Real fighting skills vs Kata Form training

The question: Can you really learn to fight through form or Kata training?

The quick answer would be no! You can not really learn to fight with only training kata's or forms. (But!!!)

 

From personal experience I found that learning how to fight effectively against anything is really to fight against anything or spar. The point is that real fighting skills come from fighting and not from posture training. There is however a big but when I say these type of things. If one is a genius then maybe he really can learn how to fight with form or posture training. Chances are that you are not one of those geniuses. I know I'm not dumb, but I'm not a genius by any means. The other but is that kata and form training do however give you new abilities.

What are postures, forms or kata's good for?

You would first want to know why people invented those forms anyway. There is an old Chinese fighting style called Tong Bei. The style incorporates soft techniques like taiji, bagua, and Hsingyi, but also has hard components like shaolin Lohan boxing. Tong Bei is actually one of the oldest Chinese fighting systems out there. In old school Tong Bei training (note that Tong Bei was used in war) they would practice individual techniques, forms where only invented later. But even though the forms where invented later, students of Tong Bei only start training forms after they know all the basic techniques. Kata's teach you to perfect your movement and is only designed for this purpose. If you train postures long enough it will become second nature. Let's take running as an example: first you start running, but after a while you keep one tempo with one breath technique to keep energy within the body and not over exhaust yourself. When you have found this tempo, the next time you will run you will automatically go into your running mode. Which is the tempo explained above. The same applies to forms and kata's, but without the tempo in mind(that's another post if you ask me). You will automatically go into a posture of the form that you are training after a while.

 

Tong Bei Application training:

If you look closely to the next video and if you take away some the obvious Karata in this form, you will see it has some taiji principles hidden inside. But done in a Karata way of course, it's just my opinion.

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