Journal Martial Arts Energies in Practice

[HoldAll]

The Problem with Purity - Part 3: Capoeira

The seductive quality of ‚pure‘ martial arts energy is not seen as problematical in capoeira, on the contrary: flawless techniques only serve to heighten the appeal of a game. Since there are no blocks in capoeira, you can be sure that the wide arcs of all your beautiful spinning crescent kicks (armadas) won’t ever be rudely disrupted by another guy’s meddlesome hands. Utility of application is not a consideration - aesthetics is, giving capoeiristas the freedom to create and experiment irrespective of the practicality of their moves and tricks.

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The trouble with such crescent kicks is that compared to the trunk, the head is a small and very mobile target, and leaning sideways a bit while raising your shoulder to let them glance off or taking a small step back is often enough to thwart them, without having to risk your blocking getting injured. Crescent kicks like the armada can only ever hit you if you hold perfectly still which no capoerista will ever do, not even a beginner. Just imagine a wrestler or a football player cannoning into you as soon as your leg reaches its highest elevation and bringing you down with a tackle… ugh. Being far more pragmatic, karate doesn’t even teach such risky kicks.

For the avoidance of doubt, what I mean by ‚seductive quality of pure martial arts energy‘ is that styles which only ever practice basic techniques, kata/forms, and pre-arranged partner exercises tend to lull their practitioners into believing that they’re these incredible warriors without ever confronting them with non-cooperating opponents. In some ways, capoeiristas with all their fancy kicks are superior martial artists because they know how to improvise freely and spot sudden opportunities they will be able to exploit. Doing nothing but formal drills, however, tends to ossify your patterns of offense and defense, and the harder you train, the more fossilized and set in your ways you will become.

As in the case of capoeira angola, I’m forced to make a culling here and exclude slow games from my investigation. I hate doing that because I’ve always enjoyed them more than the fast ones but like capoeira angola, they lack this intensity I’ve made one of the criteria for true MA energy. It isn’t just a question of speed - the

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(musical bows) of the bateria will switch from a very laid-back São Bento Pequeno or Benguela to the syncopated, driving São Bento Grande rhythm played at least twice as fast, and the adrenaline levels of both players in the circle will soar despite of themselves. There’s still cooperation, of course, but also urgency, and if you dodge or evade kicks too slowly, you may get hit since pulling techniques at such a pace is difficult or next to impossible in the case of jump kicks. You can opt out of such fast games if you’re still a beginner or too exhausted from a class but if you decide to play, don’t complain if the going gets too rough for you. As

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goes:

Quem não quer melar o dedo, não come do vatapá
Quem não tem o couro grosso nessa roda vai sobrar
O lê lêo, o jogo arrepiou

If you don't want to get your fingers sticky, don't eat

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Who does not have a thick skin will be left out of this

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O lê lêo, the game got scary

Or in other words: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. It is in those fast games where the intent, focus & intensity of capoeira energies are most clearly felt. Nobody will actually try to hit you with malice aforethought but what it will boil down to is a string of very near misses - deliberate misses but sometimes a little bit too close for comfort, and if you manage to escape your partner’s kicks, you may get taken down, and break-falling isn’t taught in capoeira as far as I know. What additionally makes fast games so dangerous is your own cardio, or lack thereof - if you can last for more than 90 seconds of uninterrupted kicking, dodging, and acrobatics, you’re quite good but usually you’ll fade before that, and those kicks will become harder and harder to spot, your reflexes slower, and the overall risks of getting banged around the ears will increase.

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Laypeople may discount capoeira games as ‚show fighting‘ or ‚movie fighting‘ but that’s precisely what they aren’t - as opposed to action movie scenes, there’s no fight choreography and protective padding ensuring that nobody will ever get seriously hit, and it’s the capoeiristas themselves who are responsible for keeping the MA energy flowing, not some film director and editors making clever cuts. Prior to the game in the circle, kicks, dodges, sweeps, acrobatics, etc. will be practiced and standard situations rehearsed during a capoeira class, either alone or with a partner, but come roda time, you’ll have to react spontaneously but never predictably, or the other player may guess your next move (unless your maneuver was intentionally predictable, in which case… you get the drift). It’s this spontaneity formal MA styles lack, the ability to think fast on your feet, no matter what the situation may be; ‚think‘ perhaps isn’t the right word, you develop reflexes, instincts, a feeling for which technique will be an adequate response to a given challenge. Practicing set-pieces is all well and good but there comes a time in your martial arts career when you have to let go of them and soar…

 

[HoldAll]

Sparring is Jarring (Part 1)

In the 1930s, Zhejiang police officer Liu Jinsheng noted a decline in the aliveness of Chinese martial arts practice:

...the practitioners of Shaolin and Wudang styles only pay attention to the beauty of their forms— they lack practical method and spirit... When the ancients practiced any type of martial art, sparring and drilling techniques were one and the same. Once a fight started, techniques flowed in sequence, six or seven at a time, never giving the opponent a chance to win.

(„Chin Na Fa: Traditional Chinese Submission Grappling Techniques“ by Jinsheng Liu & Jiang Zhao as quoted in Wikipedia, „

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“)

I’ll take that bit about the ‚ancients‘ with a grain of salt since I’ve noticed that Chinese authors love to invoke an idealized past that most likely never existed. As far as I know, traditional karate didn’t include free sparring either; as the (apocryphal) story goes, one of Gichin Funakoshi’s masters had him practice nothing but one and the same kata for a whole year. The idea is that katas/forms will prepare you for real fights by teaching you effective patterns of defense and offense which may be subsequently applied in possible emergencies. In actual practice, this is where the seductive purity of MA energies as generated by elegant katas/forms will come into play, and it seems that in interwar China too, there were practitioners who preferred to keep their MA energies pure and rather ‚fought‘ in the abstract only.

In answer to the usual accusations of their impracticality, it should be remembered that katas/forms weren’t meant as a way of preparing for fights against other martial artists but as a means of self-defense against ruffians who had no martial arts training themselves. In this connection, an Asian proverb is sometimes quoted: „When two tigers fight, one will be dead and the other mortally wounded“, i.e. two skilled martial artists fighting in earnest can only result in fatalities and is thus unthinkable. Provided their practitioners weren’t totally seduced by the deceptive ‚purity‘ of their MA energies arising from katas/forms, various pre-arranged partner exercises were developed to convey the immediacy of real combat without risking serious injury. You need to feel that sloppy blocking can have (sometimes painful) consequences. You need to feel how it is when another person is physically trying to impose his or her will on you, feel his or her arm pressing down hard against your rising blocks, feel him or her trying to disrupt your balance, and you need to feel an opponent’s resistance to your attacks, otherwise your subconscious and your instincts won’t take seriously what you’re doing because they won’t grasp that your physical integrity could be at stake.

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A Shaolin kung fu step into the right direction. It’s a drill you could also observe in a karate dojo, and I guess even officer Liu Jinsheng would be a bit mollified. My only gripe is that the two guys are standing a little bit too far apart - you need to feel your opponent pressuring you and striving to overcome your defenses since practicing all techniques from a safe distance can lull you into a false sense of security.

Learning a martial art is a bit like learning a foreign language. First it’s words, then sentences, and after a while you’ll be ready to hold your own in a conversation or discussion. Sparring is such a discussion (whereas competitive or street-fighting would be like an argument ), and one day you'll have to take the plunge, let go of all your list of vocabularies and course books, and actually talk to a native speaker instead of simply parroting your teacher’s set phrases, no matter how incompetent, nervous and embarrassed you may feel.

On the face of it, karate sparring (sometimes called

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) is no big deal. As point-fighting rules apply, there’s only a limited number of offensive techniques your opponent is allowed to use, and you will be accustomed to defending against them from previous pre-arranged drills anyway. Only… as opposed to these drills, you won’t know which ones and when as well as in which combination he or she is going to use them.

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Despite its techniques being right there in our katas, one of modern shotokan karate’s major weakness is lack of infighting practice. Our Okinawan gojuy-ryu cousins seem to have the right idea though…

It’s only during sparring that you'll realize what works and what doesn’t, what can only work in specific circumstances or against which type of opponent (fleet-footed dancer, immobile colossus, taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, etc.), which technique is only useful as part of a combination or might require a feint to get through, and finally, what techniques and combination you yourself are comfortable with; all karatekas have their favorite four or five combos which they will hone during each sparring session and then use in point-fighting competitions. Not all will work against specific opponents, or they may get botched due to bad timing on your part. This practical knowledge can only come from experience and can never be acquired by reading books alone; it’s practical know-how which has to become instinctive to be of any use, since you won’t have time to mentally scroll through „The Book of Five Rings“ or „The Art of War“ when facing an opponent who’s intent on whooping your ass (as considerately as dojo etiquette commands, of course ).

I don’t have any idea yet as to how MA energies behave in sparring. You could claim that those ‚pure‘ MA energies generated by basic techniques and katas/form will become disturbed in sparring, so to speak, but like I mentioned before, I don’t think it’s one fighter’s energies against the other’s. In a capoeira roda, the energies of the two players will flow together create something new that is greater than the sum of its parts; this synergistic phenomenon is boosted even further by the bateria, the band of capoeiristas playing various instruments, and the other players in the circle singing and clapping, and I’ve often seen quite shy or reserved beginners suddenly go wild with excitement and enthusiasm once they entered this witch’s cauldron of energies.

No such uniform spatial arrangement is in evidence in karate. Point-fighting competition areas are 8 x 8 m square, open to all sides and will also include a referee and four corner judges with their red and blue flags, with the audience sitting somewhere far off. Forming a circle to watch a fight go down is a natural response - building a special mat floor first is not. During karate sparring, there will not usually be any spectators present, no cheering will be heard, and you’ll have to make do with whatever space is available, always taking care not to bump into other pairs of karatekas, and the dojo floor can get quite cramped sometimes.

All this goes to say that the MA energies produced by karate sparring aren’t strictly contained or confined to a dedicated space. Partners are switched every few minute, and you may spar in one dojo corner and then with a new partner in the opposite one. In a capoeira roda, all eyes will be on you; in karate sparring, your and your partner will be just two faces in a crowd.

Hm… I wouldn’t have thought that spatial settings played such a major in MA energies. I’ll need to explore such external circumstances some more here, I think.

 

[HoldAll]

Sparring is Jarring (Part 2)

When practicing basic techniques or katas, everything is under perfect control, with no room for surprises whatsoever. Your instructor will count „ichi, ni, san“, etc., and a punch, kick, block or whatever’s on the menu at the moment will occur. Basic techniques are routinely performed by tromping up and down the dojo, katas will always follow a certain stepping diagram (

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‚ground plan’), technique A will be followed by techniques B and C, and you will always move in the prescribed direction and execute the prescribed kata turns. In pre-arranged partner exercises, your opponent will always remain within range, and you will attack with techniques you have to announce beforehand, no nasty tricks allowed, so everything is always nicely predictable and up front.

Sparring and competition matches, on the other hand, are chaotic and messy, and I think this is where practitioners of traditional styles who know nothing but formal exercises would be easily overwhelmed if they ever dared to venture into free-form combat territory. Developing a feel for the right distance (

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) alone will require many hours of practice because after all, your opponent won’t just stand there and patiently wait for your attack like in pre-arranged partner exercises. Closing the distance is one of the most challenging maneuvers in striking and MMA - all you can ever see is an opponent too far to hit, thus having all the time in the world to react, and what’s more, he or she is hiding behind a raised guard, leaving no unprotected spots for you to attack and presenting no obvious weaknesses for you to exploit (the good news of course is that you will appear to him or her as difficult a situational nut to crack as well!).

There’s various ways of overcoming this forbidding gap between you and your opponent (feinting, using several techniques in combination on the approach, etc.), and it’s always a good idea to practice positioning alone without any kicking or punching, both solo and with a partner, but you really have to learn how to make optimum use of the space available to you spontaneously instead of simply moving to and fro in a straight line all the time. Acquire some nifty footwork because as the saying goes: "Never give a sword to a man who can't dance" (Confucius, „The Analects“). Boxers know why they skip rope, and do I need to mention capoeira? Here’s what I mean:

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Karate point-fighting legend Rafael Aghayev (and others) dancing at an Azerbaijani wedding as well as on the competition mat.

Intent, focus, and intensity are all there in sparring and competitions while the ‚purity‘ of traditional techniques apparently gets lost. Or does it? A correct (and thus ‚pure‘) basic technique is an effective one and will cause maximum damage, it’s just that usually a few attempts will be necessary for a sparring partner or competitor to finally score; in competitions, points will only ever be awarded for correct technique, so you could say that ‚purity‘ of MA energy will be preserved even in the chaos of unscripted fighting. According to the Word Karate Federation (WKF) Rules, Section 8 „Scoring“:

8.2 Points are scored by a traditional karate technique with the hand or foot executed with control to the scoring area.
[…]
8.5 In order to be considered a score the technique must have the potential to be effective if it had not been controlled, and must also fill the criteria of:
1) Good form (Properly executed technique).
2) Sporting attitude (Delivered without intent to cause injury).
3) Vigorous application (Delivery with speed and power).
4) Maintaining awareness of the opponent both during and after execution of the technique (Not turning away or falling down after completing a technique – unless the fall is caused by a foul by the opponent).
5) Good timing (Delivery of the technique at the correct moment).
6) Correct distance (Delivery at a distance where the technique would be effective).

These officially sanctioned criteria also imply that old-school karate virtues will maintained even in such sporting contests disdained by ultra-orthodox martial artists; the conceit of point-fighting is that every scoring technique is theoretically a fight finisher (

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). Even zanshin (see item 8.5.4) about which I wrote an entire post is included in the rules.

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Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that the WKF’s point-fighting system is only one possible competition format among many others which are just as valid but have different philosophies and limitations. In contrast to full-contact bouts, point-fighting is relatively safe and allows for big tournaments where champions will have to win several matches in order to reach the top, something that would not be possible if they still suffered from injuries from previous full-contact bouts.

What I’m trying to say here is that making across-the-board ‚purity‘ a distinguishing characteristic of MA energies is short-sighted and superficial, and the same goes for any notions of ‚harmony‘, ‚balance‘, or some such NewAge waffle. You can have your precious ying-yang equilibrium in pre-arranged exercises where partners take turns in assuming both the parts of the attacker and defender but that’s not the whole martial arts story, and imagining MA energies to be an even flow of basically uniform forces is positively one-dimensional. Sparring and MA competition energies are more like jarring, dissonant experimental music with a haphazard beat, admittedly interspersed with pockets of ‚purity‘ where scoring will ensue but otherwise completely erratic.

I’ve written before that many occultists secretly wish that all energies were easily controllable and exploitable, free resources to be harnessed and ‚tapped into‘ at will. However, I still maintain that there is also a type of energy that can only be observed (and even enjoyed!) instead of simply being used and utilized for one’s personal purposes, and I’m afraid that MA energies fall under this category as well IMHO. Or maybe I should rather say that martial artists can in fact benefit from these energies, just not in the way a layperson would expect. Hm. Food for thought. And for another ten posts or so.

 

[HoldAll]

The Martial Arts Universe is NOT Mental

For me, martial arts is not primarily about developing the mind, building character, or heaven help us, about cultivating qi, it’s first and foremost about training your ass off. Martial artists are frigging athletes first, fighters second, and maybe some kinda sorta artists last, if at all. ‚Kung fu’, for example, literally translates into ‚hard work‘, and for good reason. Laypersons will rarely appreciate the extent their bodies will need to be transformed when taking up karate, and the chiselled ‚capoeira body‘ has almost become proverbial among fitness nuts. From what I’ve seen in locker rooms, some older judokas may sport a paunch but will still have pronounced pecs just like the younger guys. However, big muscles are not a requirement for success in the martial arts - functional strength and good cardio are, and it will be a long, hard slog to acquire them.

At a summer camp in a small town in the mountains about ten years ago, I woke up early and couldn’t get to sleep again, so I grabbed a coffee from the vending machine and sat down all bleary-eyed and muscle-sore on the terrace of my hotel where the camp’s karate classes were held. The scenery was surreal - there were two discos nearby that had apparently just closed, and young people in various stages of inebriation were standing around in sullen little groups in the harsh morning light when suddenly a bevy of joggers appeared, all dressed in the same colourful tracksuits, smiling, looking all chipper, and clearly enjoying themselves and the cool crisp air. It was the entire national karate team, and the contrast between them and those weary revellers couldn’t have been greater… when the day’s classes were over, all these athletes would hit the hotel’s small gym to do some weightlifting while I getting was ready for dinner, maybe have a beer or two afterwards, and then collapse into bed, dead tired with exhaustion. And that’s precisely the difference between professionals, a lone amateur athlete, and ‚civilians‘ in one take.

As with any kind of performance, the audience of a sporting event will routinely enjoy the spectacle without giving much thought to how much preparation and effort on the part of the athletes and the organisers have gone into it. I, on the other hand, can’t even write about karate without thinking of the chronic soreness in my quads caused by shotokan’s uncomfortably low stances, of drowsily waiting for the bus, the subway and then another bus to take me home after classes, happy and satisfied but also worn out and ravenous, of the two awful cramped basement dojos at the beginning of my karate career, the long car drives to various workshops, the exhilarating summer camps where I would usually take far too many classes (so much interesting stuff on offer here!), and as a result, walked like I had just crapped my pants after the third day (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit).

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Now you’ll hopefully understand why I find it downright offensive whenever laypeople act claim that it was only the mental aspect that really mattered most in the martial arts, if not outright fantasising about some mystical superpowers attainable through meditation and other allegedly more ‘spiritual’ procedures supposedly far superior to the patient, slow grind of regular physical exercise. You see, I don’t believe that martial arts virtues like constancy or courage can ever be developed in the abstract - they rather emerge as a by-product of actual practice. In martial arts, everything proceeds from the body, and it is only after the fact that its performance may be analysed by the intellect and any beneficial mental habits boasted about. “I only earned my black belt / won this championship thanks to my attitude, my work ethic, my… “. No, that’s what you claim in hindsight, but all the while it was your body which practised all these moves again and again and led to your success, not your precious mind, and odds are it was your emotions which drove your body and NOT cold and calculating reason.

MA energies arise from the body, and they’re cultivated through exercising the body. In this, they may become amplified or hampered by emotions but the thinking portion of the mind will only play a minor part here, e.g. when learning a new kata or trying to follow the explanations of an instructor; in all other respects, however, it’s best to shut it off completely and let your body, your reflexes and instincts take over. It’s difficult for me to imagine a better way of grounding myself than focussing exclusively on my own body, feeling how it moves, marvelling at the feats it’s capable of, while also being humbled by the challenges brought about by actual physical confrontations. The mind is totally inept at creating such hands-on experiences, and unless you’re a martial artist yourself, all your mind can ever do is rehash movie scenes, book knowledge, or romantic fantasies in which it is king and the body just a blindly obedient subordinate with boundless strength and stamina.

When it comes to generating martial arts energies, the intellectual mind cuts a pretty pathetic figure.

 

[HoldAll]

Karate Fundamentals (Part 1)

When it comes to the optimum way of moving about, karate and capoeira radically part ways. While capoeira favours a dynamic balance achieved through continual motion, karate at first teaches formal stances before allowing its practitioners to move freely, and it’s a shame the majority of beginners will have quit long before reaching that final stage; what dropouts will mostly remember from their one or two years of karate is being made to do stuff that felt uncomfortable, unnatural and stilted. It’s like wanting to become a soldier and learn how to fight but once you’ve joined the army, all you'll ever do is marching drills in the barracks yard.

Generally speaking, there seem to be two diametrically opposed approaches to teaching beginners martial arts. The first one (which includes karate) assumes that beginners are these weak-bodied softies who need to toughen up and put some backbone and steel into their physical and mental frames; the second one (e.g. aikido) believes that, on the contrary, people are much too tense anyway and that a relaxed posture as well as fluidity in motion are key. This is the perfect opportunity for armchair martial artists to nod sagaciously and claim that both paths are valid and will miraculously somehow meet at an unspecified point in the future anyway. Weeell, yes, in a way. The only trouble is that these opposite mentalities will have become so ingrained by that time that making even the smallest modifications to them will be difficult - which should be considered a good thing and is precisely the aim of those interminable formal basic drills (

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) in karate. As the body is a slow learner, there’s no way around repeating the same exercises over and over again in the beginning, as boring as that may feel and how many new members it may lose your dojo.

According to (unspoken) karate philosophy, beginners are thought to lack the required physical stability to withstand hard impacts when throwing punches or parrying them (I’ve written about Newton's Third Law of Motion and its biomechanical implications previously). Your body won’t be ready yet to generate and handle any sort of martial arts energies before acquiring a sufficiently strong foundation. There should be no weak or buckling link in the anatomical chain involved in transmitting and receiving kinetic forces, and without a solid foundation, you’ll just flail about ineffectively without ever producing an ounce of MA energy.

The karate front stance (

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) is a prime example for so-called ‘martial arts secrets’ which aren’t any. After all, you’ll assume this stance quite naturally when pushing a stalled car or a heavy piece of furniture and won’t place your feet in a single line instead, will you? Which is the whole idea behind the front stance - you’re bracing for impact, with your weight distributed accordingly. As opposed to boxing and other MA striking styles, shotokan karate advocates closing the gap between you and your opponent by taking one big step instead of several smaller ones. Of course you won’t use the traditional stepping/lunge punch (

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) performed from such a low formal stance in real fights, you’ll be kicked or punched several times before even completing your step, but that’s not the point. The idea is to learn how concentrate the all the momentum generated by this long step straight into the bull’s eye, in this case your opponent’s solar plexus where it will cause maximum damage; in this, the zenkutsu dachi could be likened to the undercarriage of an artillery gun - it has to be rock-solid, or the gun won’t shoot straight.

This long front stance is also used for blocks, and this is where some crucial conditioning will happen in beginners: you’ll be defending yourself while looking straight at your attacker, which should be a matter of course but usually isn't - when feeling overwhelmed by a much stronger aggressor, many people will turn sideways, look away, cover up their faces to protect vulnerable body parts like the eyes and nose while one blow after blow rains down on their heads. By forcing yourself to keep your body erect and gaze straight ahead at all times, you’ll slowly unlearn this unhealthy reflex, but you’ll have to give it time since unfortunate habits can’t be changed overnight, more's the pity.

I’ve always felt that shotokan’s low front stance and its headlong stepping or lunging punch in particular symbolised its aggressiveness, the indomitable will conquer any obstacle by storm, and I suspect that its practice helps to inculcate a certain forthright attitude and a bold spirit in beginners which they probably didn’t even possess before taking up karate. This would mean that the mind becomes transformed by the body which isn’t how it’s usually thought to work: it’s the mind that is traditionally regarded as a person’s supreme command centre, the king of all it surveys, while the body is expected to obediently dance to its tune, and not the other way round. However, it’s not so outlandish when you think about it - both hatha yoga and breathwork follow the same principle, for example. Hm… I must confess I’ve never thought about it that way. It’s as if it was the body which was teaching the mind not to take shit from anyone. Strange when you think about it.

All of this means that I can now add maintaining stability through a solid physical foundation to my list of MA energies criteria which so far includes intent, focus, and intensity. Mind you, stability isn’t of universal importance in martial arts and will mean different things in grappling where it’s initially guarded as well but will cease to be a requirement once the fight continues on the ground. Stability is vital in striking though, and a solid stance will also convey a certain personal attitude - you can intimidate a weaker fighter by a strong aggressive stance alone: it signals that you’ll not only stand your ground but also chase an intruder ten blocks if necessary, take him down and give the bastard a sound thrashing. A bloody-minded mien alone won’t win you any fights of course but might put you in a much more favourable position right from the get-go.

 

[HoldAll]

Karate Fundamentals (Part 2), Control Intro

In reference to my previous post about karate’s front stance and the resulting idea to add ‚stability‘ to my list of requirements for martial arts energies (which so far includes ‚intent‘, ‚focus‘, and ‚intensity‘), I would now rather use ‚control‘ instead since ‚stability‘ is more about physical aspects like posture and balance.

By ‚control‘ I mean full situational awareness in combination with a readiness to engage an opponent, or being actively involved in such an engagement. It ties in with the original intention of the present post which was discussing the backward stance but more about that a little later. The point is that ‚being in control‘ doesn’t necessarily imply being on the attack or even winning; rather, it’s the ability to handle oneself competently in fights while also including a suitable state of mind to be maintained during practicing and preparing for such eventualities. It ties in with concepts like the aforementioned ‚intent‘, ‚focus‘, and zanshin (martial awareness) but is more of a hands-on nature.

Blindly and panicky beating a headlong retreat doesn’t produce any MA energies - fighting an intelligent rearguard action will. In basic formal drills, the backward stance (kokutsu dachi, similar to the en garde position in fencing) is designed to teach you how to defend yourself effectively while being literally on the back foot, keeping your body out of harm’s way while providing stability for any subsequent counters or counter-attacks. A cat always lands on its feet, and so should a good karateka, no matter how dire the situation. As the

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goes:

Nem tudo que reluz é ouro
Nem tudo que balança cai
Cai, cai, cai, cai,
Capoeira balança mas não cai

Not all that glitters is gold
Not all that sways falls down
Fall, fall, fall, fall
Capoeira sways but doesn’t fall
(Note: „sway“ refers to the basic swaying capoeira step, the ginga)

And that’s precisely something all the no-nonsense striking arts could learn from capoeira: exploiting all available space to one’s advantage. You don’t have to stick to your opponent like glue all the time, and this especially applies to situations where you’re at a disadvantage. There are no heroics points to be won by bravely standing firm and proud whenever a superior, taller, and much heavier opponent is preparing to steamroll all over you, and no, stepping smartly aside bullfigher-style and letting the guy crash past you mostly won’t work either because he’ll simply adjust his direction of attack.

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I keep coming back to that historic Vitor Belfor - Wanderlei Silva KO. Silva had a kickboxing and muay thai background, and both styles aren’t exactly known for teaching tactical elusiveness, so evading such a fast attack by a younger fighter’s probably wasn’t even a feasible option for him.

Hm… the subject of ‚control‘ will probably require a more structured discussion but I’m already beginning to see how it hangs together with ‚intent‘, ‚focus‘, and ‚intensity‘ which can be practiced alone and without a partner, but this newly introduced MA energies criterion of ‚control‘ will take the whole game to another level. This is going to be fun.

 

[HoldAll]

A Worst-Case Scenario

The body doesn’t lie. A popular movie trope are fights where a smaller and weaker person will triumph over a stronger one to the astonishment of viewers, but it hardly ever works that way in practice. Even in full-contact bouts where a lucky punch by an underdog may unexpectedly end a fight, you can be sure that the guy knows very well how to handle himself in the ring or octagon and possesses sufficient strength and cardio. Empty boasts, pouter-pigeon strutting and theatrics are all completely useless since an experience fighter will know who he’s up against by just watching you stand or walk alone. I’ve written about it in my post about feinting - you may of course choose to attempt it but it has to be convincing, and no one will take you seriously if your body signals uncertainty or fear before clashing with someone in earnest. If you struggle to put on a brave face for an opponent, it will be just that - a face, and your body will tell an entirely different story and betray your pathetic wannabe’s facade.

In my opinion, even the most deluded fool who thinks himself as good as invincible because of his proficiency in the super-secret style of XY will run like hell when confronted with the real thing out of sheer self-preservation, never mind his diploma from a phony

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. There was a time somewhere in the Nineties where in movies guys would boast about their black belts prior to street fights, only to get creamed in short order, probably by Hollywood screenwriters’ statute, it was so comically widespread.

In my opinion, the most crucial skill in martial arts is the ability to defend yourself. There is this quote from Gichin Funakoshi’s „

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“ which I’ve already written about:

Do not think of winning. Think, rather, of not losing.

This may come as a bit of a letdown to young ambitious fighters but it’s what martial arts really boil down to - don’t get killed or injured. Self-defense, remember? Most MA books and practically all those MA youtube videos will show you how to win fights, or to cope with any self-defense situation imaginable and emerge victorious, but hardly anyone will teach you how to remain unscathed when confronted with a much stronger aggressor when there’s no chance that you’ll ultimately triumph. Here is a very rare exception I’ve mentioned before in my uke post:

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In this video, the Japanese sensei gives a very fine example of remaining in control even when being at a disadvantage: he just absorbs all attacks without putting himself into danger by countering. It might not be the most heroic of tactics but will have a definite effect on hot-headed opponents - it’ll usually drive them nuts and thus make them more and more careless: „What now, I’m throwing everything but the kitchen sink at him and the guy still looks unimpressed?“Now would be a good time to run away, circumstances permitting, since sooner or later, a powerful punch will come through despite your best efforts, and any riled-up bigger and stronger aggressor will be fully committed to whooping your ass by now instead of merely playing around and aiming at humiliating you. A cool head won't always prevail in such situations, it won’t diminish the guy’s strength and size after all.

As far as MA energies are concerned, I would claim that as long as you remain in control of your defense, they’ll continue to flow, billow, radiate or whatever around you but will cease abruptly as soon as you extricate yourself from the situation and make your getaway You may still remain somehow energetically connecting to an aggressor if he decides to give chase but that’s a different scenario entirely, in my opinion.

Actively and confidently defending yourself will not only depend on effective blocking but also on nimble footwork, a fact ignored by many traditionalist styles that exclusively focus on static formal stances and where nothing but single punches or kicks are ever blocked and then successfully countered, surprise surprise. Shotokan karate, on the other hand, has such formal one-step partner drills as well, but for your very first grading exam, you’re expected to cope with no less than five punches in a row (gohon kumite). Here’s how it looks when performed by two black belts:

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Very nicely done but it will look quite different if one of the guys is merely a white belt. Most punches performed by the black belt will get through because beginners have yet to learn know how to tense their whole bodies at the moment of impact, and as a result, their blocks will buckle, their balance will get more and more wobbly and their entire defense crumble under such pressure; some may even lose their footing and fall down as their stances deteriorate with every step. You really have to know how to brace yourself and then immediately relax in order to stay mobile, which is the whole secret of effective defending (as well as attacking!) - both fear and aggression lead to excessive muscle tension and will slow you down, so your body has to know instinctively when to tense up and when to let go again.

Such pre-arranged formal partner drills are valuable for beginners because they make them take blocking much more seriously, even if it may initially not seem so ‚glamorous’ as punching and kicking. Gohon kumite includes punches both to the head and midsection, and there‘s nothing convincing you of the seriousness of your new-found pastime like staring helplessly at a fist if blocking too late or being punched (lightly and considerately) in the stomach (mostly, that is) if your block’s too weak. In my mind, any self-defense system that fails to teach students first how to protect themselves effectively, even if its only by intelligently using a boxing guard when cornered, is downright criminal. As for traditionalist styles that eschew even formal partner exercises altogether… if you want to practice martial arts for martial arts’ sake, ok, but don’t ever presume your precious forms alone will make you capable of tangoing with the grown-ups.

 

[HoldAll]

An even worse worst-case scenario

Muhammad Ali’s famous

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, i.e. leaning against the ropes the elasticity of which will help a fighter absorb the forces of incoming blows, of course only works in the boxing ring. In any other location, an aggressor may drive you against a wall or into a corner, and the only thing you can do in such situations - if he’s bigger and stronger than you - is cover up for the time being. The problem is that as opposed to boxers, you won’t be able to hide behind huge gloves, and your opponent won’t be hampered by them either, making it easier for his bare fists to penetrate your guard; what’s more, Marquess of Queensberry rules won’t apply, so you’ll not only have to protect your head and torso but also your groin. As a result, there’ll always be gaps in the defensive shield you’re trying to erect in front of yourself, so prepare to get hit with at least some glancing blows. Blocking will be mostly useless at such close quarters since you’ll never have time enough to react, so cover up as well as you can.

The classic karate stance to adopt in close-up fighting is sanchin dachi (hourglass stance) which may look bizarre to laypersons but will root you to the ground much better than if your feet were planted parallel to each other while additionally protecting your groin against rising kicks and knees, and I’d bet you’ll assume this stance instinctively if you’ve ever been hit accidentally in the goolies before as a kid (as probably every guy that ever lived has - that’s why I always claim that kicks to the balls are of limited usefulness in self-defense because more often than not, they’ll just get deflected by the aggressor instinctively turning away).

Try this idea: when riding a bus or subway, try to remain standing without holding on to any straps or stanchions as soon as the vehicle brakes when driving up to a stop or rolling into a station. Most likely, you’ll assume that knock-kneed sanchin dachi stance automatically to catch yourself from falling; additionally, you get to practice keeping your center of gravity (hara) really low to ensure stability into all directions (while protecting the family jewels too but that’s not a concern here ).

Probably the best tool to practice covering up are pool noodles. Seriously. Full-contact fighters use them all the time. You can’t get hurt but will be able to hone your defensive reflexes, and you can even turn it into a fun game. It’s really up to you if you go into a boxer’s crouch, dodge the noodle strikes (sounds funny, I know ) or let them hit your guard, or stay more upright like karateka and try to brush them away (gliding block, nagashi uke) - it’s all good, learning by doing. The main thing is keeping your eyes open and not turning away because that’s when you’ll become just a punching bag for your aggressor.

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When you’re tired of noodling around , you can also try The Slapping Game we often did for warm-ups. The attacker performs light slaps to the head, face, and groin (use the back of your hand if this makes you uncomfortable) of the defender; careful when simulating straight punches to the face though, it’s best to make a fist, then let it drop open it so that the finger tips point downward since you don’t want to give your partner an eye-poke. Let the defender stand with his or her back against the wall for added realism and try to break out without taking (too much) damage; it’s harder than you think. If you want to take things further still, you can let the defender hit back, even if these punches are mere faints - they will help to keep an attacker occupied while you slip out of the corner.

To take this worst-case scenario even further, here’s another practice-oriented game to play which will challenge both your abs and your cardio. The defender lies flat on his or her back on the ground, the attacker remains standing, just like in a self-defense situation where you've tripped and fallen down. The attacker’s job now is punching the defender in the stomach (again with an open fist so no one gets hurt!), the defender’s will be holding the attacker at bay by making sure his or her legs always point towards the attacke to, push him or her off, if necessary, while also covering up the head just in case. The attacker will of course try to get around the defender’s kicking legs (it’s best to keep one leg outstretched and the other one pulled up to your body to prevent them from both getting caught) by circling the defender, so the defender will be forced to adjust his or her position accordingly in order to avoid presenting his or her ‚open‘ side to the attacker. If you’re just about evenly matched, it will be a good workout, I promise you.

Hm… energy-wise, I think that facing dangers unflinchingly makes all the difference. The moment you give up, close your eyes and stop defending yourself, no martial arts energy will emanate from you anymore, and it will be solely the attacker who will now have the opportunity to unfold his full violent potential. However, I won’t judge anyone who just curls up and prays for a beating to stop; blocking or catching bare-knuckle punches with your forearms hurts, and reaching out directly into their path may seem counter-intuitive. I don’t believe it’s possible to teach people to be courageous that aren’t brave already but think you can help them become less susceptible to blind panicking.

 

[HoldAll]

Playing hard to get

In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the World Karate Federation (WKF) adopted an 'inaction' or ‚no-stalling' rule where a fighter deemed inactive for approx. 20 seconds would now receive a warning, simply in order to make point-fighting more attractive to lay audiences. I suspect that the WKF took a page from the UFC's book here where referees can stop an MMA bout and hand out point deductions if one of the fighters or both remain passive for too long and refuses to engage their opponents. According to the WKF rulebook:

10.4.16 Avoiding Combat refers to a situation where a Competitor attempts to prevent the opponent having the opportunity to score by using time-wasting behaviour such as constantly retreating without effective counter, holding, clinching, or exiting the competition area rather than allowing the opponent an opportunity to score.

I understand the reasoning behind this new rule but believe it was an unnecessary kowtow to the International Olympic Committee which demanded more fast-paced action and allegedly even wanted to scratch all kata competitions. Fencing, on the other hand, is an Olympic discipline that has an inaction rule as well but will tolerate a full minute of ‚non-combativity’, as they call it, before a competitor will be penalised. As with much of martial arts sports, it’s instructive to scour the rules for any illegal techniques or behaviour and do just that in real-life situations. Constantly retreating without countering is the best tactic to employ when facing a much stronger aggressor (short of running away, of course).

One major weakness of modern karate styles with their emphasis on long point-fighting stances is that they require sufficient space to work. There may be knee and elbow strikes in various katas but I wouldn’t even know how to throw a boxing hook or an effective uppercut. Fighting in cramped spaces is unfamiliar territory for sports karatekas, and I think traditional Okinawan styles with their higher, shorter stances (see the ‚hourglass stance’ I previously mentioned) prepare students better for such eventualities. A karate point-fighter relies on the power of lunging forwards when punching and therefore can’t very well be expected to fight his or her way out a broom closet, so to speak. Clinching without attempting a throw is not allowed in point-fighting, and all clinches will be immediately broken up by the referee; you can sometimes see competitors ending up standing chest to chest and then pushing each other off by mutual consent in order to gain enough distance for their long-range techniques. If you want to learn infighting, better turn to boxing, muay thai or one of the grappling arts where the real fun only starts once it gets up close and personal.

Capoeira, on the other hand, is deficient in another distance-related respect. As the basic shuffling step, the

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, is a lateral movement, players will mostly move from side to side and only rarely take a direct step forward, which made playing in the circle difficult for me as a karateka in the beginning because everything seemed way too close for comfort. As I became more used to this unfamiliar physical ‚intimacy‘, I would sometimes try explosive whole-body feinting as if wanting to take a vigorous step forward, and the other player would invariably panic. Different strokes for different folks.

However, close-up fighting is not all there is to the martial arts, and you have to know how to control distance if you want to be successful. Boxing is generally regarded as the most ‚manly‘ way of fighting by guys who like to brawl - the general idea seems to be putting up one’s dukes, taking all incoming punches like a man and dishing them out in return. Only… you don’t have to play the macho game by staying within haymaker range at all times, available space allowing, and this is what point-fighting can teach you - to be elusive, fight on your own terms, attack only when you want to, then retreat and weigh your options. It’s the ancient

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philosophy again, i.e. patiently waiting to end a fight with a single blow instead of both fighters taking cumulative damage until finally one of them collapses.

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Get out of here!

So much in fighting depends on making smart use of available space... It’s not something MA books talk about much, it’s all stand-and-counter and never evading instead of being elusive, or refusing to be nailed down. Remember Muhammad Ali's famous slogan "sting like a bee, float like a butterfly"? It’s exactly what point-fighting is about - you only get into the range of your opponent when you want to score and keep a safe distance between the two of you otherwise.

I currently view MA energies like smoke billowing around two fighters; whenever they clash, their energies will merge like clouds but separate whenever they disengage and withdraw. Again I would like to stress that in my opinion, these energies aren’t antagonistic but synergistic, meaning they’ll add up and subsequently burgeon even more wildly as the intensity of a fight mounts. And again I want to point out that these energies are by-products of focussed physical activities performed with combative intent. Qi has no place in my model - it may be relevant to an athlete’s health but I would categorically deny that it can have any bearing on the interaction between two fighters, neither physically nor mentally.

That’s just the thing, isn’t it? I can’t prove my suppositions to you, of course, but neither can believers in qi powers capable of affecting an opponent. As things stand, I’m still inclined to allow for the possibility that all MA energies can be explained and described in entirely mundane terms, e.g. by modern medicine (increased heart rate, hormone release, etc.) and psychology (aggression, emotional charge, learned motor responses and so forth); I’m not so sure about occultism though. The Olympic Games in Ancient Greece were held in honour of Zeus and Heracles, not Ares/Mars, so sporting events (including wrestling, boxing, and

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, the granddaddy of modern MMA) fell under the aegis of the supreme deity and a legendary hero and demigod. Military unarmed combat would be more in line with Mars although it rather seems like these guys from the National People's Army of the former German Democratic Republic worshipped Thalia instead, the Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry :

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If this was merely dojo karate, I’d say it was a so-so display of happo kumite, i.e. standing in a circle, defending against attacks from all sides and immediately countering (some direct countering straight into attacks as well, nice!). Classic karate punches performed at a brown-belt skill level and below, although some of the counters would be considered unrealistic today, for example the famous ‚judo chop’ (shuto uchi) to the back which won‘t do anything in practice, ditto the spinning hook kick (ushiro ura-mawashi geri) to the midsection. As for kicking the knife out of an attacker’s hand… I think not. All in all okay as a semi-formal dojo exercise but a military unarmed combat instructor would probably bust a gut laughing.

 

[HoldAll]

There’s always the berserker option

In his book 2010 „Got Fight?“, former UFC fighter Forrest Griffin describes an encounter with who he calls „the toughest fighter on the planet“. I had originally planned only to copy some excerpt here but he tells the whole story much too hilariously for it to be abridged:

„Back when I was attempting to play football for the University of Georgia, I’d occasionally catch a ride with a group of meatheads who were also attempting to play football. One afternoon, four of us were packed into a Jeep with the top down, cruising around for a while, when someone had the bright idea to go down to Georgia Tech and harass some of the smart folk. With nearly a thousand pounds of muscle, fat, and attitude weighing down our ride, we trolled around campus. I wasn’t exactly sure what my cohorts had in mind until one of the guys jumped out of the Jeep while it was still rolling and headed straight for the only person in sight. The target happened to be the biggest geek I had ever seen. Now, I’m not calling this kid a geek because he had more brains than all of us combined and actually went to class, but he was five nine, packed at best a hundred twenty pounds, wore a button-down shirt, and had, in his breast pocket, half a dozen pens crammed into a plastic protector. But there’s more. He had on horn-rim glasses and hugged a handful of books to his chest like a ten-year-old schoolgirl. Hands down, he was the most pathetic-looking kid in existence.

So what does the dickhead who jumped out of the Jeep do? He goes straight up to the kid, slaps his books out of his hands, and then begins laughing at him and calling him names. Dork, dipshit, fuck nuts—he let this kid have it. Pretty early on in the verbal assault, I suggested that we get moving and, to expedite our departure, started to say that the cops would be showing up. Now, I was certain this short, scrawny kid would begin wailing and running in circles, which only would have prompted this asshole I was with to chase after him. It would have been a horrible (although hilarious) sight to watch—a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker chasing down a hundred-and-twenty pound kid, pens flying everywhere. But that’s not what our geek chose to do. Out of nowhere, he charged directly at my dickface associate and swung for the hills.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. Swear to God, the football player was so big that even if you had ten buddies getting your back, you’d still think twice about charging him. And here, this little kid was doing it all on his own, petite fists looping through the air like pesky mosquitoes. But before the kid could land a single shot, the football player cracks him and he goes down. I thought that would be it. The kid had probably watched too many kung fu movies and thought he was some kind of tough guy. Daniel-san or some shit. Anyone who saw this exchange would have figured now that he had taken one to the face, he would stay down and play dead. That’s not what happened. Getting socked only seemed to fuel his passion for justice. He popped back up like a weeble-wobble and again charged forward.

By this time, another one of the guys in the Jeep had jumped out. Harnessing the pack mentality, he grabbed the kid by his neck, dragged him over to the edge of a grassy slope, and threw him down it. The kid tumbled head over tail, but when he reached the bottom, he didn’t lie there in a tattered heap. He came storming back up the hill. When he reached the top, he stopped for a moment, casually removed his glasses, set them down on the grass, and then panned his eyes back and forth between his two assailants. The four words that came hissing out of his mouth will be etched into my frontal lobe for an eternity.

“I’M READY TO DIE!”

He began his charge at five hundred pounds of muscle. He ran straight into one of them and knocked him backward into the Jeep, producing a decent- size dent. This naturally angered the driver, so he jumped out and joined in on the “fun.” Together, they began beating the holy hell out of this kid. They’d throw him down, kick him in the guts and back, and then begin to walk away. Before they could make it five feet back to the Jeep, the kid would leap up again and charge them. So they’d smack him around, throw him down again, and do some more kicking. All the while the kid threw his fists for all he was worth, head butting, trying to bite. Meanwhile, I’m urging these boneheads to get moving.

After this went on for a little while, I could see the fear growing in the eyes of my fellow football-player wannabes. They weren’t worried about this kid causing them damage with his fists—they were scared of his heart and soul.It suddenly dawned on these geniuses that they had started something they couldn’t finish, not unlike a twenty-pound burrito. The kid really was prepared to die for the sake of his dignity. Unless they were willing to go to that end and actually kill this kid, they could not win this fight. Eventually, the three of them picked the kid up, carried him back to the hill, and threw him over. The second his sinewy frame left their hands, all three of them came scrambling toward the Jeep, scared that they wouldn’t make it back before the runt clawed his way up the slope and began his next charge.

All of them fell inside, as though they were trying to escape some terrible onslaught. The driver revved the engine and peeled out. As we sped away from the scene, I looked back over my shoulder. I saw the kid come over the top of the hill in all of his hundred-and-twenty-pound glory, and a chill went down my spine. His face was bloody, and his button-down shirt was torn and grassstained, but there wasn’t a trace of emotion on his face. Instead of running for the police, the kid dusted himself off, put his glasses back on, and then headed casually off, I assume, to Gryffindor or Hogwarts or wherever, hugging his books in his arms. Right then, I realized that not only was that kid the coolest guy in the world, he was the toughest son of a bitch to ever walk the face of this earth.“

 

[HoldAll]

Are you not entertained?

Years ago at a sports karate seminar, a coach started his lecture on kata competitions with the following polemical statement: „If you’re a woman and want to become kata world champion, you have to be petite, cute, and Japanese.“ Which was roughly true at that time since the majority of judges and referees was, and still is, male, but then the great

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from Spain burst onto the international kata scene, and suddenly all bets were off. Nevertheless, karate kata competitions are mainly about aesthetics, and I’ve written about the importance of male charisma here (between first and second videos). They’re sporting events, so competitors will exploit even the smallest advantage imaginable. For example, competitor would wear longer gi jackets and belts reaching almost down to their knees to make their stances look lower, so the WKF (World Karate Federation) adopted a new rule and stopped that; as competitors must now wear red or blue belts provided by tournament organisers to distinguish them in one-on-one contests, the super-long black belt trick is out. Additionally, WKF rules say:

2.2.6 Hair slides are prohibited, as are metal hairgrips. Ribbons, beads and other decorations are prohibited. One or two discreet rubber bands on a single ponytail are permitted.

That rule proved necessary because some kata ladies already started to sport some rather elaborate pinned up-dos…

Dojo kata practice, however, is anything but glamorous. I must have some sort of kata aphantasia or something since I have a hard time remembering their choreographies unless I have practised them three to five times more often than everybody else, so my own experiences are probably not typical. A kata is defined as a fight against multiple imaginary opponents but I usually just focus on executing the moves as fast and as hard as I can without picturing myself dispatching one attacker after the other since that would be way too distracting for me. At the same time, I doubt if it’s really necessary because a single move can mean three different things, for example a block, a punch, or a grab. I see kata practice more as an abstract artistic performance rather than a martial pantomime.

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A kata performance must look 100% fierce and powerful, or as a Japanese sensei once exclaimed at a workshop: „Kata must kill!“, no matter if it all looks like exotic make-believe to outsiders. If all those fancy techniques are of genuine value in actual self-defence is a matter of debate but I think that’s not the point - in my opinion, katas are the best way to practise one’s fighting spirit. When performing a kata, you can fight as dirty as you want, be as mock-murderous as you want, scream your head off, and nobody will get hurt (or go deaf), and try your damnedest to generate as much martial arts energy as you can.

When writing about MA energies in previous posts, I soon realised that I had to take third-party influences into account as well. In the case of capoeira it’s obvious because without the circle (roda) there won’t be much MA energy to speak of. Karate, however, is usually confined to the cosy ‚living-room‘ atmosphere of the dojo where one’s skills are solely exposed to the scrutiny of an instructor or sensei while everybody else would focus exclusively on their own performance.

Nevertheless, I think I should stress the purely subjective angle here. In competitions, your job is to impress the judges, the referee, and maybe the audience, provided enough people show up. On a purely personal level, you can produce tons of MA energies practising katas in your backyard while nobody’s watching; it’s probably because you’re fighting against yourself and not against anybody else. Hm… I was going to claim that competing in public amplified MA energies, which is true in a way, but I think it’s not so easy after all. I realise now that much of the charisma of kata competition finalists is due to deft TV camera work. It’s completely different when you sit in the stands or at the record-and-time-keeping table directly in front of the mat and watch - from these vantage points, katas don’t look nearly so impressive. You can’t zoom in on the grimly determined look in competititors’ faces from there, their charisma comes more from the way they carry themselves when entering the mat area. The katas will still look impressive, you’ll still catch yourself thinking „I’ll never be that good in a million years!“ but the visual media glamour is missing, the different camera angles, the lighting, the clever editing.

I wouldn’t say this media boost is fake as such but can’t be explained so easily away either. What’s more, it’s safe to assume that experienced athletes will perform even better at competitions than in training, especially when there are TV cameras around. Cameras can help audiences appreciate kata competitions more and make them exciting to laypersons who would be unable to enjoy what they’re witnessing if they had to watch them live in a sports arena - one distant stick figure after another dressed in white pyjamas and performing some weird movements, booooring! I can understand them though. I’m spellbound when watching shotokan katas („I wonder how they’ll manage those

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and the jump in unsu?“) but would always be a little mystified by those from other styles („Cool move but what’s it supposed to signify?“).

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As shito-ryu katas are closer to more ‚poetic‘ kung fu forms and look faster and more elegant, they’re nowadays frequently chosen for their finals by kata competitors who haven’t trained in that style originally. Incidentally, that „My style is better than your style!“ nonsense is strictly for the movies and has never been an issue in karate; in point-fighting matches, it’s impossible to tell which competitor comes from which style anyway. On the contrary, at workshops everybody will curious about katas from other styles.

I’ll be the first to admit that karate is not a very attractive spectator sport. In the elimination rounds, there will be 2, 4, or even 6 mat areas so you won’t even know where to look first; the stands will be mostly empty except for competitors on hiatus cheering for their teammates. Every five minutes there’ll be announcements blaring over the PA system, constant yelling from

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, and even a tournament’s semifinals and finals will probably leave laypersons cold if they don’t know the rules and wonder what all that screaming fuss was about. Scoreboards will be mostly rudimentary or non-existent, award ceremonies typically lack drama or may even go largely unnoticed in local events because they’re often held somewhere in a corner hastily cleared of reluctant athletes warming up first.

As a result, I’m inclined to say that in kata competition, audiences can in fact boost MA energies to a certain extent but their effect shouldn’t be overestimated; performing a kata is a deeply personal matter, it’s more about challenging oneself and less about fighting one imaginary foe after the other.

 

[HoldAll]

I must say I had initially overestimated the impact of kata competition audiences on martial arts energies in my previous posts but they’re definitely present in a capoeira circle (

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). The audience will not be strangers sitting somewhere far-off but your friends, all of them fellow capoeiristas with whom you practice several times a week, delimitating the very space where you’ll subsequently play with their own bodies, singing, clapping, and playing music. The circle is the most archaic of spectator configurations ever since the first cavemen huddled around a fire, from bullfights to gladiator games at the Roman Colosseum, from street fights to ballgames at giant sports arenas. Today you sit in the stands to watch a boxing match held in a ring that’s square. Weird when you think of it. *lol

A typical capoeira class is not that much different from a night at a karate dojo - warm-up, stretching, basic technique drills, pre-arranged partner exercises, sparring/roda. There’s a difference in intensity though: while speed doesn’t matter that much when practicing basic capoeira moves and kicks, all karate techniques must look snappy or it isn’t karate, period. It took me some time to get adjust in capoeira classes when doing some of the kicks karate and capoeira share, for example when we’d practice the chapa/side-thrust kick which is called yoko geri kekomi in karate but which is performed in a rather relaxed manner in capoeira, without any special emphasis on strength or speed; once in a while during chapa practice, I’d throw in a karate-style kekomi as fast and powerful as I could just for fun, and the other capoeristas just would look askance at me as if to say „Dude, cool it with the kungfu shit, will ya?“ Same technique, completely different context.

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A side-thrust kick is difficult to score with in point-fighting. It’s an ok technique to keep attackers at bay who are running at you but in such cases, it will either land in their guard or result in nothing but a push. However, it works very well in practice (I checked) as part of an offensive combination against opponents standing with their right leg forward - the idea is to use the punch as a feint to make the opponent raise their guard, thus creating a gap for your kick. The idea is to deliver a short sharp shock with the outer edge of your kicking foot; simply pushing them a little bit back won’t accomplish anything.

As a result, I would claim that capoeira solo practice doesn’t generate much in the way of MA energy, as physically demanding all those combinations may be. Intent, focus, and control, ok, but the intensity is lacking somehow, and turning cartwheels or walking on one’s hands isn’t exactly martial, isn’t it? Not that capoeira classes are ever boring, far from it - it’s karate practice that’s notoriously repetitive (not that anyone who’s stuck with it for years and decades would ever dream of complaining). The songs make a huge difference though. While it’s just canned music during regular practice, its rhythm and energy will still affect the way you move, and any explosive outbursts of energy would plainly jarring.

If practicing capoeira techniques without a partner feels too laid-back to be called truly martial, everything will change at the end of the class as soon as it’s roda time. I once had the idea of replacing ‚energy‘ with ‚meaning‘ because of its misleading physics connotation but didn’t get anywhere with it. The roda phenomenon, however, would be an opportunity to use ‚meaning‘ as a descriptive term for ‚power’ or

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. The same moves had been practiced so casually just before will take on a new meaning, that is to say, a kick will now be aimed at a specific person and executed with much more determination and focus. Evasive maneuvers (esquivas) will be performed more forcefully since no one wants to get kicked in the head, after all, but that’s not the whole story. It’s the circle of players and musicians that make all the difference because without it, it would just partner practice roughly resembling sparring in karate. As soon as the circle and the bateria (band) have formed, it’s like somebody had turned on the limelights and the MC, e.i. the instructor or mestre, had invited the first pair of capoeiristas to play center stage.

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Taekwondo practitioner Chloe Bruce performing musical freestyle forms.

This dramatic element is what’s missing in regular karate kata competitions. There have been freestyle kata events complete with music and lightshows before but they never really caught on; they seemed a bit contrived and too focused on acrobatics, and anyway, it was the exhilirating embrace of circle that was missing there, the rim of the bubbling energetic cauldron, as it were.

Near the end of a karate class when it’s sparring time, everybody will try to scrape up enough stamina to get somehow through this last part and look forward to finally hitting the showers but it’s completely different in a capoeira class where everybody will be utterly exhausted from solo practice as well until the roda will be announced, that is - the effect on everybody will be nothing short of electrifying. The transformation is astounding: all fatigue and soreness will vanish in a flash, everybody will feel fresh and miraculously energized. This time the music will be live, and it will be you singing, clapping, and sometimes even playing an instrument.

Hm… I have the sinking feeling I’m comparing apples and oranges here. Karate kata competitions and capoeira rodas are just not on the same level. There are no contests in capoeira, despite some attempts here and there that never came to much. Yes, capoeira is about aesthetics as well but its magic arises from the spontaneous interplay of two people, not from the performance of traditional set choreographies by single contestants. Rodas have a completely different energy.