirely in my home dojo, a space that she had seen pictures of and could see it was quite spacious. I was reviewing kata and bunkai every night after my kids went to bed in preparation for my sandan exam so karate was pretty front-and-center in my life at that time. However, karate was still a major part of my life in the years before COVID. I had joined a local Goju-ryu dojo that trained once a week for a 2-ho

Deciphering Bunkai Across Styles

I’ve spent a lot of time training kata and studying bunkai. It is really at the center of my training, at least mentally or intellectually. When I think about karate, I’m usually thinking about bunkai. The dojo I came up in had many many kata, something like 30 kata all told. As I discussed in my post of the Flexible Bunkai Model , I think there were several reasons for this and I’ve continued to train a number of those kata beyond the 8 classical Goju-ryu forms. However, what I’ve stopped trying to do is decipher bunkai for those kenkyu or research kata. I’m sure I could slap together something obvious (and have had to do that before for testing), but I don’t believe it would be close to the Core Bunkai I would want, the ones the kata was built around. For Goju-ryu, I think I have enough of a map to find those Core Bunkai. For example, Goju-ryu bunkai will usually have you move off the line of attack, get in close to control the attacker, and finish with a strike to or twist

Training Yourself to Endure

While karate-ka love to talk about spirit , no one ever seems to define it. Indomitable spirit is one aspect of it, usually in the context of a ferocious warrior-like spirit. Gentleness and benevolence also come up from time to time too, as in the Bushi or gentleman warrior. For me the spiritual side of training is more grounded than those two extremes. I'm not trying to be an ideal, I'm trying to be , ideally. I believe that life is difficult. In different ways, and certainly not equally distributed, but everyone will face hardship and have burdens to carry in their lifetime. For me, karate teaches us how to endure this hardship and make peace with the struggle. Obviously in the dojo we push ourselves past our previous performance as we get stronger and more skilled. One reason I’ve always loved pushups is because they work the most important muscle in karate – the never-give-up muscle. But the real lessons in spirit come when you look beyond just the physical demands o

Is This A Test?

Two things need to be true for a test to be held… or maybe I should say be valid . If one of them is missing, you have a problem. If both are, you no longer have a test. I’m not sure what you have in that case, something between a theatrical performance and a reality show? Anyway, the two key things are - The student needs to believe that the test is an accurate evaluation of their skills. Does the test actually test the skills they have been developing? There’s certainly a place for stretching or taxing the student during a test, but generally most of the test needs to be “on topic”. The student needs to believe that the examiner is qualified to administer and evaluate the test. If you don’t think the examiner is qualified to judge you… then what’s the point of the test? Whatever comes out the other end isn't meaningful. I ran hard into both of these before I separated from my old Sensei. We had planned to hold a rank test, but I fell ill and had to postpone it. This was ac

The Thematic Bunkai Model

Now that I’ve described the two competing bunkai paradigms that I’ve worked within – the Core Bunkai Model that I ascribe to and the Flexible Bunkai Model which I grew up ‘learning’ – I thought I would take some time to describe a third model that is common and, I think, also useful. While I was struggling to understand the Flexible Bunkai Model, I stumbled upon a critical book called Four Shades of Black by Gavin Mulholland . This book is a must-have for any Goju-ryu practitioner. Mulholland has a clear point to make and he drives it home in a beautiful and illustrative book. I can’t recommend it enough. The basic idea is that the Goju-ryu kata form a progressive curriculum so that the student develops more advanced karate skills as they move through the kata. The book uses the first four Goju kata to illustrate the point (Gekisai Dai Ichi, Gekisai Dai Ni, Saifa, Seienchin). Each kata gives the student a new area of study and a new set of skills to develop. You move from the