Why 3K Karateka Should Consider Pragmatic Karate
Вставка
- Опубліковано 26 січ 2023
- www.iainabernethy.co.uk/ In this video I give some reasons why 3K karateka may wish to consider adopting are more pragmatic and traditional approach. These days the term “karate” covers a wide range of disparate practises. I think this is good and healthy because not everyone trains for the same reasons. The key thing is that the way a person is training is addressing their stated goals. There is no need for everyone to train the same way. All of that said, I think the pragmatic approach has much to offer. In this video I discuss:
Introduction (0:11)
Pragmatic Karate Attracts Adult Students (1:19)
Pragmatic Karate Widens Your Martial Knowledge (4:20)
Pragmatic Karate is Holistic (6:35)
Pragmatic Karate is Effective (8:46)
Pragmatic Karate is Interesting (11:15)
Pragmatic Karate is Traditional (13:21)
You Have Nothing to Lose! (16:31)
Conclusion (22:41)
This is not an attempt to convert karateka who are already happy with their existing practise. Instead, it is hoped that the video will outline the pragmatic approach, and the benefits of this approach, to those who maybe considering it.
All the best,
Iain
My App: iainabernethy.co.uk/iain-aber...
Shop: iainabernethy.co.uk/shop/
My Newsletter: www.iainabernethy.co.uk/join-... - Спорт
"Kata, Kumite and Kihon and never the 3 shall meet" - You really got me with this one. I will definitely steal that. 😀
I experienced the same with the adult and youth ratio in my club. All the clubs I have trained in before had a lot more children and have almost exclusively trained the 3K-Way and in my own club it is the other way around. As you describe, we also focus on practicality.
Thanks for the great video.
Back in the early 1980's, when I was just starting, I asked my first instructor "Why the stances (in kata), why the hand on the hip?" He told me "That is the way people used to fight, but we don't do that anymore. We practice it for tradition." Many years later I started figuring some of the truth out, I wish your videos were around then!
What's your interpretation of the pulling hand in Karate?
@@matthewbaumann630 Primarily, grabbing the opponent and holding/pulling them in to control them and/or amplify your strike. It also maintains awareness of where they are. If I have an arm, I pretty much can guarantee that their head is at the other end of that arm! It doesn't have to be an arm, or course. People have many parts that can be grabbed!
I've found it really easy to get adult students the last year and it's really surprised me. Amazing what happens when you focus on what you want for the dojo.
If you ask me what the 3 K of Karate are, myanswer would be: Kiken, Kitsui, Kitanai (hard, dangerous, nasty).
I think there's no problem with the 3 K's by themselves, the problem is practicing them with no interconnection between them. Since I begun watching your channel (and also others, also other martial arts), I try to connect and relate the 3 K's. From time to time, I have the opportunity to lead a class, and then I try to combine them as much as possible. Once I made a whole class around Heian Shodan, relating the kihon, with the kata bunkai, with ippon kumite, with free sparring. Anyway, it is so much more interesting!!! So it serves me also as an intellectual training and development tool. Really mind opening. Thank you!
Couldn't agree more!... I have been looking at getting back to karate and stumbled across your videos... About a month before I saw your Martial Maps video I had found myself explaining martial arts in exactly the same way to a colleague who is a self-defence instructor from a policing background. Seeing your Martial Maps video was reassuring that I wasn't the only one to think this way. I love the art aspect of karate and the close quarter self-protection elements, that unfortunately seem to have been lost by many clubs over the years in favour of the very sports focussed kumite element which I confess I am less interested in. I can see exactly why your teaching methods would appeal to adult students... I wish there was a club of a similar ilk in my area, but failing finding one, maybe I'll get a chance to attend one of your seminars one day. Thank you for making your videos.
Thanks for the kind words!
If there's nothing pragmatic near you, go to a 3K club anyway. The air punching is wholesome and maybe you can convert them.
@@dermotrooney9584 To be fair I love Kata for the martial "art" aspect and have always found it meditative... just I'm currently working in Saudi Arabia, and have been in West Africa and the Middle East for the last few years... home soon though, so may get along to a 3K club once I get back to the UK 😊
@@sara_west good luck! I'm loving it after a 35yr break. Hurts a bit though.
Really great video. My current karate club is very much like what you are describing, pragmatic. I've trained in very traditional (Japanese JKA/KUGB) focused and very sports focused clubs for many years but I'm turning 50 next year and I'm very much enjoying more practical bunkai focused training. I've also been training in Ju Jitsu and the two complement each other really well. The funny thing is I'm training 4 days a week, but the new practical self defence focus is making me want to train even more.
When is your next seminar in Essex please? 🙏 🙂
That was a great presentation on why the Pragmatic approach is a very good thing for practicing Karate. At it’s roots it is close range & based in self defense & that dimension needs to be understood as well as those that use karate in a combat sport situation. But ultimately understanding how the katas properly work & can be applied should be something all us Karateka share because it would not only do us some good but it would show the detractors that Karate isn’t what you see in the movies & especially in point tournaments.
I love your enthusiasm! It’s very engaging. Wish I was in the UK so I could drop in and say hello.
Agreed! I want to make it more pragmatic and more practical, but I don't really have the setting for that. I should start my own dojo, my own club. ... Yeah.
Thanks for this video, I have been on the path of exploring and practicing pragmatica Taekwondo for years. Your DVD s and videos have been very helpful. Although I had to reverse engineer the WTF "Kata" to the original Pinan to learn the Bunkai.
Thanks for all you do!
Great video, honestly karate and martial arts in general is boring unless it doesn't work
Absolutely brilliant.
Absolutely spot on. Great insights.
Thanks for sharing! I've always felt that holding onto students required the instructors to constantly have more content. I've often asked my class how many of them have had to defend themselves, only to not see many hands go up. That tells me they're more concerned about learning interesting things, and training to apply said knowledge. That being said, I tend to see getting to black belt too soon is like telling students we don't have that many interesting things to teach.
Practicality of karate is something that has always appealed to me most, but I enjoy other aspects of it as well. Excellent video.
Same here. Thanks for the kind words!
I've been practicing karate for a bit over 11 years now, and I agree with your ideas. Moreover, I've learned a lot about bunkai from you in particular. However, if you might accept a bit of constructive criticism, you should make your videos a bit more engaging. For example, in this kind of video you should add short clips illustrating what you're saying. It would add a lot. Most people, especially the younger generations, don't have the attention span to listen to a lecture that doesn't include any visual aids. I do enjoy your videos though, they are very informative.
Thanks for the support and kind words. I do appreciate I could get more views if I made the videos along the lines of others i.e. shorter, more punchy, etc. However, that’s not really what I care about. I simply want to put the information out there for people to do with what they wish. A modified format would dilute and distract from the core content. I simply can’t bring myself to cater to some people’s short attention span, and they will never be the right audience for that I do. I therefore don’t really care about how view each video, but providing good content for those people who are genuinely interested. Those who can’t bring themselves to watch for a meaningful length of time will never get it anyway … and there are other channels to cater for them :-) I amke these videos for you and those like you.
I agree with everything you're saying.I certainly have done some cross training over the yrs.I get ideas and drills from other ma I feel too that some kata Bunkai needs too be tested the problem is a black belt says this is the Bunkai for this movement but a lot of Bunkai I see would never work against any real resistance and instead of just practicing kihon as a line across the floor I like to practice it to from a freestyle fighting stance with my hands up and I'll pivot off the ball of my foot I definitely feel the need to get rid of kisoe kumite I certainly feel that those skills are not realistic they don't mimic a real fight at all I see a lot of time being spent on kisoe kumite (3 4 5 step sparring) I love your approach that's why I'm subscribed.
Thanks for the support!
6:00 the bjj guys get so confused when I say that I learnt to pin people in karate
I was listening to a science podcast, and the scientist said "it's hard to become an expert at one thing, but it's more than twice as hard to become an expert at 2 things." A completely different context, but I think it can be applied to MA as well.
I don't see how one can practice kata without kihon. Kihon is within the kata.
I think the key is the right kind of kihon. It is presented in a logical and functional fashion within kata, but I see plenty of “Frankenstein kihon” where unrelated and impractical sequences are stitched together for ill-defined purposes. There’s also a place for kihon for consensual fighting as opposed to the non-consensual / fighting methods we see in kata.
I'm a forms guy all the way. Back in the 80s, when I first saw Tekki Shodan, something clicked with me, and my life has never been the same lol!
I did Japanese forms from 1986 until maybe the late 90s, and it's been just about all Chinese forms after that.
Just never could get into the other 2 "K's, just never clicked with me.
Wonderfully insightful video. And personally no matter what art or system I have trained in over the years, as this "3K" practicing/teaching method can exist in any art. And I have never liked nor understood such an approach. One area of training should always lead into another area of training, and be usable in that area. One of the last arts that I trained in, in a group setting (a bit before covid hit) was a branch of Kajūkenbõ. Nice composite mixed system, but sadly the instructor didn't have the best understanding of the concepts they were trying to teach, and often wound up being rather lazy in how they taught (and sadly right as I stopped attending, they were on the verge of unintentionally turning the school into a "McDojo"). Still a good overall martial art, regardless of the major branches or subsystems, and I still find value in some of the things I trained in there. But the "3K" process was a bit habitual at this school, and greatly hampered the production of quality of students.
For example when I trained in ITF Taekwondõ, everything was still linked, although the Forms, Self defense and Multi-step sparring were a bit emphasized over the sport based sparring that was starting to become more popular at that time. That however stemmed directly from the time period in which the instructor had first learned it (which was back when the original form of Taekwondõ was the Korean military's main form of hand to hand combat). But still everything was linked together.
Curious Abernethy Sensei, based on my study it seems Funakoshi, Mabuni and Motobu practiced pragmatic karate, yet one generation later Nakayama, Nishiyama , et. al. taught 3k. Why? To what end? It seems strange to lose so much so quickly...
My guess would be their surrounding culture and the state of a world as a whole. There happened to be two global wars in Funakoshi, Mabuni, and Motobu's time, but a cold and mostly political one in Nakayama in Nishiyama's time
Jesse Enkamp has done some videos about that. You can look at his channel for yourself, but I believe the nutshell version is that when Okinawan karate was first brought to Japan, it was done so in schools, and to accommodate this, the more violent aspects of in close locks, strikes and throws were taught as distanced blocks.
I think part of it was photography in books. The boss made a book that said "stand like this... this is a strike" etc., and so those things became fixed, but the photo and text format couldn't include all the nuance. The form hid the function. That and making money from a world-spanning organization of large classes 😁.
A key part is the Meiji Restoration making martial arts seem old-fashioned, violent and not a fitting pursuit for Japanese youth. However, the rapidly expanding military, with mandatory national service, was keen to support anything that would help prepare people for that military service. Kano (founder of judo) was key in presenting Judo as a way that martial arts could help produce healthy and disciplined individuals. Karate was dying out, so they copied Judo’s lead and made a new “budo” version of karate. This became massively popular and without these changes it is unlikely any of us would ever have heard of karate. A lot of what we do these days, and is wrongly thought of as “traditional”, comes from these changes i.e. lining up by rank (mimicking the military), kata without applications, an emphasis on physical conditioning (lower stances, higher kicks, etc), the switch to fighting each other within a sporting format, etc. The first generation of Japanese karateka - as opposed to the Okinawans who brought karate to Japan - largely (but not exclusively) learnt, practised and taught the new “budo karate” and not the combative system that gave birth to it. Looking back, some karate critique these changes, but, as above, I do think it is important that people realise there would be no karate, of any kind, if these changes had not been made at that time. The ensured karate survived and spread. It is only because of those changes that we have a karate that we can both wind back and advance back into being a functional and holistic system.
@@practicalkatabunkai Thank you for that cogent explanation.
I wonder if Oyama and Motobu would've gotten along
🌟 I'd love to be invited to that night out. 😁
3k 🤔🤔Iwas thinking 3000 what.
You may be confusing 3k with
Mcdojos and belt factories. 3k k isn’t holistic?
The definition I give of 3k is, “Kata, Kihon and Kumite and never the three shall meet”. They are practised as three sperate disciplines with the goal being to get good at that specific discipline i.e. kihon to get good at kihon, kata to get good at kata, and kumite (typically in a modern points format) to get good at kumite. You can get very good 3k clubs (i.e. they produce people good at those three separate disciplines) and poor 3k clubs. You also get very good pragmatic clubs and poor pragmatic clubs. It’s about WHAT is being practised and not just the quality of what is being practised. 3K - good quality and poor quality - isn’t holistic because it tends to be mid- to long-range striking only and the totality of what is being practised does not hand together in a holistic way.
@@practicalkatabunkai thank you for your reply . The flavor of Isshin ryu I practice . The 3ms are intertwined. Like the Queen of Hearts . Trying to make all ways our ways. Individuals do emphasize what they enjoy. Will be in the States in the near future?🙏
Drinking game: take a shot when you hear "holistic"
Good luck
If you ain’t competing I can’t see the point in basing your training on anything other than self-protection.
It’s a personal choice, but I do enjoy training and teaching for consensual combat too. We are strict on the demarcation, and we don’t limit that to any given competitive format, but instead pursue a holistic approach to one-on-one combat (strikes, gripping, takedowns, etc). I take the point though as I do know of many groups that don’t engage in points karate, but still spar that way in the mistaken belief it is traditional and the only option available. It’s also important that the live practise for non-consensual violence / self-defence is specific to the nature and objective of that kind of violence. Confusion with the live practise for one-on-one consensual combat is common too. People can do both, but the demarcation need to be clear.
If some one likes me old japan karate 1950 and you best of both worlds then do train jeff thompson the fence get his vedlo pavement area 3 second fighter animal day the fence because he tells asrory afox and cat on hill dogs .chasing them fox says lno one hundred ways to get away the cat says lno one runs up.a tree why dogs there he gets caught by the dogs when meand to many moves gives you traffic jam in your brain so lam happy lhave the best of both worild s
Be open minded never closed
3K Karate?
modern karate. kihon, kata, kumite
He defines what he mean by "3K karate" in the first minutes of the video
I finished with Japanese Karate because of the 3 ks...
The place I trained had no realistic sparring, no bunkai whatsoever and no bagwork or padwork.
Sad stuff...
That's the traditional karate I was happy to leave...
Traditional usually means that it doesn't work, so I hate it when a teacher is so proud to say its Traditional 🙄
It really depends on what people mean by “traditional”. In karate, many people inadvertently define, “traditional” as what was done in the 1940s. They ignore what went on before that and the positive potential changes after that. They also embed problematic practises that are not justifiable on merit alone i.e. X-step sparring. I call that, “pseudo-traditional”. The true tradition has been one of constant growth, change and innovation. I am a traditional karateka because I draw on the roots to ensure new growth … which is what roots are for.
Lam old japan karate 1950 .put lam open minded most..japanese go insraight .line up and down put ltaught hang on min what lf lchange this what..lf ldo at angles like I square stand in middle head lock reverse punch turn inner block reverse so that new modern way and like this yes lwiil always be old school japan karate put never closed minded thats just way of training thousands of head block inner blocks put that way look find what way you like modern or old and train hard put neve closed minded wing chun boxing done them aswell so
Like to listen to other people views heres problem when you push all karate way on people that's wrong