The Way of Kata: A Comprehensive Guide for Deciphering Martial Applications

Way of Kata covers the largely untold truth about Kata. For anyone looking for a deeper move involved Bunaki for their kata or for anyone who feels that some of the applications taught by their Martial Arts school seem to be missing something, this book is for you. Even if you are a beginner, this book will give you a unique perspective and definite advantage as you begin your journey in the Matial Arts.This book coversa brief history of karate and kata.strategy vs. tactics15 guiding principles to follow8 rules for interpreting katawhat happens during a violent encounter, physically and mentally. Types of criminals, things you should know about fighting and what will happen during a fight.How to bring everything together to make your knowledge and practice effective.Kata examples with checklists from Goju Ryu kata.Along with extra goodies at the end, there are some great glossaries/appendixes at the end; excellent reference/resource material.First, there is a lot of information in this book. A LOT. It's almost overwhelming. However, everything is arranged in a logical order with a progression that builds through the book. Everything in the next chapter builds on the chapter previous so they don't throw you in the middle of everything.I found Chapters 3 and 4 to be the most useful/beneficial to me. If you have not read anything else by Kane and Wilder or by Rory Miller, then Chapters 2 and 5 will be very interesting and information packed as well. If you are familiar with other works by Kane, Wilder, and Miller, then they will be a bit of a review, but still worth the read.Chapter 6 covers great classroom ideas as far as drills go and ways to practice what you learned. Chapter 7 is an extensive checklist of Goju Ryu kata and applications. This gives some really great examples and helps you understand the fundamentals of what the authors are talking about. I think this list would be invaluable to any Goju Ryu student. If you study a different school, like I study Shotokan for example, it would be helpful to look up the kata on YouTube to get a better idea of what the kata look like so you can see the techniques in motion.The only complaint I have with this book is that it is a little on the dry side. It can be tedious to read through sometimes, as if you are reading through a text book, especially towards the end, chapters 5 through 7. I think this is just due to the sheer amount of information packed into this book. HOWEVER, even if you have to put the book down and come back to it the next day, I highly recommend pushing through it and finishing it.I think it is very important for Martial Artists to be educated on what they practice and/or teach. If you are teaching someone self defense, (which is in essence what Karate was designed for by the Okinawans) then you need to teach them something that works, not something ineffective that could get them hurt if their lives ever depended on their understanding of their techniques and kata application.I think this is a MUST HAVE book for any Martial Artist or dojo library.

Although I have a black belt in a discipline which required kata, I not only did not enjoy them but saw no sense in them whatever. I considered them to be akin to line dancing, in that, although you *can* do it this way, it's way more fun to do something like this with a partner. I was given rather traditional instruction, in that I was told one should perform kata as though one were fighting an invisible enemy; but some of the movements were obviously counter-intuitive, and others seemed frankly ridiculous to view in a fighting context. During a six year tenure at my first dojo, I did not once encounter the concept of bunkai.However, after several years of teaching and a reintroduction to kata through a new partner/instructor, I was forced to reconsider the kata. And again I found them required in the discipline; but this time around, I began to question why they had survived. How does a practice last for several hundred years without having a use? The only reasonable answer was that I had misjudged the practice, so I set about finding out just what I had missed.This book was a profound and primary factor in that search. Although my partner/instructor would occasionally speak of bunkai when instructing a particular self-defense or fighting technique, sometimes saying, "What does this look like? Isn't this (say) Heian Shodan? Isn't this the downward block?" he would never relate the techniques directly to the formulaic repetition of the kata as we performed it. And his bunkai was only ever applied to one or two basic techniques, but we were learning a lot more than that in the required kata. Many movements still remained at best a mystery to me, and at worst downright ridiculous.By presenting kata as a dictionary of possible moves rather than as a dance, and by giving a few very basic but vital and essential hints (i.e., "when the closed fist returns to chamber, it's usually holding something", and "the name of the technique means nothing"), this volume helped me to understand that the foolish blocks could actually be highly effective strikes, that the odd stances could generate profound power through kinetic linkage, and that there was even more information contained in the kata that could not be seen because the bunkai was deliberately hidden. Although I'm still far from a full mastery of kata, I have at least come past the idea that it's a useless rote repetition and have begun to appreciate it as the muscle memory trainer of potential techniques it was originally meant to be. I can now continue my practical training with a better insight, and therefore a more focused interest - which I was definitely lacking.I gladly recommend this book for anyone who has despaired of understanding the usefulness of their discipline's kata, and find themselves, as I was, bored, bored, bored whenever it was performed. A more practical interpretation is available, and it waits to be found.