 Please check out this incredible playlist that features a series of short interviews with some of Okinawa's most respected karate masters...  These genuinely heart-warming interviews have been beautifully produced and serve to create a very valuable record of 16 teachers who not only have direct links to the pioneering masters of our past, but who have also contributed greatly to karate's continual evolution and inspired so many to find passion in this incredible art.
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 When it comes to targeting for self-protection, you have to keep things very simple. The skill to impact a specific weak area on the opponent is of course a high-reward component of your striking strategy, but those locations, and indeed the probability of meeting your desired accuracy needs to be kept within the realms of reality. An exploration of vital points, TCM, small surface striking and similar fine motor control studies is no less a valuable part of a martial artists journey and enjoy these studies too, however, with Murphy's Law being ever prevalent in the application of karate for self-protection, we need to keep the notion of targeting as fail-safe as is possible.
 Recently, I've started fly tying again. This was a hobby I had in my youth and it's been around a quarter of a century since I last put feather to hook. Getting back into this craft after such a long time is as interesting as it is rewarding, and what struck me most was how easy it was to access all the old skills I had learned and repeated so many times as a teenager. It got me thinking about karate (as everything does 😆) and the connections between these two traditional arts.
The photo above shows five very different looking flies that I tied one evening. Different colours, different materials and different shapes. Some are wet flies for fishing deep and some are dry flies for fishing on the surface. Some imitate the adult fly and some imitate the earlier nymph stage in the fly's lifecycle. Some are tied on heavier gauge hooks and some on much smaller lighter gauge hooks. All in my opinion are not only successful fish catchers, but are also works of art and personal expressions of the individual who tied them.  The method of karate I practice and teach heavily emphasises the study of kata below the surface. It continually takes on the challenge of what I call 'boiling off' the templates found in karate to help better understand the movements (i.e. essence) contained within them. The result typically reveals more similarities than differences and an art that's comparatively narrow and deep, as opposed to wide and shallow. The techniques found in kata may involve (1) separation/splitting, (2) meeting/colliding or (3) joining/connecting the hands. Despite the many choreographed shapes and movements performed across the plethora of classical forms, this is really all the hands are (or can be) doing. And although each of these three core interactions possess individual importance, it is really the connecting of hands in kata that I'd like to focus upon in this blog post.
To begin, I'd like to recollect a story from a while back...  Following the ongoing debate and controversy over the Internet surrounding the practical purpose of Hikite (pulling hand), I thought I would offer my own take, which doesn't suggest any specific application per se, but instead covers what is in my opinion, a far more essential understanding of this concept in action.
For me, in order for the physical expression of karate to become both holistically effective and integrated, we must look at the classical kata choreography according to its most essential elements. Regardless of any particular combative purpose (which due to lack of historical evidence is always going to be a product of reverse engineering based on informed opinion), the expression of universal principles that govern karate are entirely dependent on how we move as a human being. That is really our only constant. |
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