What are the purposes of martial arts forms?

Question

A lot of martial arts use forms as a part of the training. They are taught and drilled. One benefit, of course, are the applications that you get from them. Small books of self-defense and movements that can be ingrained in the body memory.

Some forms are very small : iaido forms have sometimes only one cut. Taijutsu 'form' are sometimes limited to postures 'kamae' (this is one way of looking at it, please bear with me). Some forms are much longer, like nijushiho or kusanku / kanku dai in styles of karate.

What purposes do they serve?

Answer 1

There are a mix of answers already offered on this question. I would like to rebut a couple of points proffered in some of those answers. These rebuttals are made with due respect - we all have different teachers, walked different paths and have learnt different things. Please don't be offended if I have chosen to critique one of your statements.

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Kata's normally don't have any 'real world' implications

That has to be one of the most incredibly wrong statements I've ever heard. Centuries ago people lived and died by their kata. Not so many people die from them these days, but their meaning and intent is still there, even if it isn't as widely understood or taught as it once was. Some kata have evolved over time, usually due to teaching styles and preferences - this is normal within martial arts (styles evolve over time). There is also anecdotal evidence that a lot of knowledge was withheld from American GI students after WWII, leaving them to decide (invent) the knowledge for themselves¹.

One thing to keep in mind is that most all Kata are extremely contrived.

I'm sure there are some contrived kata/forms out there, without a doubt. However all the kata I have ever learnt were not contrived. Some of the simplest kata out there, the Taikyoku katas invented by Gichin Funakoshi, are full of death and destruction. They contain just simple blocks and punches, right? Turn left, block the kick/punch coming from that guy, turn right, block the kick/punch coming from that guy and then hit him in return² yada yada yada yawn... If this is what you think the kata is then you have been sadly mistaught.

Katas were assembled by teachers and families, the "owners" of styles. It is a package of moves that represents their knowledge, each move could have several specific applications (bunkai). The owners of the kata would keep the meaning of them secret except to the select students who were taught them, the moves and knowledge in the kata gave them a competetive advantage over the family or school on the next farm when issues arose and fisti-cuffs started. These "owners" also didn't have dozens of katas like we do these days, they had just a few which they honed to absolute perfection.

You don't use all the moves in a kata one after the other until the opponent falls over - if you need more than one or two moves from a kata then you are doing it wrong. In some kata the third move may be the same as the first move but they are not necessarily doing the same thing. In a sequence of moves that consist of a straight punch followed by a groin block followed by another straight punch, consider this:

1. taken individually, the straight punches can both be doing exactly the same thing
2. the first straight punch is done followed by the groin block
3. the groin block is done first followed by a straight punch

In cases 2 & 3 the straight punch can be doing something vastly different. When in a fight I can use moves 2 and 10 from the kata provided I have sufficient understanding of it to do so, I don't have to start at move 1 and progress to move 2.

Each move from a kata has specific applications. After I execute one of these moves on an opponent, I know exactly the position he is going to be in, I know where his head should be, where his torso should be, etc. If I execute the same move with my eyes shut in a pitch black cave, I still know exactly what I have just done to him and his body position. Depending on the exact application I just used, I know whether I need to follow up with something else, and depending on his (and my) body position I know which kata technique I should use next.

Even simple bunkai is powerful. Take one simple move found in many kata: soto uke while pivoting sideways into kiba dachi (inner block while pivoting sideways into horse riding stance). Depending on how I'm engaged with the opponent when I start this move it is either an arm break/elbow dislocation, a knockout, or a hip dislocation. This stuff is all buried in the kata. If successfully executed then this move is all I need to stop the fight.

Kata trains the mind and muscle memory. Every single move you execute in a kata, you should be visualising what you are doing on your opponent. As your knowledge grows you will have more options to visualise, even back in the basic kata you learnt when you were a white belt. This visualisation is what helps to cement the knowledge I talked about in my previous point, where I know exactly what I've just done and what position the opponent is in. Visualising the bunkai of the kata assists with the state of mushin, where you do not have to consciously think about your current or next move, it just flows.

¹ I will try to dig out some citations to support this in the next day or two.

² Please please please stop and ask yourself: what happened to the first guy where all you did was block his technique? Is he going to stand there and patiently wait for his next turn while you deal with his friend? Do you really believe kata are teaching you that?

³ I should point out that the Taikyoku katas are a watered down or simplified version of the Heian and Kusanku katas.

Answer 2

There are a couple of different reasons I can see for the use of forms.

The first is that they are a functional mechanism of communicating patterns of movement that tend to go together, and to ingrain those movements into muscle memory. I've seen a few people talk about doing something in real life, only to realize later that it was part of some form that they had practiced. It is worth reflecting that many of these arts, at their very core, started as ways to survive a life-and-death situation, and kata is a traditional way of safely practicing this.

To go with Rory Miller's statement from his book Drills:

Fighting is inherently conservative and this shows in martial arts. Fighting is dangerous. People get hurt and killed. For everything that might work there are a hundred things that seem like a good idea that can lead to a messy death. We have kata and tradition NOT because people are stuck in tradition but because when people consistently survived it was considered imperative to remember how to model it.

He also comments in Meditations on Violence, describing something that happened in real life, that "Occasionally, I would have an encounter, often an intense one, and later see the action in my wife's Karate kata."

The other part of it is that there is a distinction between simply following the forms by rote and actually trying to understand what is going on. In the book The Way of Kata by Kane and Wilder describes the idea that "kata is our textbook." Essentially that the essence of the art is stored in the forms, you just have to know how to read it, and the exact lesson that is being communicated may be different for each art.

To compare it to the game of Go: we have patterns that can form in the corners called (in Japanese) joseki. These are patterns that are supposed to be locally optimal for both players. Real games aren't exactly like what happens in the joseki: the surrounding situation modifies what moves make sense. Memorizing joseki and following them by rote is a recipe for disaster, and it is possible to get reasonably strong (at an amateur level, at least) without any detailed work with joseki.

But there's a lot of value in the study of joseki. Trying to understanding the "why" of each move and trying to understand when it makes sense to play that way, when it makes sense to deviate, and whether and to what degree you may be able to take advantage if your opponent deviates.

I feel similarly about forms. They aren't necessary, and memorizing them without actually trying to understand them is only of limited value (good for muscle memory, so maybe your body will understand more of the "why" even if you don't, also potentially troublesome depending), but there's a lot that can be gained from their detailed study and trying to understand them in the context of what the art is trying to achieve.

Answer 3

I think the main purpose of forms(kata) is muscle memory, drill something enough, and it you will be able to do it without thinking.

the precision and exactness of the forms also encourages the participant to focus on the little details of a technique which will make their over all technique much better.

the final reason i see for doing forms/kata is discipline, doing the same thing over and over gets boring and it builds discipline and character to be-able to get past that and maintain focus.

one other thing some people may find that doing forms/kata is a form of meditation.

Answer 4

Forms are a way to transfer the knowledge from instructor to the student. In many cases, forms are what defines specific martial art. Change the form and you have different martial art. If only one practitioner is left of the entire art, the art still can be resurrected via forms.

That's what I was taught and this is my belief as student and instructor.

I agree with other answer, though. Muscle memory, focus and precision are important outcomes of kata practice. They are developed as specific individual practices the form many times and gains understanding of knowledge getting transmitted.

Answer 5

There are some excellent answers here.

There is a use for kata that goes beyond muscle memory or instilling discipline through boredom. I am reminded of it just now when reading this answer.

Stilling your mind is difficult just sitting down. Stilling your mind while standing is harder. Stilling your mind while walking is harder still. It is most difficult when you are in physical conflict with someone else. Kata provides a stable physical base for you to work on stilling the mind ... but I suppose that means you need to first practice until you are as unconscious of kata as you are of walking.

Answer 6

A slightly different answer than the others above: forms are excellent relevant exercise.

Using myself as a specific example: if I perform every poomse from Taeguk Il Jang to Taebaek with total focus on form, accuracy and power, I will have tested my flexibility, exercised my core and soaked myself in sweat. When I have an hour that I can dedicate, I'll run through them all three times.

Note that relevant is important. Sure, I can (and do) exercise my core with crunches. However, poomse has always struck me as exercise with purpose, intent and relevance.

Answer 7

One thing to keep in mind is that most all Kata are extremely contrived. You will never, in a real situation, find yourself in a situation where a Kata fits fully.

Kata are trained to teach you two things. First they are there to train your body to move without thinking, muscle memory, like Patricia stated. Secondly they are to teach you to keep moving. To quote Johannes Liechtenauer "He who is still, is dead, he who moves will live". They teach you to keep moving, and applying small aspects of many different Kata.

Answer 8

Forms are good to check your posture and correct execution of the techniques.

For some time I knew my posture was wrong : I am arching my back when I should not, which mean that on some blocks I would not correctly transfer the strenght of the attack to my legs and the floor.

By working my form, I am now able to slowly but sure correct this bad back posture. I am now improving not only my martial skills but protecting my back for my old days.

Kata or Form do allow the instructor to check that the moves are well performed and would work. It would be harder for my instructor notice my failing in a dynamic execution.

Answer 9

In some way it really depends on the type of kata as well, to use Renshinkan Shorinji-Ryu Karate-Do as an example, one can argue that the kata come in two types, those that typify the core kata that in part define the style for what it is, and Yakusoku Kumite which isn't generally called a kata but which arguable is one.

The kata that define the style are in part just that, a way of defining the style and making it stand apart from others. If you look at the way one karata-ka does Seisan-no-kata (Kata Seisan) and compare it to another you can usually tell if they are doing the same style or not and if their "Kata Seisan" is related to each other or not, thus, defining the style. In terms of how my sensei has instructor me, the kata also provide you with a means of practicing all of your "basics" at once in a more fluid motion that would be more typical of an actual combat situation. We are generally stressed not to just "go through the motions" but make it actually look like we would injure someone with a punch and really bock someone with our blocks while doing the kata.

In regards to the second part, Yakusoku Kumite, or "Prearranged Sparring," as to if it counts as a proper kata is arguable as it requires two people and is done in short bursts, but it is stressed as soon as you make san-kyu (green belt) because it also stresses the application of the "basics" in a more rigorous environment that also drills offensive and defensive muscle memory into you. One of my instructors always mentions that "Yakusoku Kumite is where Renshinkan goes for self defense" and it makes sense because you do it so much and for so long. From the stand point of a kata though, it doesn't really look like one as it lacks the "showiness" that most people tend to associate with kata. However, on the other hand, it is definitively a fixed set of forms that are drilled and you can definitively see what the applications of them would be.

Also, consider things from the stand point of instruction in an art, kata are usually complex enough that you can see where students are having issue and it also provides a situation where they can really be placed under a microscope. If you throw punches at the air often enough you can make it look good and sparring tends to be chaotic enough that even an expert may not look like one, but when you make someone do a series of techniques while moving around their flaws tend to show through and you can generally tell someone who really owns what they are doing from someone that is just going through the motions.

So to summarize:

• The type of kata in part defines it purpose
• Some kata are used to define the style and make it stand on its own from others
• Kata provide you with a venue to practice your "basics" in a way that isn't just doing the same motion repeatedly
• Kata can also provide a venue for drilling offensive and defensive techniques that you may come to eventually default to when needed
• Kata provide instructors with a way of testing students to see where their weaknesses are by forcing the student to learn to "own" the kata

Answer 10

In addition to the excellent answers by Patricia and David H. Clements, let me add two small historical foot notes.

Some kata were developed to hide essence of a technique with extra movements. Thus, it allowed the master to teach something to all the students but only those with insights or special favours would be given the heart of how it worked. This would work as well as an obfuscation to any spy that wanted to learn how to defeat said style by observation. How effective those were, I do not know.

Some schools claimed to teach fighting styles in times of peace were duels and fighting was no longer du jour. Those would use paired kata as a way to simulate fights without resorting to sport.

Edit: In a similar way, the names of the techniques were obfuscating what the technique was about. Kano, Tomiki, and Bruce Lee (to name but three) all changes the names to reflect more what they were about rather than some abstract concept. While not directly linked to obfuscating movement, it is obfuscation nonetheless.

Answer 11

IMHO, forms have purpose and are extremely beneficial. Martial Arts isn't just about the physical. If the mind can't execute then your technique will be useless.

"My mind is my blade." - Lyoto Machida

Forms on a high-level is a meditative practice. Forms training can provide a type of "walking meditation" or "dynamic meditation" similar to the practice of zen monks. Forms allow one to train in aspects of fluid motion, no mind, and matching breathing to your technique and even to the nervous system.

Answer 12

What purposes do they serve?

1) They correct your mistakes while you a learning (for example, if you don't keep your back straight, your form would not look right etc)

2) They help you fight (yes, they do!); there is a simple but very powerful exercise - try to fight (spar) using movements from the kata and nothing else (as much as you can do it); I have done it many times and it works great

3) They work as a great riddles - ask everyone to come up with 1-2 different bunkais for a certain kata element and you will be surprised

Answer 13

Kata's normally don't have any 'real world' implications. Because they are basically a predefined chain of movements that almost would never happen in the real world. But Kata's are still important for the following reasons:

• It slows down the art, allowing you to work on form
• In a Kata you move with power and purpose, snapping your action
• You work in completely control, focusing on each action
• Ki Ups's and sound offs to generate power
• Action chaining and flow and builds muscle memory
• Your practicing how many others through time have practiced

A Kata will teach you discipline, focus and allow you to prefect the motions and actions in the Kata. Don't overlook them and take them seriously as they can be an integral component to your growth as a martial artist. Work on snapping, moving with power and purpose and try and be as accurate as possible when your going through your Kata, that muscle memory will translate over to your other actions.

Answer 14

Forms will teach you almost everything.

You start with a basic form, mostly stances and a few basic moves. They go into muscle memory, forms are an excelent way for that. You also learn how to learn, because martials arts have a different learning way, and you learn to trust your teacher.

Then you get a form with some complex movements, like kicking and punching or blocking and kicking at the same time. You improve coordination, balance and start developing some muscles you weren't aware you had. You learn to know your body.

At some point you learn a two people form, which will teach you more coordination, timing and a lot about hitting and not being hit. It's not real combat, though.

As you don't stop practicing your forms, the new ones teach you something you didn't learn the first times. That takes discipline, but you start evolving the form and learning how to express yourself through the form.

If you learn a form from 3 different people you get 3 different visions, which is confusing but really useful, because forms have a lot of angles.

Depending on the teacher and the martial art, there will be a fixed curriculum or the students will get the forms in the order that matches their needs. For example, people with weak balance should get a form with a lot of moves that requires good balance, but the guys that are too rooted should get a different form.

Forms might not be the best or quickest way to learn everything, but time has proved they are way to do it.

Answer 15

Originally Kata was practiced with 3 attackers. It was used to teach students how to react when faced with dangerous situations. Although this is not used these days some instructors may still use this technique to put Kata into perspective.

Answer 16

Solo kata

I trained kata-heavy karate pretty seriously for a while, and most of what I got from that part of training was the ability to look silly and ineffectual while trying to look scary. I have a few trophies from the (in-house and local) kata tournaments, too. Today, I consider kata (the way the vast majority of people do it) to be a dance for people who'd rather not learn how to fight.

There are a number of problems with punching the air as a primary method of learning self-defense. Matt Thornton describes some:

The main reason people falsely believe forms have some sort of value is usually listed as "muscle memory". The idea that a move repeated enough times, becomes smoother, or more accessible during an altercation. Repeating a move over and over again in the air will do absolutely nothing for your reflexes or so called 'muscle memory'. In fact, repeating a move or series of moves over and over again in the same pattern and sequence will actually be counter productive to your bodies ability to respond quickly.

First, there is no TIMING, without a resisting opponent in front of you. Since there is no timing to be had, your reflexes, or response time against a resisting opponent, will not change, increase, or be helped in the least.

Second, there is no impact, as there is against a heavy bag. So there will be no benefit to your strength, body mechanics, or conditioning. In fact, your body mechanics may become altered in correctly due to the fact that you are not making impact against anything, but merely striking 'air'.

Worse yet, solo kata often involves either convoluted low-percentage applications, or use-your-imagination reverse engineering exercises where someone who doesn't know why a given move is in the kata simply tries to make up a scenario where the move makes sense. This is madness.

But of course kata comes with all the benefits of dance: it's fun and keeps people interested, it involves a little bit of moving around with varying degrees of vigor, it requires varying degrees of strength and flexibility. As an added bonus, kata are used in many martial arts schools as a way to keep students busy with an extended curriculum without really challenging them. (Scheduling a ring fight or grappling tournament would be challenging. It would also cause massive attrition.)

However, done correctly, solo kata can be part of a complete breakfast for developing and demonstrating gymnastic-level strength and mobility in the context of showing off some fundamental movements of the style. Tai chi forms competitions are quite impressive in this regard. (XMA--extreme martial arts--take this to a new level, a level with lots of shouting and posing, that I find particularly distasteful.)

Historically, solo kata were also a swell mnemonic to remember all the moves Teacher was showing you and your five classmates, because you were all illiterate and didn't have DVDs. Later, they were also useful to the Japanese government as a highly patriotic form of physical culture that happened to inculcate bloodthirstiness and an affinity for militaristic formations in large numbers of schoolkids:

Partner kata

Many styles of koryu and grappling utilize two-person forms. These can be used to little effect just as solo forms can, but they are frequently done with at least some degree of resistance and testing. Steve Scott illustrates for us the kata situation in modern American judo:

For instance, when someone practices nage no kata, he should actually do the throws and perform the skills in such a way that uke doesn't have to "jump for tori to make the throw look good" (as I once heard a semi-famous American judo instructor tell a young black belt at a kata clinic who was having trouble with uchi mata).

Jumping for tori isn't what doing nage no kata is all about. Same with doing any technique or skill. The technique has to actually work.

Of course, describing that ideal requires noticing that judoka often fall short and just parrot the moves. But even that is at least a little better than solo kata--you get the chance to throw your partner, and work on a little bit of (contrived, but potentially pedagogically useful) timing.

(Steve Scott actually has a quite intriguing and compelling view on the place of kata in everyday judo practice, which he describes in the October 2010 issue of his Welcome Mat newsletter. Essentially, he says that you should do kata every practice...in the form of drilling.)