Some form was designed in such a way that the 1st 1/2 of the form can match on the 2nd 1/2 of the form as a 2 men form. No translation will be required there.
Matt F, I applaud you for having the courage to post your video clips of your workout. I applaud and encourage anyone who does so. I think it is good for MAP. I admit it, I do not have the courage to post a video of myself. Because while some people are nice and helpful, some people can get pretty negative in a nonconstructive way. I have seen both the helpful and mean sides come out by various people on MAP (and elsewhere on the Internet) in the past. I hope nothing said here discourages you from posting video clips in the future.
The bold bit above is what I have the most issue with, its the same answer you always get from tma when they can't defend something, yes there are lots of bad examples of such and such out there but basically they don't understand what they are doing, we that do have the real stuff do understand, of course outside of compliant demos where uki let's you show how the movement form should be used there are no actual clips of unrehearsed sparring where we can clearly see the majority of the moves in the form, or even the body shapes and footwork being used I'm not having a go at you, but the defence used above its basically saying you don't know the secrets that we do therefore your view is wrong, but there's no prove we are wrong normally outside unrealistic demos
??? " One motion means many motions " as verbalized in FMA.But certainly common in many systems,including CMAs.I mean that's a recognized thing,especially as some CMA forms are performed on different "levels" where motions/hand/footwork etc are slightly altered.And so at times is the function. So no, I'm not going to describe 150 applications for a gross body motion with variance of hand positioning.Between the two of us you could probably come up with more apps than I could.At least I would hope so. You're actually saying there is only one function for each move in a form?And/or each move can ONLY be performed in exactly that way?Am I misunderstanding? 'Cause I know you ain't dense. Okay, I don't believe this from you. Just using Fu Hok Hung as an example there are certainly throws,takedowns,etc in the pillar forms at least. I've never studied Karate but even in my early days I could watch some of the Karate kata and see locks/throws/etc in there.Seemed pretty obvious.Which is why I was shocked when one of the older Okinawan guys came over and started teaching the "hidden" locks and throws in the kata and some Karateka were describing it as an eye opener.Those were guys who had been around a lot longer than I had.I was shocked they had been so blind. Also....As you put this sentence- "A teacher has no application experience will teach a group of students also with no application experience."- right before the vid of Cheng... you're not implying that Cheng had no app experience are you? (I'm not disputing that he taught many students who couldn't contend with the proverbial paper bag!) That's all 'til Monday!
Very few forms have recorded the following information: - foot work (such as to move to the blind side, away from the attacking path, or ...), - head dodging (such as to move head down, back, in circle, or ...). What's the best solution for this?
I'm not talking about kata; I'm talking about how Steve Morris says karate in its ENTIRETY is useless and counterproductive. He's making bold claims that Mark Tobin would destroy everyone in UFC and Pride or how 30 minutes with him is better than 30 years karate. I also don't like how he calls Oyama a fraud Anyway here's Peter Smit using karate in K-1 Bas Rutten also credits Kyokushin to his success- that's where the liver shot came from Obviously Machida Morris doesn't give karate ANY credit, not even conditioning or the basic punches or kicks
Thats a great clip! It's the first thing I've seen from morris that actually looks technically solid.
The above is an extremely incorrect statement - the way I am taught. I guess the answer is come study at my school!
I modern (post-modern? Actually old but newly found? Re-visited?) kata interpretation the turns and direction changes that make up the embusen of the kata are seen as telling you where to move in relation to your opponent. Rather than the old (but new) way of thinking people were attacking from the 4 compass points, behind you from the side, etc. like you see in kata competitions with bunkai. As such they show you how to move away from the power hand, away from likely follow up attacks, finding an angle advantageous to you but not your opponent, moving behind them, etc.
As I stated previously some forms are performed differently at different levels (of the individual practitioner).For instance,some CMA forms change the footwork in the higher level versions. But there are plenty of things in systems which are not in the forms. So I don't feel it's a problem that some things aren't in a systems' forms. Unless someone is using forms as the only training method-which is suicidal.
TL;DR If you want to learn to fight, go somewhere with lots and lots of sparring. If you can already fight, and you have the opportunity, find an instructor who can pick apart a kata, look at the body mechanics, and see what you need to work on I'm sorry that it came across like that, because it certainly wasn't supposed to sound like a 'TMA mystical secret' thing, I've been punched in the head enough times to not go for secrets! Again, what I'm putting down here is my opinion based on coming back to karate within the last year or so after several years with not learning forms at all in Sanda and various grappling things. Kata has been helpful for MY understanding of the body mechanics my sensei is teaching, based around using your whole body to drive a strike, which is certainly not a secret. In fact, the principle has been there across almost every striking art I've done, but exploring it in depth has started to refine the way I move. It doesn't look like the original kata when I'm sparring, to use my example from earlier a low block might become a kick catch, and I'm unlikely to step through with three body punches in a row! However, I DO try to catch a kick, step through, and throw a punch before sweeping if I'm sparring with a rule set that allows that. I will try to film some sparring next time I'm just doing a casual session. If a beginner wants to learn to just throw hands quickly, and start competing in a combat sport, obviously they should go to a boxing/kickboxing/MMA gym, where they will spar regularly, I'd never debate that. If someone like me, with a few competitive fights but a lot to learn, wants to find something to add to their training, then I would recommend looking at the body mechanics that people like my instructor (who is locally well respected, my old Sanda instructor trains with him, as have/do lots of the guys I grapple with) teach. I was recently lucky enough to spend a couple of months training at Reaper Muay Thai in Telford, and between the Sanda sparring experience I had, and the Karate body mechanics I'd been learning I was able to do some boxing/kickboxing rounds with a few of their fighters, and while I didn't come out on top, I didn't get battered either. (Under full Thai rules they would have taken me apart, their clinch game and knees and elbows were something else!)
I found this online but not from Morris' website. Apparently Morris fought Muay Thai but I can't find the proof: " A lot of karate people went in for those fights, and almost all would have been quickly eliminated. The ones who stayed the course were those who learned to fight using Thai technique, as that is what works in stand-up battles with no rules. Steve Morris, the de facto head of Goju Ryu UK, was a typical example: he went to Tokyo to train in Goju but changed to a Thai/Goju mix after fighting there (like a lot of people, he kept up his karate training but used Thai boxing as the fighting method). He was considered the hardest man in UK martial arts for a long time, feared by many, and known as ‘Mad Morris’. Nobody in UK karate put down Thai boxing when Morris was around. This was a long time back of course, in the 70s and 80s, when nobody in the West knew much about Thai boxing - a complete contrast to today. Well, he wasn’t called Mad Morris for nothing. In his day he was an iron-hard cruiserweight who could beat anyone in the country. He would have minced up the big Kyokushinkai guys like Whybrow for example. He has trained a lot of good coaches like Vince Jauncey, Mick Blackwell and so on (mostly for short periods till they couldn’t take any more) and you should probably talk to them first before you say he never did anything. Because he is very difficult to get on with, nobody sticks around with him long. That’s just the way it is. He used to walk around Brixton at night with a heavy gold chain on, to get more fights in. If you made Floyd Mayweather (with his private life) a cruiser and made Conor Mcgregor a cruiser with all the mouth, and added in Tyson with his worst episodes, you’d have Morris. He was the first guy to go out East, live there, and fight in Thai boxing (on the Tokyo pro circuit there at that time - he was double the size of any Thai of that era). What he says always has a grain of truth in it although you have to consider it the same way as McGregor’s nonsense. There is no need to respect him - he is one of the old guard who could really fight and proved it. As a person, you don’t want him living next door. He’s basically a street fighter who trained hard in the martial arts for about 60 years and beat anyone around in his day. But don’t expect any manners or whatever - he is and always was a fighter not a teacher or an administrator or anything else involving organisation or cooperation with others. It is what it is. The guy was a fighter not a model of etiquette. Like Tyson without the fame. Everything he touched dissolved in the end because he was not a team player. But don’t knock what he could do or stuff he taught to people who could stick it for a bit. In his day he would have beaten Dolph at the time when the guy was about to go for the European Kyokushinkai championships but got a film gig instead. There aren’t too many people you could say that about, and most of them were in Amsterdam not the USA. At that time, Americans thought Thai boxing was a game for scrappers who could never beat a real martial artist. Most people did to be honest. People like Morris changed their mind. The thing I feel sorry about for him most is that he stayed tied up with Goju for far too long and should have just ditched it and moved on. There was a very limited market for a Goju-Thai mix then, and still is, it’s a dead end. For a long time - decades - he tried to mix the two; but if he’d switched to Thai boxing 100% (as I did at that time, faced with the same choice) he would have been in at the ground floor with Thai boxing’s start-up in the UK, and he had 10 years on everybody else at the time including all the Thais here, none of whom were anything compared with him. He lived and fought in Tokyo in the late 60’s / early 70s. This was the same time Dale Kvalheim, the American lightweight, was living and fighting in Bangkok. Those were the only two Westerners who I knew of at the time who could fight and win against top opposition with no rules except keep standing. They really were exceptional. People like Terry O’Neill got to that point some time later. But you have to take into account such people are not normal in some ways. They actually did it for real, in an era when a Shotokan kata done nicely was seen as the ultimate. You have no idea what it was like back then. People who could fight for real with no rules were rarer than unicorns."
@Smitfire @Matt F did Morris really fight in Muay Thai when he was living in Tokyo? Why does he hate karate so much as to go and say it's counterproductive? Peter Smit and Andy Hug's ura uchi mawashi geri and ura yoko geri are both karate kicks not seen in Muay Thai. Bas Rutten's liver shot came from Kyokushin as they focus on body shots. Lyoto and Chinzo Machida's footwork is karate kumite. I'm not talking about kata, I'm talking about karate as a whole. Why does Morris hate Kyokushin as to go as far as cheating in competitions if he fought Muay Thai; just forget the head punches.
Before saying that something is useless you should have to take a look at the goals of a practitioner. Maybe someone wants to be very good in kata competition, is kata useless for such a person. Everyone has their own goals in martial arts.
Yes, I think some kind of source is needed. Quite a bit of nonsense in that post. There’s no source directly from Steve saying he thinks he is an authority either. The truth is, it’s quite the opposite. No source that he claims to have trained and beat loads of guys on the Muay Thai circuit in Japan. No source where he actually says Karate is useless. Well he kind of does, but It’s more-complicated because he lays out in detail his view on karate and it’s training Methods etc etc in many posts over the years. For example here he says this : “As part of my trip to China an interview had been arranged with the leading boxing masters of Fuzhou City, Fujian who represented the systems of the Dragon, Lion, Tiger, Crane, Dog, Rooster, Lohan and Five Ancestor Fist. Whilst their demonstration of form was not particularly revealing (I had seen much of it before, and far better, by way of Yap Leung and his master Yap Ching-Hai), what they had to say with regards to Okinawan karate was extremely revealing—and they were in a good position to judge as they had acted as hosts on numerous occasions to those of Okinawa, Japan and the West who had travelled to Fuzhou in search of their roots. Whilst the masters didn’t dispute the historical evidence of the martial art connections between Okinawa and Fujian dating back to the early 14th Century, what they did dispute was the claim that there was any similarity, other than a superficial one, between their respective practices. The Okinawan systems, according to Li Yi Duan, then Vice Chairman of the Fuzhou Martial Arts Association, lacked in what he termed ‘essentials.’ So as to clarify this statement, I asked the masters what they thought about the way the fundamental form of Sanchin (which embodies those three internal and external essentials of Fujian Boxing) was practiced on the island of Okinawa, and they just laughed. When I asked them what they thought about the way the form is practiced in Japan they laughed even more; some of them had to wipe away the tears. Because of the age of some of the masters I didn’t dare ask them what they thought about the way the form is practiced in the West as I didn’t want to be responsible for giving any of them a coronary. However, Yap’s observation of a ‘Western master’ attempting to perform ‘shaking’ energy within a Fujian form might help: he said ‘he just wobbled.’ The masters of Fuzhou, despite the visits of some of the leading representatives of karate in the world, simply failed to acknowledge the deformed offspring named karate that had been born of a previous relationship between Fujian and Okinawa. In the same way, the masters of Okinawa, Japan and the West who had visited Fuzhou in search of their roots had failed to recognize and realize the significance of the roots of Fujian boxing from which the profusion of systems had evolved. From its introduction into the Okinawan school curriculum by Itosu Ankoh (1832-1915) at the turn of the 20th century and its later introduction into the colleges, universities, naval and military academies of Japan, Tode (or karate as it later came to be known) was altered in order to accomodate military precision marching en masse, everybody moving off at exactly the same time in exactly the same direction and in exactly the same prescribed manner to the beat of Bushido and a miliary barked-out cammand, and it has been simplified and misrepresented by every karate master and practitioner since. So that all that remains of the Tode systems of the Fujian province are the old worn-out skins and feathers into which the modern practitioners of Shin Budo have climbed. The term ‘kara’ within karate doesn’t represent the vast emptiness of ku that some wishfully imagine, but the emptiness one associates with an old rusting and battered tin can from which all the essential ingredients have been removed long ago, so that only its empty, hollow-sounding, distorted shape remains. It was by way of this regimentation of emotions, thoughts, sensations and actions through precision marching en masse, as well as daily beatings (‘Bentatsu’) and wrapping themselves in the most superficial features of the code of the warrior by which they were willing to sacrifice their lives (‘Gyokusai’), that the youth of Japan and Okinawa were indoctrinated into those Emperor, ultranationalistic military and fascistic ideologies which were to lead to hostilities with China (1844-45), Russia (1904-5) and later during Japan’s blackest period (Showa) of her long history: the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the Asian Pacific War (1936-45), during which crimes against peace and humanity committed by the Japanese are amongst the most heinous ever recorded (for further reading I suggest The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Japanese Imperial Conspiracy by David Berganini, Hidden Horror by Yuki Tanaka and last but by no means least, Kempeitai by Raymond Lamont-Brown). For me, watching men, women and children in small groups, let alone in their hundreds (or as in Korea, in their thousands) marching en masse to an ideological beat and military barked-out command is abhorrent and has nothing to do with the martial arts in the true sense of the term, and everything to do with the indoctrination of those who engage in such practices into an ideology within which they are required to forfeit their free will and delegate the responsibility for their lives to a supreme authority, who they mistakenly believe to be a wise benefactor having their best interests at heart but who in truth is just another exploitive, self-aggrandizing person who has somehow managed to float to the top” On mas Oyama he actually says this: “When in Japan not only did I discover that the samurai no longer exist, but that in one way or another most things are fixed. Grades are fixed if you have enough money and in particular if you are a foreigner. Breaking is fixed. According to Lloyd Williams, a corrrespondent for Black Belt magazine, even the first tournament of Oyama ‘God Hand’—in which to the audience’s delight Oyama failed on several tries to lop the top off one of several different bottles—was fixed. Williams relayed to both myself and Brian Fitkin who the winner and second and third place fighters would be and the reason why: they were going to open kickboxing dojos. Judging from many of the decisions, and in particular those made against the Thais, he could have been right. Unlike all too many martial artists of the East and the West, I never had any difficulty in viewing the claims made by the masters or on their behalf with regards to their extraordinary powers and skills as being nothing more than nonsense. Despite the so-called evidence, stories of throttling tigers and killing bulls with bare hands are nothing more than ploys to draw the suckers in. I suppose if the masters concentrated more on becoming supernormal through realistic and effective training and fighting methods rather than, by some deceit or another, appearing to be superhuman, I would have found them to be more credible. I didn’t go to Japan in search of someone I could worship as a god but someone on a physical plane I could emulate as a fighting man.” Lloyd Williams is actually the guy that says it. Also Jon blumming ,who trained under Oyama, has interesting things to say about Oyama. Maybe he is too honest for most as he says this: “Over the twenty years I lived at Horsham I was visited by many of the senior grades and representatives of the leading Okinawan and Japanese masters in the world, and might I add, with each visit my depreciation of karate grew proportionally. Almost to a man they all effectively said the same thing: that they had learnt more under my instruction in the first thirty minutes than they had under their respective masters in the last thirty years, but the reason why they couldn’t commit themselves to my methodology the way they had committed to their masters was because they had to make a living, and if they were to have told their students that what they had been teaching for years was fooling their students would have been leaving their organizations in droves. One, an internationally acclaimed 6th Dan KUGB at the time (I wonder who?) put it most succinctly than the rest during one of our many telephone conversations when he said that although he didn’t believe in karate, its methods or masters, his students did and that’s how he made his living. What was difficult for me to comprehend when I first heard this statement was how such a highly respected figure within the karate and martial arts world could stoop so low as to deceive those who attend his seminars and who hang on his every word and blindly imitate his every move, simply in order to make a living. Making a living, by the way, is something which as a trainer I have failed to do, I suppose mainly because I am too honest and pragmatic as a trainer and too competitive and ruthless as a fighter. How is it that some celluloid hero of the likes of Jean Claude Van Damme can amass a fortune or some Okinawan or Japanese master or their Western clones by way of oranizational fees, training fees, and grading fees can put in the bank hundreds of thousands of pounds a year for creating the illusion of combative effectiveness when the vast majority of those professionally engaged in reality-based fighting and training earn a pittance by comparison? The reason is that the vast majority of those engaged in the practice of the martial arts prefer the illusion of combat to the harsh reality. Perhaps I was wrong about the previously-mentioned 6th Dan deceiving those who train under him, in that it seems, being tarred with the same brush, he and his students are fully deserving of each other. A bit of a rant On a more personal note, with regards to the deceit practiced by those who have visited me over the years, it seems a number of them are now teaching or publicizing on the web those ‘moves,’ concepts and principles, etc. that they managed to glean from my methodology as if they are their own. Not that this will help them, in that they have failed to grasp the fundamental principles of my fighting and training system, without which they will forever be blowing in the wind” Pedigree Also worth considering that in 1973, when I think he handed back his grades and his gym was just about full contact fighting , including going to the ground, kicking low, kicking in the nuts, head butting ....very little rules... guys like Iain Abernethy were either not even born or very young when Steve was a 5th dan directly under Gogen Yamaguchi and his associates and was trying to introduce more realistic bunkai and training and fighting methods. And in his 60s and through into his 70s I’d argue he moves better and is in better condition , no hip, back, knee problems etc. ...than most of the guys from his or later eras. Maybe he does actually understand how we should be moving and training. The Muay Thai connection comes from how some of his students competed and and won in that field. Ronnie Green trained with him when Vince jauncey took him along and said he was ahead of time. This guy, Nick stone,who runs a respected gym and Australia said this: Father Dave interviews Nick Stone: part 1. Nick talks about the early days - growing up in London, coming to Oz, and having his first fight ..".I very first saw Thai boxing when I was probably about twenty and a guy called Steve Morris, who is very, very well known in karate circles, as being one of the hard men of karate and other styles of martial arts. He's a very well respected man, Steve Morris. And a friend took me up to Leicester Square to see his Thai boxing. He called it 'Thai boxing' or it might have been 'Goju-Ryu'. It might just have been 'fight school', I think, but i was totally in awe of what they were doing. They were kicking each other in the groin and knocking each other out and it was full on. It was really scary, and I thought, 'I'm not into that', and I said 'I'm not doing it!'
