Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

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Van Canna
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by Van Canna »

:)
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Van Canna
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by Van Canna »

No harm in teaching things either way , I'm sure most could probably pick a spot and manoeuvre to it regardless of the kata with a bit of drive and variation and expression , but doing it well is the point.
If I ask one of my students to do an 'explosive' kata visualizing a live fast and furious opponent coming at him...and also tell him to be sure to return to the same spot from where he started...he will...by adjusting his moves...with more 'controlled movement' ...being able to move being the key to surviving a fight.

I see too many Uechi students ...stuck on 'I must block this crazed baseball bat aiming at my head' instead of thinking 'I must be able to sprint off the line of the swing...leaving behind just a shadow for the bat to land on'

They become 'stance prisoners' _

I see stances being taught as 'fighting techniques' whereas they should be taught as 'tactical movements' after a student has absorbed the Uechi sanchin concepts.

The whole, feet exactly here, hand exactly there is for testing and rank promotion at the junior levels and not reality for the advanced practitioner where his teacher strives to get him to.

Which stance are we going to use here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwQd-09zz-E
Last edited by Van Canna on Sat May 21, 2016 4:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Bill Glasheen
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by Bill Glasheen »

Teach forwards, and then teach backwards.

You need to put in your many thousands of hours of repetition. Kata training is good for this. Technique training and prearranged kumite training as well. Then you need to do some resistance training with free weights - some general and some activity-specific. Just do it, and lots of it.

Then...

At some point, the eye needs to look at real fighting, and see the pattern buried in the chaos. It's there if you squint your eyes and look for it. Throwing that person is made a lot easier if you connect your arms to your legs via a strong core, and get all the parts working in unison. And that is done through the discipline taught in kata and reinforced with good gymnasium training. Watching Bobby Campbell show you how he escaped a baseball bat attack - if you "see" the way I "see" - reveals the horse stance charge and turn in Sanseiryu. You do what Bobby did, and layer in the good technique. Seeing the classic Ali right punch over Foreman's jab reveals the application of Seisan's principle of simultaneous block-attack. Etc., etc., etc.

The sweet spot in our science is in-between the Platonic ideal and the chaos of life. Being able to make the connection day in and day out is a gift which comes both by Nature and by Nurture.

When you do something one day without thought and realize that a no-minded movement likely happened from mindful training, then you know that you have arrived - if only in that moment. Those are special moments.

- Bill
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f.Channell
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by f.Channell »

I see the beginning and ending as more of a cultural thing than anything else. Watch Japanese in a busy center square or other public places and you will see them not invading others space. They allow a distance between each other.
In Iaido we begin and end in the precise same place. You actually have a piece of tape in testing you are expected to finish on. The necessity of this space become more important when someone is using a live sharpened blade.
It is possible, that some of this cultural norm may have been brought to the kata after its introduction to Okinawa and Wakayama.
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by gmattson »

Someone sent me this clip of a really fine Yang taichi set and I noticed that the grand master did not end up where he began. He was close though. . . A huge number of viewers and almost all comments were similar to this one:
david lee1 year ago

This is Yang taichi the last master was Yang zen-hu who taught master Cheng man-cheng, a landmark in modern taichi. It is a martial art taichi and this guy reaches near perfection!
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Bill Glasheen
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Re: Uechi-ryu kata start/end positions - What do you do?

Post by Bill Glasheen »

Umm... That ending is pretty far away from the beginning position. Bottom line for me (personally) -- it just doesn't matter.

From a practical standpoint (again), it's nice to have forms you can do with large classes such that someone doesn't step and turn out the building window. And that can only happen if the choreographer intended it to turn out that way. If not, then there's absolutely no point obsessing over it.

A smart person can do the 2-dimensional math and figure out if a form was intended to turn out that way. There would of course be assumptions made when throwing together a computer program to figure that out. Not rocket science. If I was a math teacher, I'd make my students figure it out. 8)

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