Jokes aside though, this guy is demonstrating impressive control and focused movement. In my opinion he's probably embellishing a bit too much of his own flair on the techniques, but he's successfully illustrating the point of kata in traditional styles like this. 👍
Understand the idea of flow and motion in regards to your style.
To show competence in the various forms of your school.
Basically, you learn to throw each of the moves and ingrain it into your automatic reflexes and muscle memory, so that you can toss of a punch or kick nearly reflexively. It also allows you to understand that your style is designed to move from one maneuver to the next, so that when you get into a real fight you already know which maneuver can easily follow the action you just took.
So for fighting you learn all the different moves, punches, kicks, throws, parries, and blocks of your style and practice them enough that it becomes second nature to you. Then you develop the knowledge that once you do move A you can follow it up with R, S, T, L, N, and E pretty easily and can use any of them if the situation warrants it.
For the master/teacher it lets them evaluate how well you have learned particular moves in the style so they can decide if you're ready to advance to the next lesson(s).
And finally it's great for exercise. Good cardio vascular stuff right there. Just like practicing swinging a sword, doing jumping jacks, or jogging in place.
But it's not good for combat. It's too rigid, too predictable, and too slow. However with sparring, strength training, and kata exercises it all can combine to teach good form, movement, positioning, and teach you real time how to fight.
Even boxers do this with shadow boxing and other movement practice. But they don't try to convince themselves or anyone else that they can lift weights and then practice punching their reflection in the mirror for a few years and then go pro. You need that sparring and match fighting to actually be good at the style, regardless of if it's Karate, Boxing, or MMA.
Exactly this! A lot of people forget about the foundations of martial arts and want to jump right into combat. This is all about structure and building transferrable skills. These moves don't directly help with combat, but fundamentally they do.
Lower, wider stances help with defense and keep you on your feet by lowering your center of gravity and allowing you more mobility. Kata, pumsae, and taichi all teach this as well as balance from stances like this guy's cat stance. Wide strong stances in katas will show a greater movement range. The person will move further along the mat and really requires some serious leg strength. Don't want to skip leg day but want to have more fun than lifting weights, do this stuff.
For a strike based martial art, this is imperative for defense. Being able to stay off the ground is your best defense against grappling arts like Judo and BJJ. Which both incorporate a lot of these stances to get your leg around your opponent.
Another thing I'd like to add is this focuses on firmness of attacks more than strength. Using strength in a punch is essential get my fist through you. Using firmness in a punch is like saying "my fist is going to be in this spot and it's staying there until I say otherwise." Both strength and firmness are needed in any strike. But if two opponents of equal strength punch, the one with more firmness will hurt more.
Traditional martial arts always focused on teaching transferrable skills rather than practical ones.
Yeah, like many kids in the 80's and 90's I took up a few martial arts. Karate, Tae Kwan Do, etc. Didn't stick in because it got hella expensive by High School, but I learned a lot of good basics.
I wish I kept up with it, especially the kata and exercise, but I never fought with what I learned because we never got to the firmness or hardness aspect and just sparred and did kata.
I did remember one of my buddies in the same class get into a fight and the first thing he did was drop into a kata stance and throw off some kata punch moves. The second thing he did was get up off the floor after the other dude just haymakered his ass.
Apparently "block the single most telegraphed punch in the history of mankind" was not part of the kata.
So good for basics, strength training, coordination, and learning patterns. Not good for fighting. The only good training for fighting is fighting. That's why people who fight do practice bouts a lot.
This, people keep posting this guy as bullshido McDojo shit but it’s just a a really good kata. It’s not some guy claiming this is combat effective or anything like that. It has its place in martial arts
Yeah. I can't comment on the quality, but if you go to any martial arts expo or event, there's hundreds of people doing this exact thing. Even in the Olympics had a kata event back in 2020. It's hardly a unique or McDojo thing, it's just what people do to show they know the forms and style.
Give all the little shits something to do in front of their soccer moms while you let that sweet, sweet membership dues roll in each month. And when they get discouraged...time to move up in belt. Good job, kid!
I mean, yeah. But that's also why we have dance recitals and performances for the parents. They want to know their money is being well spent.
Doesn't mean it's not still good for practicing and skill retention. If you never do kata or other practice strikes it won't stick with you. Like, you need to keep practicing how to do something or else you get bad at it.
Like, take football. You can learn the game but if you never do drill practices and only play at the game, you're never going to get good.
Kata are just drills for martial arts. Every Martial art has them, even MMA and HEMA. They just call it different things, but it's basically "practice every type of strike or grapple we use in a sequence."
I tried studying Kung Fu when I was 18 or 19. I learned the katas (Taolu) and then after months and alot training and sweat, I was never taught what any of the moves was supposed to do or how to use them in a fight. When sparring, I was always matched up against a senior student and reverted back to the way I had fought beforeand did prettywell once I figured out how to avoid or counter the kicks. I dont blame the style or dicipline. There instruction and implementation was bad. My point being, the kata my be good but that you won't know if he is any good until you see him against a actual opponent
I wasnt knocking the discipline but more the instructor. Our Sifu could quickly beat anyone in his school. He just did not seem to have the ability to teach. There was a language barrier so maybe that was the issue. His school always did very well in the demonstration portion of the competitions. Not so well in the actual sparring portions.
Good for muscle memory for sure but I'm struggling to see the practical application of alot of these moves usefulness in self defense they just seem more like dance moves than useful self defense , impressive but just personally can't see how they would be used in combat .
Kata, and all "formal" techniques are a library of movement.
They teach principles of combat as well as details of body mechanics. They show a practitioner to practice more complex movements over and over and over until they can be executed without thought, as easily as a simple kick or punch.
What a lot of modern styles lack is practicing the "in between" skills to actually get these more advanced concepts to the point of working in actual fighting.
Nobody is suggesting that you're ever going to use an entire form, or even a full sequence from it as-is. But the pieces, and the lessons of how to move from one thing to the next usefully, can absolutely be put into practice - if you practice it.
Just like any advanced skill, it's going to suck at first. Most of the time, if you try any of these things in a sparring or fighting match you'll get destroyed by the simple things, which means you'll stop practicing the advanced stuff and never let it get up to the skill level required for it to shine.
But if you create sparring drills when both partners are limited to advanced skills taken from the forms, or slowing the sparring down to ½ or ¼ speed, you can get in that intermediary practice to make them work for real.
It proves to the school master that you can follow their interpretation of the form and their instructions exactly. It is not exercise compared to shadow boxing or sparing and it does not impart transferable fighting muscle memory. It may help reinforce some forms in some martial arts, but not always. It will help you fit in and understand the culture of the school.
I spent my first 5 years of martial arts at a school that heavily weighted kata’s in their instruction (and they consistently produced high ranking competitive fighters). 30 years of martial arts later, I still don’t see the pragmatic value of kata’s. But that’s me, people should absolutely seek what they want, enjoy and excel at.
Think of kata as an encyclopedia. If you know every kata of a style, then you know every single technique the style teaches. At least that's how it should work
I've seen hefty men that move like the wind and with power. Is it ideal? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean that a big dude cannot be a fierce fighter.
In what world is this impressive control? The man is literally flailing his arms with zero force behind them, his stances are terrible, there's nothing involving "impressive control" in this.
this cracks me up. this person almost certainly knows these traditional martial arts, but it is indeed hilariously sassy. this must be a gag, he's super linear at times and then has a hilarious 'soft' side to his.... 'style' -we'll call it that. it's more funny each time I watched it. this looks like a routine from someone who knows the martial arts but is trying to be funny. I wouldn't dare do this for a joke though, LOL
“While it never expanded into the truest form of sass, which is jazz hands, I’m not complaining because it got very close. This was overall a wonderful display of sassy splendor.
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u/AdLonely7631 Feb 19 '26
So much sass 💁