2025-08-04

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

Last night during kata training, I compared kata performance to singing in a foreign language. As a youth, I enjoyed singing. I was in concert choir, swing choir, madrigal choir, you name it.

Most of the time we sang songs in English but sometimes (particularly in madrigals) the lyrics were in another language. And while it was certainly possible to just learn to pronounce the foreign words, you couldn’t really put your heart and soul into the song without knowing what those words meant.

Kata is the same way. Yes, it’s possible to learn to move your body the way the kata asks you to, without any understanding of what you’re really doing, but that’s shallow … empty. In order to really express a kata, you need to know how each move is supposed to be applied.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to begin by just learning the moves without understanding them. You have to start somewhere. But you can’t really claim to understand a kata without being able to apply the techniques in self-defense.

“Once a kata has been learned, it must be practiced repeatedly until it can be applied in an emergency, for knowledge of just the sequence of a form in Karate is useless.” – Gichin Funakoshi