How to teach yourself a kata

The official DVDs are an ideal way to learn a kata at home

Kata are the primary grading criteria, and lie at the heart of the GKR syllabus. There are some schools of thought that say you should only learn a new one when your sensei is ready to teach it to you. The idea is that they know best when you are ready to learn a new kata, or that you should only concentrate on your grade kata. I used to agree with that viewpoint, but then I found myself going to seminars as a sensei, and during kata practice, I had to sit out before students in my region because they knew higher grade katas that me. At that point, I learned every one up to black belt so that it wouldn’t happen to me again. Shihan himself now recommends that senseis should learn every kata up to black belt.

I spent quite a long time on my 1^st kyu, so by the time I got my shodan-ho, I’d been performing sepai and sanseru for almost four years. I got so much more from those kata by studying them for that amount of time, that I now believe it’s in your interests to know the patterns of most katas long ahead of your grade so that you can concentrate on understanding the true nature and performance of these kata, enabling you to demonstrate mastery, rather than mere pattern knowledge when you need them.

Learning in class can sometimes be frustrating, and surprisingly, is not the most efficient way. In an ideal class, you would have the one-on-one supervision and tuition of a sensei. He would then teach you at your own pace, correcting your mistakes as you go, and placing most emphasis on the areas that you most required improvement in. He would show you some moves, then you would repeat them, demonstrating memory and understanding.

However, in most classes, you will have lots of peers, and they may learn at different speeds and have different challenges to you. Thus your performance is done at the speed that the sensei dictates, with only occasional correction, and because you can simply copy those around you, there is no need for you to actually remember anything.

With that in mind, you’ll want to learn them in your own time at home, or at least augment your class studies.

Fortunately, GKR produces three pretty decent DVDs that you can use to learn your katas, and they’re very reasonably priced (order them from your sensei). Some people tell me that they can’t learn from DVDs, but unless that’s because they don’t have a DVD player, I think it’s simply that they don’t know the best way to learn.

Admittedly, there are two great shortfalls with DVD:

1. Because you’re seeing it from front on, the action is all back to front, so you have to translate in your mind, which side of the body is doing what action.

2. DVD can’t correct you when you’re doing something wrong.

Learning from DVD is great and the benefits easily outweigh the disadvantages – you can freeze frame in order to study form, move step-by-step through the action at any speed you like, and you can rewind to see bits again. True, it’s not an interactive process, but a DVD is endlessly patient, and is available any time that you want to learn, 24 hours a day!

	You can freeze frame the kata DVDs for detailed study

There is a knack to learning from DVD in order to learn in the fastest and most effective way. By following these guidelines, I can now learn the pattern of most completely new katas in under an hour.

1. Print out the footwork charts from this web site. Click here to go to them.

2. Ideally, you should clear space in your living room so that you can practice, without running back and forth from your garden, bedroom, patio or hall.

3. Watch the kata all the way through first, so that you have a sense of how it should be performed.

4. Rewind to the beginning and watch 3-5 moves and learn them, rewinding the DVD as often as needed to ensure that you are learning the right thing.

5. Watch the next 3-5 moves and learn them exactly how you learned the first moves.

6. Add all the moves that you have learned so far together and perform everything you know a couple of times.

7. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you know the whole kata.

8. When you think that you know the entire kata, watch the DVD, trying to predict what the next move will be. If you get all the way to the end correctly, you have learned the pattern.

9. Practice the whole kata every day for a week, watching the DVD occasionally and predicting the moves to make sure that you have not forgotten any parts.

10. After you have been doing the kata for a couple of weeks, return to the DVD and watch the Workshop section of the DVD for tips on how to perform tricky bits of the kata with greater finesse.

11. Read the detailed descriptions from this web site to see if there are any insights that you may have missed.

12. Practice the whole kata at least once a week for the next six months to pass it from short term, to long term memory.

13. If your chosen kata is one of the higher ones, buy the World Cup 2005 DVDs so that you can study the way that experts perform the katas. This will give you a guide to different interpretations, and the differences between class and competition performance.

If the official kata DVDs showed the katas being performed perfectly, I would add,the following to step11, "scrutinise the performances in frame-by-frame detail to learn about the transitions between stances, the precise positions of hands, etc". However, as Shihan himself tells us, the DVDs are general guides, rather than literal, precise performance templates. Seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to me, as this would have been a perfect time to demonstrate precisely what is required, and if the assistant chief instructor (and former World kata champion) can’t do them exactly how they should be done, then who can?

Nevertheless, as it says on the back of the DVD cases “...this series is designed to add value to your regular dojo training program and should not be used as a sole source of tuition.”

I just hope that your sensei knows the kata you want to learn...