Pattern Drills: A Requisite Training Methodology Towards Combative Effectiveness

What Are Kata?

It is in vogue—and has been as long as I can remember—to deride kata as idealized, sterile, impractical choreography, a poor simulacrum of real combat. Only through unrestricted freestyle practice, such critics say, can one truly understand the realities of combat. Before I question this absolutist assertion, I will start by saying that I’m a proponent of sparring, and freestyle practice—but it is not fighting any more than pattern drills are. Only fighting is fighting. Once you bring weaponry in, how do you do this safely without killing each other? In fact, that is true for unarmed competition as well.

Any competition with rules is actually a kind of kata. For example, how would MMA change if you could bite? How about finger breaks? Like the legendary (did it really happen?) ‘wrassling’ of the Mississippi Riverboat Men, eyes could be popped out of people’s heads, noses bitten off, fingers broken one after another. Then again, isn’t the reality of human combative situations that fighters often have friends and allies? Shouldn’t it be permissible for someone in the audience to throw in weapons, like one of the old ECW wrestling matches?  How about a live grenade and stop the entire show right there? True story follows:

When I was a young man, training muay thai in Koei Gym in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, a Thai boxing coach tried to recruit me to go to Thailand to fight, specifically to be a two-meter-tall, half-starved middleweight freak farang who would travel with him to the rural areas to fight village champions and make money through betting on the outcome. I said that as middleweight, I’d be so weak that I’d barely be able to move. He said, “Yes! We bet on you to lose! If you win, someone might throw a grenade in the ring.”

Kata is any imposition of order on the bloody chaos of combat. The only question of value, then, is if the pattern drill serves the purpose for which it is created. If I bring a pattern to a tailor, will the clothes fit? If I bring a music score to an orchestra, do the various parts create harmony among the musicians? If I develop a martial arts pattern drill, does it create training scars, habits that actually make you vulnerable rather than stronger, or does that kata enable you to integrate skills so that you can use them effectively, without hesitation, in combat or competition, whichever is the purpose?

Here’s a pattern drill, called “Tactical Two-Step,” which is part of Arrestling training. Two individuals, wearing eye protection, are in adjacent areas, approximately six feet deep and ten feet wide. They face each other. Behind each of them is a table with a SIMUNITIONS gun, and two magazines. At a signal, the two individuals whirl around, load their weapon, pick up the extra magazine, turn again, and start trying to shoot the other person at point blank range while they are trying to shoot you—running and gunning in a box. And reloading as well. Notice all the skills that are being trained: weapons management, control of fear (or anger—SIM rounds can fucking hurt!), accuracy of shooting while moving and dodging. Is this a gun fight? No, it is not. Imagine if we used real bullets instead of SIM rounds; isn’t it likely that the participants might behave differently, even though they shouldn’t? The purpose of a pattern drill is to isolate out a circumscribed set of skills that one can practice all-out, so that if in an actual event, a set of survival-based automatic responses will be so engrained that they are inevitable.

I used to spar with a Greco-Roman wrestler, who was both more powerful and a far better wrestler than me. But he was, at that time, ONLY a Greco-Roman wrestler, and I repeatedly would get him in guillotine chokes. His kata was getting him ‘killed.’ (That only lasted so long—we were friends, and training to improve each other’s skills, so I showed him what I was doing. My victories subsequently went into a tailspin.)

The test of any kata, then, is if it actually contributes to the skills one is striving to acquire. Every method, however, has limitations, and one must be mindful of what they are so that one does not get locked into a ‘kata horizon line.’ Let us look at various kata methodologies and both their benefits and limits:

• One-technique pattern drills. These are real techniques practiced in isolation without realistic set-up or flow. They are great for focusing on a specific technical problem. However, because there is no natural flow into the technique, or even a logical reason to be in that dilemma, one will not in the proper mindset or ‘physical set.’ What I mean by the latter phrase is that events in combative situations happen in chaos, off balance, running towards or away from the other, avoiding something or someone else, etc. One-technique pattern drills enable one to hone the fine-points of the technique itself. However, a person’s skills may very well break down when required to act within a complex situation with a number of additional variables.
• Limitation of speed or power. Both of these methods can allow one to train while injured or when learning a technique that requires complex motor skills. However, there are many things that one can do to another when enacting the technique in slow motion (particularly when one person unconsciously speeds up a little). Similarly, one can be an apparent ‘master’ against opponents who are not exerting power. For example, many arms-length grappling systems (aikido being merely the most prominent) often make a false dichotomy between power, which is postulated as crude and relaxation. How about a powerful attacker whose grab is the human equivalent of a lobster-claw, yet they are in a state of tensile relaxation?
• Dead-end kata. This is any technique that, if it fails, or the opponent attacks in an unexpected manner, one is in a ‘dead-end,’ unable to protect oneself or counter-attack. Here, if the technique is countered, or the enemy attacks differently than one expected, the person is helpless, literally in a ‘dead end.’ One example of this is a ‘sacrifice technique’ – for example, clinging to a person and dropping with all one’s body weight. If your opponent can ground himself, you’ve dropped into a vulnerable position with little option for escape or countering their counter-move. Another example of this could be seen when several young men joined my Araki-ryu – they had trained since childhood in what I call ‘Euro-Jujutsu’ – these are schools that have tens if not hundreds of one-technique pattern drills as well as multi-technique choreography, none of which were truly pressure tested. When they tried to apply a technique and failed, they were lost. I am not saying, by the way, that ‘dead-end techniques should not be used. Sometimes one has to take a risk to win.
• A useless type of kata is a fantasy pattern drill—this is referred to as tate (殺陣) in Japanese. This is a long sequence of moves that tell a story, an alleged inevitable sequence of moves that portray a fight from start to finish, similar to ‘stage combat.’ This is quite common in modern Chinese exhibition martial arts. This type of choreography can require an incredible level of athletic ability, but it is not all that useful from a martial perspective.
• What traditional Japanese martial arts have created, at best, are complex, sequential, multi-technique pattern drills. Unlike the choreography in tate, the techniques are like beads on a rosary: each one, in isolation, is developed to achieve advantage over the other (or is a potential killing blow). The genius of such a kata is that the techniques are ‘blurred,’ so that on can flow into one after another, realistically. In other words, one redirects one’s attack or is countered in such a way that one is put in a disadvantageous position, and from there, as if at random, one continues to attack or defend. Not only that, when properly constructed, dead-end techniques are very rare in such kata – and are consciously highlighted by instruction from the teacher. Usually, a set of pattern-drills, properly constructed, should be built in such a way that if the enemy attacks high instead of low, as expected, or stabs instead of cuts, the trainee unconsciously/automatically counters and counter-attacks without hesitation, because that is the set of reflexes that the pattern drills impose on the neuro-muscular system. Even more important, there can be multiple kata in a set – and they should ‘dovetail,’ so that each pattern drill provides answers to unanswered problems in other kata. In that sense, there is not a ‘list’ of kata – there is a ‘meta-kata.’  We see this in pugilism, and grappling; of course, both of these, however, are within the ‘meta-kata‘ of the sports’ rulesets. True kata should contribute to this ability in the chaos of real combat. 

As elegant a proposition as this sounds, traditional Japanese martial arts have been practiced for hundreds of years by individuals, 99% of whom never experienced any sort of combative engagement. If a combative method is practiced without combative experience, it inevitably degenerates or changes into something else. Even without the anvil of war, if one doesn’t regularly pressure-test pattern-drills, they inevitably deteriorate, from generation to generation: elements of drama are added, or someone ‘innovates,’ not based on experience, but because, in their imagination, their innovation will work. Because such an individual is in authority, they are usually not challenged by their students, no matter how inane the methodology; their new method becomes the ‘real method,’ and elegant rationalizations are created to justify the technique.

• I recall an account of a type of Chinese staff fighting, where, at a certain moment, counter-intuitively, one steps forward towards the attacker, and enacts some sort of technique. For several generations, students asked about this, and all sorts of rationalizations were offered by their teachers. Eventually, this group got together with the ‘mainline,’ which had been continued by the founding family in the home village. They compared forms, and the home village group stepped back where the offshoot group stepped forwards. The latter group asked why this was done, saying that they had been taught by the leading student of the current teacher’s grandfather. The reply was, “Oh, grandfather used to teach in a really small room, and we had to step forward so we wouldn’t bump into the wall. After your grand-teacher left the village, we got a bigger place to practice and did it correctly.”
• Another example of this: I’m currently learning more about pistol craft, and doing a lot of dry-firing. My instructor has me doing a draw, aim, shoot, scan, reholster. The problem is that there is an extra step – I have to rack the slide and reset the trigger to enact the sequence again. What we came up with is that, after the scan, when I rack the slide and the dummy round is ejected, I say aloud, “This is not the kata” – my instructor does not want to engrain in me, to any degree, a reflex of pulling the slide back after I fire a single round. By the way, this would create its own problem, as my friend, Kevin Tsai points out – mouthing “This is not the kata” would become part of the kata. The answer to that is to add different drills, in particular life-fire, where the problem doesn’t arise at all, as well as SIRT pistol training, where the problem doesn’t arise because the trigger does not need to reset (it’s a laser training pistol).

Therefore, as wonderful a training method as pattern drill training may be, many martial traditions have created ‘live training’ methodologies. Hundreds of years ago, Japanese martial artists added a competitive practice, either with loose rules in the case of unarmed jujutsu, or ‘fighting’ while wearing safety equipment and using split-bamboo ‘swords,’ called shinai. [NOTE: Analogous methods to the latter exist for spear, naginata, and mokuju, the last a padded wooden rifle/bayonet analogue]. This added an element of risk, even danger, and definitely made more virile individuals than many of those who merely enacted kata. On the down side, the safety equipment and ‘competition weapons’ are substantially different from real weapons. Also, in the interest of safety, bound by cultural assumptions, and variety of other factors, winning in the competitive style required different techniques, even a differently trained body than the old-school methodology. For example, if you can win a match with a one-handed leaping tap to the head (the equivalent of the previously linked ‘superman punch,’ but far less effective with a real sword), most people will do so, because it will win you the match, even if that is something far removed from a killing cut with a sword. So, what happened to the already established pattern drills, once people started training to win within a rule set? The kata changed to become congruent with what was discovered in competition—this could, on the one hand, be due to the discovery of a weakness in the kata, but on the other hand, it could merely be a change to make the kata congruent to bamboo sword fencing, or grappling when there was no longer any need to fear one’s opponent suddenly pulling a weapon at close range.

Do Pattern Drills and Live-Training Have to Be in Conflict?

Particularly when weapons are involved, one is constrained in how ‘live’ one’s training can be. Therefore, even here, a type of pattern drill is imposed, circumscribing freestyle training so that people are protected by rules or equipment. However, there are a number of ways to train to most effectively integrate pattern drills and live training. Among them are:

• Train the kata themselves with intensity and will, taking each other to the edge of each’s abilities. Some incredibly virile schools, such as Jigen-ryū primarily training in solo strikes against a post/tree or in an off-shoot tradition, a horizontally-fixed bundle of sticks, as well as two person kata.
• Hone technique by repeating one-sequence kata. Use increasing pressure to make it difficult to execute the technique, and other times, make it easy, so that the person is ‘forced’ to find the perfect line, without being so scared or adrenalized that he falls back on untrained reflexes or previously learned martial techniques that are incongruent with his current study.
• Break the kata when someone is off-line, off-center, or wrong, and then attack that opening, abandoning the kata sequence
• Where more than one kata have the same technique (a thrust to the throat, for example) somewhere within their sequence, merge those two kata—the recipient does not know which of two (or more) of the following techniques they will receive. [For example, two kata have a kesa-gake cut with a sword. One follows this with a gyaku-kesa to the other side of the neck, whereas the 2nd bears downward and then reverses in a lateral slash to the opponent’s neck. The recipient doesn’t know which of those two secondary techniques is coming and must respond per the technique: countering the gayku-kesa or the lateral slash as it comes. Initially, do this only at one point per kata—eventually, it can be at multiple points. Similarly, when a number of kata have the same opening sequence (a strike to the neck, for example), the attacker is free to initiate any one of the kata that has that initial opening. In essence you will truly end up merging all the pattern drills in the aforementioned ‘meta-kata.’ This, by the way, will also reveal dead-end techniques that only offer maiming or death if the enemy doesn’t attack in the expected way (as per kata #x). 
• Eliminate dead-end techniques. Whenever I have found a technique (or sometimes an entire kata) that, de facto or by design, makes one vulnerable or helpless if the opponent attacks in a way not ‘according to choreography,’ I correct the technique or eliminate it. I have pared away kata from our curriculum and corrected others, something considered sacrilegious in most traditional Japanese martial arts circles, where practitioners regard themselves as maintaining an immutable cultural legacy. Ironically, many of these same schools have unquestioningly replicated methodologies that have been handed down in deteriorated (i.e., changed) form; others actually do make changes, either negative or positive, but pretend to the public, “It’s just the way it was four hundred years ago.” For my own part, there is certainly a lot that I do not know, but when I am clear that a technique will not work, will get one killed, or only work in a specific situation that you cannot ‘order up’ beforehand, I will not practice it and I will not teach it.
• Multi-Uke. Get two or more people surrounding one individual, and they attack one after the other, in the kata sequence. In other words, first attack is executed by person A, second attack by person B, etc. What this does is trains the person to execute the techniques in a 360 degree ambit, rather than the linear (dueling) sequence, one-on-one, that most kata practice has become.
• Running Attack. Get at opposite ends of the dojo, each with a weapon and run full tilt at each other. At the proper spacing, while running full tilt, try to execute a technique and simultaneously, defend yourself as best you can from the other person’s attack. This is a challenge because one is required to find center-balance-focus while in rapid motion, not pacing in a mannered imitation of a duel. This could be either the first move of a kata, previously designated or freestyle. What is useful about this, particularly the latter, is that you will be in a non-replicable engagement. Your balance, the juxtaposition of your bodies and weapons, timing, speed, spacing—all just ‘happen in the raw.’
• Pile up a number of weapons in the center of the dojo, and two people stand at opposite ends, and run and grab the first weapon that comes to hand, and try to execute a technique and simultaneously, defend yourself as best you can from the other person’s attack. This makes things even more mutually imbalanced than the running attack
• Armor up with protective equipment and weaponry and spar. Change the rules (targets) that one is free to attack. (In grappling, add or subtract different techniques—for example, what happens if you add finger locks? What happens if you forbid chokes?)
• Restricted sparring. One is only allowed to use certain techniques, or must defend against specific attacks. A friend of mine rolled for an hour with the brilliant Marcelo Garcia in Brazilian jiujitsu. Garcia told him that he was working on his rear-naked chokes, and proceeded to repeatedly tap out my friend, using that one technique only, while my friend, using everything he knew, was unable to stop him (or threaten him in the least).
• Deficit sparring and deficit kata training. One weapon is superior to the other. Substitute kodachi or tanto for a sword in a sword against spear kata.
• Add something that hurts. (Shock knife, for example)
• Spur of the moment sparring. Start with one set of conditions, and then add a new condition (for example, in the middle of a grapple, a third party slips a shock knife to one of the individuals, or when two people are sparring with swords, slide another weapon, perhaps a better one, off to the side, or between them).

One rule: you are not allowed to ‘win’ using something that won’t work, but you are allowed to ‘wound.’ For example, the aforementioned one-handed tap on the skull with a shinai would almost surely not incapacitate the enemy. It doesn’t mean that it should be ignored! One’s eyes would probably be covered with blood, and one might be concussed, even if not killed. One can die from attrition. However, as it is not an immediately incapacitating blow, it is not a ‘winning’ blow. For example, consider two scenarios with small blades:

1. A person with a very small blade slashes you towards the forearm at a range that you can stab them in a vital area. Do so!
2. A person with a very small blade slashes you towards the forearm at a range that you cannot stab them in a vital area. Either avoid the slash, deflect it or cut the slashing arm. (Ignoring those slashes can result in mutilation or eventual incapacity from blood loss, or emotional reactions to being wounded).

Setting the Skills

It is essential that one starts and finishes with the kata. For example, in Araki-ryu, we may start with several rounds of the torite kata  (there are close grappling with small blades involved, one way or the other). Then, extensively, we practice breaking the kata. For example, one form, Kiken no Kakari, starts with a kick to the head of a downed opponent. When they try to block the kick, one flows into an armlock. When breaking the kata, uke successfully blocks the kick, and then goes into a single-leg take-down of the kicker’s standing leg [and uke has a knife in his obi, which he now tries to use]. Tori, who executed the kick, was, per the kata, in control throughout, but is now struggling to survive. What we are doing is using the kata as a platform for freestyle from random positions, rather than the back-to-back, or fist bump, face-to-face, options that are so common in most grappling practices.

After a period of this pressure testing, improvisations off of a basic theme,  they return to the kata. We frame live training with pattern drills. If ever, in the course of this, we find that the kata  is training us to lose, then we have something to correct in the kata itself. For the most part, the kata provide a) training the ideal principles b) Given the trainees an opportunity to train hard, while simultaneously concentrating on proper physical organization c) training the mindset necessary to achieve that ideal outcome. Live training is a reality test, teaching adaptability and making the pattern drills part of the nervous system, rather than a choreography to be remembered and enacted only when the kata is named.

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