Flow Drills – Valuable Tools or Wastes of Time?
Flow drills are common teaching tools in many martial arts, but are they valuable, or wastes of time?
bunkai
Competition Kakedameshi Ruleset
For many years, I have been an advocate of the use of kakedameshi (lit. “test of hanging/hooked hands”), or “sticky hands sparring,” for pressure testing neoclassical/practical karate, even writing an article for Bugeisha Issue #9 on the subject, and teaching multiple seminars on how to engage in kakedameshi. In short, kakedameshi is a symmetrical sparring method where both participants must […]
Seminar Announcement: Wansu Bunkai – Jan. 25th, 2025 – Roanoke, IL
Join World Combat Association Instructor, INKKS co-founder, and internationally recognized practical karate expert, Noah Legel, Renshi, for a bunkai seminar on the kata Wansu in Roanoke, IL, on Jan. 25th 2025.
The Practical Karate Training Methodology: A Primer
The majority of karate schools, today, fall into two camps, both of which are almost entirely creations of Post-WW2 Japan: That said, there is a third camp that has been growing in popularity: I honestly don’t think I need to go into much detail on how the first two train, because they are so popular; they almost exclusively follow a […]
Kata Wormholes
Most karateka spend a great deal of time learning and practicing kata, which is fitting, given that the kata are templates for the curriculum of karate, but as the art has morphed into a tradition-based art over the past century, the way that people train and practice kata has changed. As recently as the mid-20th Century CE, kata were regularly taught differently to […]
Karate’s Wooden Dummy: The Kakiya/Kakete-Biki
Most martial artists have seen the so-called “Wing Chun dummy,” which is actually called a muk yan jong in Cantonese, or mu ren zhuang in Mandarin, meaning “wooden man post.” This training tool was widely popularized by Bruce Lee and, more recently, the Ip Man series of movies, starting Donnie Yen. While these dummies were developed for Chinese martial arts, […]
KishimotoDi Revisited: Exploring the Shuri-Te Roots of Okinawan Karate
On February 4th, 2020, Ulf Karlsson landed in Phoenix, AZ for the first time in nearly 6 years. For those who are unaware, Ulf Karlsson is the foremost expert (outside of Okinawa) in the rare style of Shuri-Te called KishimotoDi, and is the only person to be granted a Shihan license in the art by the Bugeikan on Okinawa. On […]
What is “Traditional Karate,” Really?
Many people claim to teach “traditional karate,” and even advertise it as such, but what does that mean, exactly? If we define the word “tradition,” as the dictionary does, it means “a long-established custom or belief that has been passed on from one generation to another,” or “an artistic or literary method or style established by an artist, writer, or […]
The Scissor/Wedge Throws of Tachimura no Naihanchi
The art of KishimotoDi (AKA, Kishimoto-Ha Karate/Shuri-Te) is an interesting look into the Shuri-classified (or Tomari-classified, if you prefer to look at it that way) karate of the past, before its popularization by Itosu “Anko” Yasutsune and his disciples. As this style is is rare, only a small number of practitioners around the world study it, so it has been […]
The Five Elements of Karate
“Karate” is a broad term, which covers many different martial methodologies and styles originating on Okinawa and, later, Japan. There are a number of misconceptions about what karate is, although there has been a movement–a sort of “karate Renaissance”–in the past decade, or so, which has been making more information about karate available, and promotes a practical approach to the […]
The Purpose of Karate Stances
A common complaint about karate, and its kata, is that the stances are impractical–that one would never use such stances in a “real fight.” This goes along with the general complaint about kamae (postures) found in kata being impractical guards for fighting from (as discussed in this article: LINK). This tends to stem form the fact that the word tachi […]
