What is the Value of Kata?
[I:http://mymartialartsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/AlCase20.jpg]Bruce Lee did his best to kill the kata. “Why should anybody do forms,” he queried. And, the one that most people remember, “Boards don’t fight back!”
It is too bad that Bruce was wrong. Forms can be totally amazing training tools. If they do have problems in them these shortcomings can easily be corrected.
First and foremost, when doing a form, one gets one heck of a work out. With ten minutes for an average karate form, do a form a twelve times and you will be sweating like a gosh darned pig. They don’t only make for good body calisthetics, but they are n excellent cardio workout.
Within a form you will find a virtually unlimited number of techniques. Not everybody will like and use every techniques. People prefer different things, and they have different shapes and sizes, and so on.
But the wealth of knowledge in a form, considering the vast array of potential techniques to choose from, is absolutely stupendous. And every move has permutations and variations and deviations. It is an amazing amount of fun to work through all these techniques and find the ones you prefer, and then practice them within the imperfect playground of a battlefield.
The real blessing of kata, however, lies not with conditioning or the vast array of potential techniques. The real blessing lies in another, often quite overlooked, phenomena. The real blessing is in a simple word called ‘control.’
A fight is, at heart, the defining example of out of control. A person who has gotten in a fight has lost control. Thus, to win in a fight is to have control.
The point of all this is that people practice controlling themselves by practicing a kata. A person is not practicing to control themselves if he is not practicing kata. It doesn’t matter that they win a fight, they have lost the war of themselves.
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