Strategies for Shi-ai
Introduction to Shi-ai
I entered competition karate for the first time at the age of 14, as a 3rd kyu competitor for the Goju-Kai Karate club. I was a timid girl back then, reluctant to compete at first. But things change, and I soon found a love of competition karate. It wasn't until I was invested under the tutelage of Shihan Yamashita that two important things happened. One, I grew to understand that competition wasn't a be all and end in in itself. Two, it was possible to be exceedingly successful in shi-ai, competition karate, by following what became my own personal formula for my success, as well as that of my competitive peers.
What follows below is my successful model for competition karate. You will be pleased to see that many factors aren't strictly ingredients of a competition karate recipe but can indeed overflow to karate that is used every day, (as in Hideo Ochai's Living -everyday- Karate. It's a good book! Go and find it!)
Preparing to enter the tournament means grasping a solid recognition for the whole "big picture" of Karate fighting. There are dangers involved. Particularly as in the case of the kidokai freestyle bouts definitive of SKR. (As I realised over a decade ago!) It is even then possbile to survive the full-contact karate trauma, provided you will be diligent and follow the following prescribed routine.
Understanding yourself is the first key. We are the soft machine, the body, encasing the essence of that which we are - the spirit. Somewhere between the concrete and the seemingly nonexistential is the combining and controlling mechanism - the heart or mind. So, we have that we are body, spirit and mind. Prepare these properly, and you are half the way there. Where? Wherever you will go with your tournament career.
Inadequate physical preparation leaves you just as prone and vulnerable as not addressing the spiritual and mental conditioning elements. So, "let us proceed with absolute caution," as Uehara Shihan would say, meaning that the underpinning secret to success is personal preparation on all three levels.
PHYSICAL PREPARATION
CONDITIONING
The body is balance and power. It can be as soft as it is hard; as fast as it is slow; as tensed as it can be relaxed. Physical conditioning necessary to withstand harm and deliver decisive techniques comes from understanding exactly what the body is. Conditioning should aim to enhance what already exists; and bring into existance whatever does not yet exist.
Start by understanding that without balance, one does not stand. Without a stance, one has not a platform from whcih to launch techniques. This rule is just as important as realising that there is a time for hard, solid and tensed technique; and times for light, fast and quick movements. Notice how a cat will prance and dance, while playing with a butterfly or insect trapped in the house. Notice how the same cat becomes practically motionless when facing a cat the same size or larger than itself in a territorial dispute. But you see, animals know by instinct the things we are forced to achieve through arduous and assiduous efforts in the dojo.
Your personal style will need to achieve hard and devastating techniques, powerful enough to deliver one, fully-focused and potentially lethal blow. To develop go-waza, therefore, train your body's major muscle groups. This will shock you - BUT also train the bone underneath! Use a regimen of increasing muscular endurance and power. I fully esteem the useage of nigiri-game, gripping pots with a circular open mouth that you can fill with increasingly heavier weights of pebbles (or plain dirt, if nothing else is at hand). Hold these stone filled jars to the sides; or one in front and one behind in all the stances you will be using in competition: kiba-dachi, sanchin-dachi, zenkutsu-dachi. Now, start 6 to 8 weeks before competition, if your style does not use these indispensable items. Increase your endurance muscle until you can stand with medium to heavy weights in kiba dachi for at least 17 minutes if you are a girl. Or 25 minutes if you are not. This increases endurance and power in your stances, trunk and arms. It's amazing how many karate competitors do NOT possess nearly enough stamina in their stances!
Use hand held weights (up to 10kg if you are a girl; up to 16kg if not), and perform soto-uke, uchi-uke, gedan-barai, age-uke; oi-zuki, gyaku-zuki, kage-zuki and sanbon-zuki. Perform over and over with full breath control and full hard focus for the next 8 weeks, up to competition, until your execution of the techniques is fast and seamlessly fluid in application. Use bricks and a chair. Place feet up on the chair, and girp the bricks in your hands, and hold push-up position for increasingly long durations - up to 4 mins if girl, 7 mins if not. This increases the power in all your arm and hand techniques.
Use a barbell (the small type for single-hand use). Place increasing weight on one end. From a seated position, twist the the bell back and forth in your rotating fist. This increases wrist and arm strength - great preparation for throws and grappling techniques that lead up to throwing techniques. Now, build that bone! Make sure that the swinging barbell (not the weight!) knocks against your other forearm while turning the barbell to and fro. This will build bone mass in your forearm, thus making your blocking stronger, and your bone less resistant to damage.
Push ups on knuckles are the bomb for increasing arm power, wrist stability and iron-hard knuckles. Start on carpet covered with a towel or blanket. (I didn't have such a luxury like carpet when I started this conditioning form. No, I had floorboards in my house!) Move onto just carpet. Then to linoleum. Then to dirt or compacted sand. Then to concrete. The best gauge of when to move to the next surface is when the next surface is not painful!
For legs, grasp a long dumb-bell between legs with about a quarter to one third of your weight attached to it. Then perform squat lifts at a rate of 8 reps x 6 sets. Blast those quads! If you are like me and like to improvise in the Okinawan way, try my trick: tie your feet to two house bricks (one under each foot, like a sandal). Then, perform kata and all kicking techniques. (Do not let the brick fly off and nearly knock your dog out, ok? Strictly forbidden). It may feel very unco at first. But the benefits will be worth it, and you will also get a heightened sense of your balance, too.
Slam your makiwara that you will make out of a long plank of wood, bound with leather scraps tied to it with rope. Do NOT use cheap and crappy nylon or plastic rope! It serves only to REMOVE calluses in the most painful way, and the blood on your makiwara after that may put you off wanting to hit, especially when your knuckles shred, and you watch the seiken go flying through the air, though it was once attached to your bloody fist.
Add to this hitting your forearms up and down their lengths with a length of thin pvc piping or a wooden rod to harden that bone. Do this also for your shins.
SELECTIVISM
You will need solid defenses. These exercises will give them to you. Now, you must practise solid defenses against imaginary strong attacks to head, chest, stomach and back. Practise with a partner or with your imagination. See the attack without thinking about it, and move into blocking posture as easily as taking a step while walking. Now practise solid blocks liek these from all positions including while turning; kneeling; and even while jumping into the air. Things like this may look silly; but they are mutated examples of when you will be blocking in the real-life arena.
Select your best suiting blocks. Now there are two blocks: stand and deliver, which we have just practised. But there is also "Catch me if you can." Practise side stepping and stepping-around with your partner (even if she's imaginary) and always co-ordinate your stepping with a strong block. These will be better at setting up an opening than just standing and delivering. also practise blocking "on the mid-step" while half-way into your stance!
So far we have practised hard solid defenses. But what has worked for me so well is a fast, nsappy defelcting block - kage-uke, nagashi-uke or sharin-uke followed by counter flowing out of the same hand that dealt out the block. Practise ju-uke, therefore. The soft blocks.
COUNTER
It is always better to counter than to attack, because we know go-no-sen! Don't we? It means, why try and break open the side of the fortress? Just wait for the draw-bridge to almost fall on you - then the fortress will be open! Shoshinkai uses a trojan horse tactic that has earned us quite an "aura of mystique," (as someone once wrote about us), which I find myself fond of to a degree. What we train to do is let the attacker commit herself (or himself) to an attack. ANY attack is an open door, or a falling drawbridge. All we have to do is use it to "see" the opening. And avoiding being crushed as the drawbridge falls open is also quite good. Practise with a partner blocking and immediately countering (block-and-counter... 1+1 does NOT = 2. 1+1= 1, think about it!). Make your blocking arm be the same arm that you counter with. Make them opposite, too. Make your block and counter simultaneous. (This is one of the key secrets of SKR). Practise from all positions!
ATTACK.
Some people are natural counter-attackers. Some are all-out attackers. If you are the latter, you are seen to have the disadvantage from the SKR point-of-view. But that's ok. There's hope for you! Practise all your "tokui" techniques - best-suiting and favourite techniques. Practise each of them separately. Own them, know them, and master them until you are doing them in your sleep. Then, practise with a partner. Aim to launch a stream of attacks - all your best techniques with full power over and over as you advance on your partner, who will lightly block. This will build your speed, stamina and power.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Now, for the 8 weeks leading up to competition, practise techniques and combinations of techniques - practise the things we've been talking about at least once a day!
C-R FITNESS
Commit to running, cycling or swimming; or all three. Mark out a course around your neighbourhood, and aim to better times around it each day, or every second day.
Practise all your kata three times in succession with proper timing, focus and breathing on the days you do not do the run, cycle or swim.
Practising The Kneeling Finish! Ippon.
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
MEDITATION
While preparing your body for the demands of competition (and for real life encounters), it is imperative we remember that we are not just body alone. We are also spirit. Internally, we can prepare to meet our foes on the mat by remembering but one constant: kokoro-no-zuki. It may rain upon the waters of Lkae Hirosawa, and the surface may become all distorted. The sun may shine down and glint on it's waters. But when the waters are still, then they cease to become water. They become a perfect mirror, a beacon for conveying utter truth. What I'm saying is that we should strive to be still waters within, even while we are becoming as hard as iron and as unrelenting as lions on the outside.
Practise mokuso - meditation. Practise focusing on what you desire will happen. Then aim to see what will happen in your training. This has been such a great help to me in my fighting career. Practise za-zen, seated mdeitation, where you aim to know nothing; you don't aim to be anything; and you give up everything you have known or think you own - including every technique you thought you knew. The perfection of spirit is not accomplished by hanging on. But only by letting go. Let go, as you sit, breathing from hara, aiming to still your mind like a perfectly still surface of a pond. Aim for satori. What is it? I can't tell you. Only you can tell you. Or you will try, but words will fail you. It will happen when you finally stop the chattering in your mind; and the anxieties in your heart. After you taste pure water, you turn your nose up at tap water, no? Same thing. When you know the truth, you will not go back to be encumbered by meaningless distractions like thoughts of winning or losing, life or death. By accepting your failings and those of others, you are ready to let go of them ruling how your foot will move or your hand will strike. Letting go makes the way wide. Holding on forces cylinders to go through square holes.
Once you feel relieved of your burden, only then are you truly able and ready to hang onto it with hands that will not let it go, no matter what. In common terms, meditate. It will bring peace and simplicity back to your life. It will enable your spirit to exist undaunted within you.
AESTHETICS
Tired of the ugliness of the world? Uehara says: "Great men are disgusted by ugliness. Greater men than that accept it. Even greater men know that life is also beautiful. But who can find beauty?" Answer? You can.
One of the best ways to prepare to become physically exhausted for no good reason (and isn't that what shi-ai is??) is to have one day off from training each week. Go, and be refreshed spiritually! Go to church! Go and discover the waterfalls and parks in your area. Go, buy some flowers, even if you are a guy, and take them home, simply because they are beautiful. It's amazing. Ugliness is all we can see usually when we don't have much else in our houses or hearts. The Samurai did not just learn to swing swords, they also learnt ikebana - the art of flower arranging. Why? If you're asking that, I bet you are somebody who still believes the world is inherantly an ugly place in which we dwell. Have you never watched the sun rise? Have you never quietly listened as the wind passes through a spruce tree? Have you not seen the butterfly or bee as they hop from yellow flower to yellow flower? go and find beauty. Its not as far from you as you might imagine.
SLEEP, REST, WORK and PLAY
Mars knew what they were talking about decades ago. Their slogan "a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play" is altogether the biggest fraud and greatest truth. A Mars with its high sugar and fat content can't be good for the karate-ka. It's a noxious chocolate bar just meant to keep you hooked on sugar. Sugar which leads to hyperactivity in prone persons, and can't help you rest at all. But there is something we can sub-in for "Mars." There is something that can give our lives such balance. We can work, rest and play. That thing, is "common sense." The wise man/woman knows that all things must be in balance. As we have said, "no balance, no stance. No stance, no technique" - classic Yamashita Shihan. So plan when you will alot times for sleep. Sleep a good 8 hours per night. Plan times for rest and relaxation - books and movies can be great distractions from your training. Distractions are essential for success. Plan when you will work hard and do everything we have discussed. Planning and common-sense are old friends.
MENTAL PREPARATION - THE HEART
In Eastern philosophy, there isn't much difference between the sets of processes that go on inside of us. The state of the mind, is just another synonym for 'state of the heart.' It is important to have the mind-heart in a state of readiness, not just for the sake of winning shiny plastic. But for all life. The Eastern instructors of the past did not separate training the body and mind. These days, in Australian dojos as in other Western countries if the mind is trained at all, it is tossed on the end of a lesson, and sighed at like it is some imposition!
Yamashita simulataneously trained us in body-mind. He said "The body reflects the mind. and the mind focuses the body." How can they be separate, then? Without eyes, there is no zanshin (calm, concentrated alertness). Without zanshin, there is no ISSHIN. Isshin is the life-blood of zanshin.
When we practise kata, we aren't rehashing dance steps. We are involved in life or death battles with invisible enemies; and with ourselves. One false move is fatal and final. One slip of concentration (zanshin) is death. This is true in kata, because it is true in real life.
With Isshin, we can be silent, focused, commited, fully in-tune with what's going on here and now. And this is why I raved on and on about za-zen. Letting go of doubt, fear, the chaos that threatens to engulf us from within allows us to truly accept reality. And in our heart of hearts, this is what we make of reality: "Ima-ni hito-zuki da! Koko-e hito-geri da!" This was the catch phrase that rang day and night from Obata Jiroo's famous First Dojo. This cry rang out all over Okinawa and later Japan! The Founding Master of Shoshinkai pounded it through the ehads and hearts of his disciples that karate was not about being cute. It was a matter of life or death. It was a case of dignity or defeat. Consequently, his students cried out the above phrase at the beginning and end of every lesson. They yelled out the contraction when voicing ki-ai thus: "Imada!" "Now!" all that matters is now.
All we need is to not give up. All we need is to go down hanging on, sucking the last breath of life only to cry out fiercely "Imada!" We will not give up. There is a reason why the gentle tyrant Yamashita Shihan would sometimes take the senior grades through nothing but countless repetitions of the kata. All 32 of them, including the very basic, and the most strenuous and advanced. And it wasn't because karate was cute. It was because every time he commanded us to "Mo ichi do!"
We would find the impetuous tenacity in our hearts to echo "Imada, Sensei!" This is the sheer iron-fortress strength of karate. There is a style today that makes the allegation "we are the Strongest Karate." If that is so, I wish they would shut-up and be silent. Because strength sounds no trumpets. Strength is a matter of the heart that says against any odds "I will never give up," to which the only utterance that makes an appropriate sound is "imada."
Isshin means to be fully aware and fully commited to whatever happens; to give full force to your technique, and to be of one heart, without any ripples of doubt or personal concern in your heart.
It is the challenge of all karate-ka, from white belt beginner to old man red belt to find the iron-clad will to never give up. To have an immovable heart: mushin. Only encounters that test our very will to hang onto life will do that. Yamashita Shihan nearly killed us with his 3 hours of kata and nothing else one night. Everytime we thought we were close to finishing, we found we hadn't even started. But the good thing is that we did not die. Better than that, we learnt that within each of us is something so strong that even a million kata cannot detach us from it. It is the very will to live. So work hard, and then when you think you can't work any more, work even harder. Never give up, and this will build you into an impenetrable fortress, daiha. Then, just with one look at you, your adversary will know they are in big trouble. With one look, a true Shoshinkai karate-ka can defeat an opponent, and deter them from unwanted aggression.
Secret time. "Shoshin-kai" means 'enlightened mind way.' Or does it? Sho = enlightened. Shin = mind. But it also means "heart." Remember, I said there was little difference in Eastern philosophy between "heart" and "mind." Also to Obata Shihan, there was little difference between enlightenment, and a state of Isshin. To come to the point where you are of one mind, then you must have achieved enlightenment. Enlightened = "Sho" (long sound like "aw"). But "Sho" (short sound "o" as in "hot") means "first," or "Single" or "one." When he named the Art, Obata deliberately chose "Sho" which sounds much like the shorter sounding "Sho" because he felt the enlightened heart was also the first, one and only heart - sho. So the name of the Art is "the enlightened mind art." But it also lends itself to giving up it's secret name: "The first-heart, or one-heart way."
Build this "one heart," through repetitive, hard practise, and place Isshin within yourself, and you will be well on your way to not just conquering shi-ai; but to grabbing hold of mastery over yourself, along with Karate-Do.
*
When preparing for a competition, these are the three things I have concentrated on: Body, spirit and heart. In 14 shi-ai, my worst placing has only ever been 4th, and that was one time only. I have had 4 x 3rds. The rest have been 2nds, except for the majority, which have been 1sts. There is no substitute for good preparation. We can't do much about our opponents. But as long as we can control ourselves, then we have the most important say in preparing to fight for our lives. And that's what shi-ai is. It's not about personal glory or trophies. It's a shadowy possibility of a real-life encounter in a matter of life and death, dignity or defeat.
