Karate-Do: My Way of Life – Visualization

“You must be deadly serious in training. When I say that, I do not mean that you should be reasonably diligent or moderately in earnest. I mean that your opponent must always be present in your mind, whether you sit or stand or walk or raise your arms…

“You may train for a long, long time, but if you merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet, learning karate is not very different from learning to dance.”
Gichin Funakoshi

I’ve learned many forms (kata in Japanese, poomse in Korean) during my years in the martial arts. Most of the forms are lost to me now. It takes them only a few months to fade; a year to completely vanish as useful exercises.

I practice my Neko Ryu forms every week; rotating them with other drills. It’s my intent to keep these forms always. I think forms are quickly forgotten because people fail to visualize a realistic opponent in every phase of the form.

My early training in Tae Kwan Do and Tang Soo Do was a mixture of forms, drills and sparring. There’s no problem visualizing the opponent when sparring against a live person. He stands before you. In sparring, the problem is maintaining good technique in the midst of competitive stress.

Visualization in drills is a mixed bag. Some drills use a live partner, others use a striking bag or target, and others use no tangible resistance. The last group makes it easy to “merely move your hands and feet and jump up and down like a puppet”.

Judo kata are performed with a live partner. Not surprisingly, I remember them better than the Tae Kwan Do and Tang Soo Do poomse.

“… the best way to understand Karate-Do is not only to practice the kata but also to gain an appreciation of the meaning inherent in each of the various kata.”
Gichin Funakoshi

All of my martial arts instructors explained the meaning of the movements of each form as they taught it. But none of them emphasized visualizing an opponent during the execution of the form. And, in truth, they didn’t emphasize the “meaning inherent” in each movement. Usually, their explanations responded to student questions. They were intended to provide enough “inherent meaning” to end the questioning not to truly communicate the form.

This was true of even my best instructors. Partially, this comes from the knowledge that repetition is the heart of learning a physical skill – especially a martial art. There’s a common saying in the martial arts that it takes a thousand repetitions to master a form.

I arrived at visualization in a roundabout way. After reading about visualization techniques used to enhance the performance of college and Olympic athletes, I looked for and found other visualization references. I made the connection to my martial arts and incorporated into each phase of every kata visualizing an opponent attacking me in a specific way.

Visualization trains my mind to recognize an attack and to respond automatically with an appropriately drilled defense-counterattack sequence. It also sharpens my techniques during the kata because each technique must reasonably succeed in my imagination. If there is no visualized opponent, there is no standard for measuring the technique’s effectiveness. Therein lays sloppiness.

Reading Funakoshi’s words, quoted from “Karate-Do: My Way of Life” at the beginning of this post, filled me with satisfaction and disappointment. I was filled with satisfaction, because I uncovered Funakoshi’s connection between visualization and kata independently; disappointment because this teaching wasn’t faithfully passed down the years through my lines of instructors. In all the years I’ve trained in the martial arts none of my instructors taught visualization as an integral part of kata or solo drill – I had to rediscover it for myself.

Link to the Special Report: "Karate-Do: My Way of Life - What All Martial Artists Can Learn From Gichin Funakoshi"