In this month’s podcast we cover two topics! The first thing we cover is “The Case for Kata”. The question is often asked if kata itself plays a meaningful role in practise. If kata is nothing more than a repository for bunkai, then why not just practise the applications and do away with kata? Does keeping the solo forms, and devoting time to their practise, serve any meaningful purpose? Naturally, I think the solo form does have an important role to play; and in the first section I explain why.

This month’s podcast covers one-step sparring; as well as the related practises of three-step and five-step sparring. Whist a very common form of practise in karate, taekwondo, etc. it is my belief that such training is a largely pointless. In the podcast I look at why I feel one-step sparring is a “dead-end” and why it does not develop any useable attributes. It is important to isolate techniques however, but this needs to be done in a way that can progress to live practise and free flowing application.  I therefore also suggest what I see as better ways to isolate techniques.

Welcome to the latest iainabernethy.com podcast! It’s been sometime since we last turned the podcast over to the listeners, so I’ve put that right this month. I asked for questions via the website, facebook and twitter and we did our best to cover as many of them as we could.

Topics covered include: realism in training, kicking in self-defence, scenario training, training with joint injuries, the evolution of kata, the physiological and psychological effects of conflict, the specifics of female self-defence, home training, using weights to increase punching power, time management for training, and loads more! It’s around one hour twenty minutes long so make yourself comfortable when you sit down to listen to it!

Welcome to the latest iainabernethy.com podcast! This month we cover the very important topic of “context”. The failure to understand the huge impact of context is one of the biggest problems in modern martial arts / self-defence. This failure has people training in incorrect, inefficient and sometimes downright dangerous ways. It can also stop us from enjoying all the fun and benefits our training can bring us.

In the podcast I define what I mean by “context”, explain how important it is to define the “win”, look at how context and the “win” determine what pool of techniques we should draw from, how the very effective tactics in one context can be disastrous in another, etc. I also look at some of the common misunderstandings relating to context.