What is your take on forms?

[Malayan]

Almost all martial arts have them from kung fu to karate to even muay thai. there are forms done. kung fu uses forms emulating animals (crane, tiger etc.) karate has them in the form of kyokushin and shotokan and Ram muay's of muay thai/boran.

Question is what is your take on them? do you think the world should continue on with teaching forms? or just move on with western style training of mitts, bags, and sparring? Even bruce lee once expressed his opinion on the matter of forms which caused outrage in many places in the east just curious of the majority opinion here.

[Mike]

I think you are missing the fact that there is form in all fighting styles. Boxing has the most rigid form of them all. The proper boxing stance and movements are very strict and well defined. Just because mitts and bags are used does not mean there is no form. When I work the bag I pay strict attention to my form. Teaching the proper form is incredibly important in all combat sports (as well as running, cycling, iceskateing and skydiving) once an athlete has reached a level of proficiency he/she will often introduce their own style into the system. As an example professional boxers will drop their hands and dodge their chin in to entice their opponent and even TKD competitors fight more naturally in competition. The form of the style is the vehicle to learning the techniques within. If you try to learn a Muay Thai round house without learning the proper form the kick will not be as powerful or fast, the same is true with boxing and double jab.

Bruce Lee was more interested in deviating from strict adherence to a single form and applying different form to back up the different modes of fighting. the Muay Thai form is excellent for punch/kick combos but really weak against a wrestler that wants to take you down. So Lee would sujest you seek out the form that most compliments your body, chosen attack, and your opponent. This does not mean no form, it means a ever changing form based on the current situation. Just like MMA this style must start with a knowledge base that includes different forms.

[shootodog]

forms as in "kata"?

any rbsd nuthugger will tell you they are absolutely useless in any reality. they pre-dispose you to lose the confrontation by drilling fantasy responses to real situations.

i am such a person.

pre-set forms are useless.

[Malayan]

okay this post may not have been completely as clear as I thought it would come out.
when i meant forms, i meant a series of predetermined movements combined so they can be practiced as one linear set of movements you can say Kata yes. the forms that one usually practices alone. like the the particular choreographed movements to represent a particular idea in the art. Can you guys give me an explanation on why you think they are or are not useless?

[Huggybear]

Imho, Kata has its place in martial arts.

Of course it is useless if not trained with resisting partners.
It is a good teaching tool which can point out the basic outlines of techniques which is virtually imperceptible to the beginner who is taking up the art.

If a beginner is subjected to live drilling and sparring immediately without learning the basics, he will develop into a pure muscle memory dependent practitioner, as opposed to someone who's been exposed to forms which can demonstrate concepts and principles that cannot be learned by drilling alone.

To illustrate my point, I will give this example. I've had several instructors in Judo and I will describe two schools of learning that I was exposed to.

The first instructor is uber traditional with his teaching methods. He started by outlining the kata form of a technique and demonstrating it in its classical form. He lets the students try it for a few sets.
He then proceeds to show several modifications of the techniques by different olympians. He encourages the students to try each one and to continue practicing the particular style that they find the easiest to adapt to their body type, without neglecting the principles demonstrated by the classical form.

The next instructor starts with drills for a specific technique that is shown to be a high percentage move in live sparring and competition. He requires the students to choose a particular technique, chosen from several high percentage techniques that he would demonstrate at the start of the class and would ask them to drill them until it comes out of their ears.

As I have observed, they both produced topnotch competitors and practitioners of the art. The second instructor's students were adept at using the techniques that they rehearsed a million times in the dojo. They became effective athletes and won many tournaments. The students of the first instructor also performed well in tournaments and are consistent finalists if not the winner of the tournament.

The difference though, lies in their students' approach to a match or a sparring session. The students of the second instructor fought with a direct, no nonsense style as opposed to the more open and constantly shifting style of the first instructor's students. I have reached the conclusion that the students who were educated with kata had more potential to be more adaptable than those who were not taught kata as the kata folk actually understood the mechanics and concepts behind the techniques, compared to the non kata folk who rely on pure instinct alone which in my opinion, would translate to a decreased ability to adapt and formulate an alternative strategy once an opponent has discovered his strengths and weaknesses. I would also like to add that most of the kata educated judoka have a predisposition to become better and more well rounded teachers than the non kata judoka.

Of course, at the end of the day it all boils down to the art's and the teacher's goals. Was the art created as a form of education? Or a means to produce athetes or killing machines?

[shootodog]

Imho, Kata has its place in martial arts.

of course it has it's place in martial arts. but they have no place in RBSD (or so the RBSD/JKD/Krav Maga/Defendu nuthuggers handbooks says).

Of course, at the end of the day it all boils down to the art's and the teacher's goals. Was the art created as a form of education? Or a means to produce athetes or killing machines?

in RBSD they're suppose to produce aware and defense ready people. some RBSD are meant to create killing machines daw. but to this day, i doubt those killing machines would really measure up to reality.

[Thread_Killer]

Martial arts forms (pre-arranged movements done in a particular sequence to a particular rhythm and speed) definitely have a place in combat training. Is it necessary to learn "forms" to learn how to fight? Definitely "no."

I think the problem most modern martial artists/combat athletes have with "forms" is that they don't understand what the purpose was to having different "forms" in the first place. Asian martial arts were invented in a time that preceded video recording. I understand that our digital generation accustomed to the information highway has a difficult time conceiving of a time that was even before analog. But "forms" were a means to record techniques and applications so that they could be transmitted from generation to generation. One of my bagua teachers John Painter said that forms were, "a repository of knowledge done as a pantomime of dance." "Forms" were the result of combat training in societies that had ancestor worship as a strong social ethic. Martial artists paid homage to their martial arts ancestors by wanting to move and fight like them.

I think the problem with forms training in traditional martial arts, is that most traditional wushu and karate schools think that forms are the be all and end all when it comes to combat training. They don't apply the techniques learned in forms because of the belief that its too dangerous to practice in sparring. So they delude themselves into think that they'll be able to pull off the technique when they need to in times of real stress. The aim of forms training is to make the movements so natural that they become second nature and you can break down, separate and use the movements in different sequences to make them your own for whatever need you may have. Think of is a learning the alphabet. You start by learning to print separately "a", "b", "c", etc, and so on. Then you learn to write in cursive where one letter flows into the next. Then you learn to write words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs, then short stories and novels. In combat training, learning individual punches and kicks would be like learning to print separate letters. Then you flow into cursive with combinations, afterwards you add footwork to get sentences, add tactics to do paragraphs and include concepts and strategy to do short stories. The "forms" are the novels that hold all these together. If you want to be a great writer, read a lot of books. The problem with most traditional martial artists is that they think that quoting someone else' work makes them a great writer. (Despite Bruce Lee's criticism of forms, from what I've personally seen, most of his worshipers do a better job of quoting Bruce Lee than actually using his techniques.)

Huggybear had astute observations about judo and concepts. I see the same thing in the neijia arts. Most tai chi forms I know have anywhere from 24 to 127 movements. If you expect to be able to those those movements in sequence to fight, then you are in for a bad beating. But individual movements have applications, tactics, strategy and even philosophy. For instance, in Yang tai chi, most of the high movements to the face are done with an open hand emphasizing palm strikes, and lower strikes to the body are done with a closed fist. Tactically, its safer to use a palm to the bony parts of the head and face so as to avoid breaks to the fine bones of the hand, while used the hardened fist is more punishing against the softer muscles of the torso. Philosophically this is in line with Chinese philosophy of ying and yang where soft (the palm) attacks (responds to, interplays with, arises from, etc.) hard (the skull) and hard (the fist) attacks soft (the body).

If all you want to learn is how to fight and/or defend yourself, then do RBSD systems that don't do forms, because they're right. In this day and age, you do NOT need forms. Having said that, if they think that doing forms with take away your ability to fight and/or defend yourself, then they speak from ignorance.

[Huggybear]

I would not know if it holds true to FMA as well, but to paraphrase one of my instructors, he said:

"The kata demonstrates how a technique would look like upon reaching perfection."

True enough, there are masters of their craft who are able to execute the techniques in a kata like manner, even in live situations.

Here is Kosei Inoue executing a kata like Harai Goshi/Makikomi in the World Championships:



Of course I am aware that FMA and RBSD emphasizes more on efficiency than (aesthetic) perfection. But when I see grandmasters who can make advanced instructors look like noobs who have never ever tried stickfighting, the martial artist inside me desires to achieve this kind of perfection.

As a teacher to beginners, I use kata as a tool, as a basis for comparison, as a goal for the students as they try their hands on various techniques that I show them. I do not train them exclusively in kata, but every once in a while, it is good to let them see and experience what their technique might look like someday after they have drilled it and used it enough in sparring and competitions until it bleeds out of their ears.

To create an analogy, I might liken the kata to a politician's platform. Realistically, he will not be able to fulfill 100% of the things that he proposed, but a high standard is more likely to yield better results than no standard at all.

[burungkol]

For me: Forms, Yes! Katas, No! I'll just spend my time perfecting my Techniques and my General Preparedness Skills as to memorizing katas.

[Huggybear]

For me: Forms, Yes! Katas, No! I'll just spend my time perfecting my Techniques and my General Preparedness Skills as to memorizing katas.

But kata means form in Japanese.