Monday, May 10, 2010

The value of Kamae

©NamdevKLD

Most of us watch training videos. We watch to see what interesting and crazy things those silly people have dreamed up when it comes to devastation to the human physique. All of us have watched martial arts training videos from other forms of martial arts, perhaps to learn, perhaps to mock. Much of what others do is similar, after all, in the end there are only so many ways a body can be moved or controlled. We are all built from the same mold and what works on me will most likely have a similar affect on someone else. There are exceptions to some of these rules, but mostly a broken neck will surely end the confrontation.

What I find funny is that we all watch the vid’s and come across things like the postures (kamae) and have ourselves a little giggle. Why not, they look silly, don’t they? Sometimes teetering on a precarious, off balance punch, sometimes doing things like standing with one leg in the air (thank you karate kid). We then say, sometimes out loud, “that is so f*ing unrealistic!”

I have been guilty of this in the past myself...even in my own martial art. Arrogance, thy name is absolute. Humility is a thing highly underrated in martial arts. After all, it is not part of a martial art’s nature for the participant to actually assume he doesn’t know everything. That’s one of those things that comes with age I guess.

A kamae, by the most primitive definition is a posture taken up by the martial arts student. It is best available to anyone who’s ever watched boxing, or MMA or better, martial arts movies. A boxer or MMA fighter’s ‘lead’ is what most of us call a kamae. We see that lead foot standing out before the other and the arms up in a defensive position and him rocking or moving on his feet, but always when his feet land, returning to this basic position. That’s what we think of as kamae. In movies of course, they take up a wide difference of kamae from Horse to Bruce Lee’s Dokko variations. And worse, they, the movie versions, will hold that kamae until the very moment of the attack and then flutter through a flurry of punch / kicks / throws and end back in that kamae. As if before the kicks and punches they were a still lake then the chaos of the fight and right back to the quiet body of water.

This is bullshit. Kamae maybe obvious when we stand still, but the reality is that we are always in kamae, every single second of every single waking moment. We are not stuffed animals, nor chiseled granite statues. We are flesh and blood, living, mechanical, transient beings. Our brains are fluttering from thought to thought, from position to point of fact. We change every single moment. It is our very nature to be change right down to how often hair regrows or how often skin is shed. We even have the ability to change the way we remember, to think, to ponder. How then, can such a thing ever be reflected as a stagnant statue of obvious position? Does a bird in flight ever stop being in kamae? His very wings are perfectly in place, doing exactly what they are meant to do with each stroke through the air. Animals have the luxury of mushin so they don’t get caught in the minutia of thought and worse, get trapped by standing still.

Now, does that mean you shouldn’t practice kamae? Hell no. In fact you should slow it all down to a point that it barely moves and you feel how your starting kamae moves you from position to position and you are in fact flowing through a whole series of different kamae until you decide to stop flowing through them.

A general sitting in the ranks of his advancing army is well aware of ‘kamae’. His moving army represents a shape, a position is space and time. He, hopefully, has build a strategy and is attempting to apply a series of tactics by using his armies ‘kamae’ to defeat the opponent. Now, in war, the general can see what his right flank is doing and what his center is doing. He can witness it from a larger, top down view, so that he himself does not get caught up in the fray. In other words, he can see enough of the big stuff, that the individual bullets or fists or knives moving so fast do not distract him from the whole of his strategy. If for example, he sees his left flank being overpowered and pushed back off the field, he can push his center forward turn his left to the right and hopefully pincher the opponent. Now as an individual, we should always see ourselves not trapped in the time it takes to fight, but instead, look at our own ‘kamae’ as way to move into better position and do the most devastation to the opponent without increasing the net harm we will receive. And remember, you will be hit.

My OODA loop is pretty slow, I admit it. So I use kamae as a way to create better defenses through the act of moving and evading and keeping my foot soldiers before the enemy so that when my ability to orient and act catch up, hopefully I have moved enough of my army into a position to act quickly and disrupt their OODA loop. Start looking at kamae as part of your holistic* necessity of your strategy.


*Makes me sad that the word Holistic has lost its true meaning, which is an idea that holds all the properties of a given system and must only be explainable by the combined, collective pieces and that no single piece can define or explain the behavior of the whole. “The whole is more than the sum of the parts”