LGodamus: For someone who has said that he does not intend to be condescending, you seem, well, condescending.
You also sound a great deal like the other Ninjitsu, Taijitsu, Bujinkan, Ninpo, and Hoshinjitsu folks that I've talked to -- most of the time, they start off ragging on katas, like you did, move on to claim that any style with sparring is useless, and then declare that (whatever your style is named this week) is superior because there are no rules. Man, how I loved being trapped at that party, mistakenly having asked the Hoshin-ninpo-tajitsu-bujinkanist to tell me about his art, only to receive a lecture where he smugly declared that all other martial arts were stupid and silly, and that only by embracing the lawless chaos of combat could you really survive. The pinhead also neglected to ask me if I'd had any martial arts training, and then proceeded to get irritable when I pointed out the logical contradictions of his statements.
Essentially, you're whipping out your ninja-to and unleashing a vicious can of ninja-fu on a straw man you've created. Some schools have indeed turned katas into pure art forms that get practiced to music and done in really pretty costumes with extra flips and stuff thrown in. I don't think anyone is going to suggest that those katas are street effective. There are also schools that practice sparring exclusively for tournaments, with an emphasis on point fighting and little tricks about making your sparring pads snap when you punch so that it sounds cooler and gets the judges attention. Again, nobody is seriously putting these schools forward as viable street defense contenders.
Katas are not designed to be street-effective any more than pushups are designed to be street-effective, so stop attacking them as though they claim to be such. At a well-rounded school, a kata serves as a way to get the student to practice his stuff as part of a series of techniques with transitional steps between them. The katas might start off as simple block-and-strike combinations that give the beginner something to work with, and move into becoming a collection of full-fledged techniques, any individual one of which would work on the street. To attack the entirety of a kata as not being street effective is like making fun of someone for practicing all of the blocks or parries on their material sheet in order because "No one would attack you with that many punches in succession ON THE STREET!" That's silly, and it misrepresents katas.
By the same token, sparring ain't street-fighting, but it can teach valuable skills. It's a good way to teach students how to NOT telegraph their strikes. It's a good way to teach students how to take a strike and not fall down or go into shock (if you practice in a medium or heavy-contact school and don't stop each time a "point" is scored). It's a good way to teach timing, and it's a good reality check, as the student learns that the stuff that works so well for them when practicing with a dummy doesn't work quite as well when the attacker doesn't know that he's supposed to fall forward and get tripped.
A good school should use a combination of training methods -- these training methods may include:
- Simple repetitions of techniques, combinations, individual strikes, blocks, or kicks -- can be in the open air or on pads or bags
- Katas, which are formalized collections of the above
- Partner training, with a variety of partners, so that the practitioner learns how to make a technique actually work -- and this can include choreographed techniques or spontaneous "Defend against this attack" stuff. When traded back and forth, this also teaches the practitioner how to dummy, which is a great way to minimize the impact of strikes that might otherwise flatten you.
- Sparring, to teach timing and give them a better feel for how fast actual combat is when you don't know what the attacker is going to do
- Contingency training, so that students learn to adapt their techniques in order to deal with an attacker who doesn't react as anticipated. This is best handled as a subset of partner training.
I have no objection to someone saying that their school, or even their system, doesn't use a particular practice method -- heck, there are probably a bunch of methods I left out -- but to declare that there is no value to katas or sparring shows you to be somewhat ignorant and fairly close-minded.
Note: I'm assuming in this that you understand that katas can be made up of either combinations (kick, punch, step, punch, chop) or techniques (catch the punch, break the arm, backfist to the ribs, takedown, stomp to the spine, break the neck, and then call it "Slaying the Dragon"). I'm assuming that you are attacking katas as such, and that you are not attacking the idea of techniques or combinations. Please correct me if I'm mistaken, and you ARE in fact attacking the idea of techniques.
-Tacky
