My Blog
April 23rd 2026
This is my first blog post on this website, just here to collect some of my thoughts on martial arts. I wonder about kata. I've heard a lot of people proliferate and espouse about kata, but to be honest, I've never really made much heads or tails of it. Shinji Watanabe has a series of videos on his channel on Naihanchi, also known as Tekki, and in it, he says that kata is a tool to make you stronger in fights, if it's not making you better at fighting then to discard it, because that's the sole purpose of training martial arts. I can agree with this idea to some respect, afterall, martial arts is here to make you stronger, that's an undisputable fact. However, I wonder if kata is truly that useful of a tool in performing that function or if it's simply an antiquated tool of the past. I've heard other people say that they believe kata is a form of meditation, and that it is a useufl tool to conduct moving meditation. I've heard of monks performing walking meditation, in where they meditate while walking around a Stupa, but I've never really been able to crack much on this idea. It's a preset series of movements that allow you to clear your mind while also moving your body, focusing on your breath and what not, but is moving meditation so useful compared to sitting meditation? These are questions that I don't think I'm qualifed enough to answer about.
I have a black belt in Goju Ryu karate, although I've long since forgotten many of the kata. I learned them for my belt exams, but afterwards didn't practice them very much. There's only a few that I continually practice, because they feel more impactful to me. Perhaps that's not such a great word to use there, but they seem to be more internal and that's something I think kata may have value in. They are: Sanchin, Tensho and Naihanchi. I also do some saifa practice as an aside, but that's just because I like that kata, not because it's particularly interesting to me.
Sanchin has a very long history stemming from white crane, known as San Zhan, I'm sure the local Fujian dialect has another name for that, but it's in essense the characters meaning three battles or wars. I'm not sure this kata has a lot of applicable fighting purpose, but I do think it's great as a conditioning kata. I like that you're constantly making deep inhales and exhales, performing Ibuki breathing. Deep breathing is something I've utilized a lot to recover some breath and stamina while resting, I think it's better than the short panting breaths that come naturally to me when I'm tired, but I think the literature is still out on that one. I think it's also good as a way to move while keeping your abs tight the entire time. This is the way kickboxers brace their torsos while fighting to take unexpected bodyshots. I think there's some application of the principles there. Finally I think there's some value in the "gripping" of the ground you perform with your feet while performing this kata. I'm not entirely convinced that your feet strength is the secret to Okinawan karate, but surely it can't hurt. Bill Maeda has a few videos on the value of foot and ankle strength and that guy's a beast.
Tensho is pretty similar to Sanchin in a lot of ways. The basic format of the kata is identical, step forward into a sanchin stance, perform a few hand techniques, finish three steps, perform 4 nukites, step back into mawashi ukes and finish. So I see these two kata as sister kata. One is hard and rigid, whereas the other is flexible and tough. I think the dynamic tension while performing Tensho is something fairly similar to a lot of southern chinese martial arts, primarily Hung Gar is what I think of, with their iconic L shaped hand posture. I've heard that the breathing of the two arts should be reversed, with long inhales and short exhales with Sanchin, to represent the exploseiveness of that hard style, whereas Tensho has short inhales and long exhales to demonstrate the softer flowing motions. I don't truly think there should be a big difference between these, there's no advantage to artificially shortening or lengthening the breaths of each kata, instead it should be kind of natural.
Naihanchi, the kata that makes the least amount of sense to me, but was deeply foundational to many important karate masters. Motobu Choki famously stated in his book Karate, my Art, that this was the only kata that he practiced and that he would have students do nothing but naihanchi for three years before teaching them anything else. The way I was taught naihanchi involved a lot of hip rotation, like throwing hooks. Each block, strike, etc, is done with hip rotation in mind to produce a lot of force. However, I was exposed to a different way of performing naihanchi, in where you allow the arms to swing around, as if they were dragging your body behind with it. I can see the way in which this can be applicable, as moving the hands first and then putting the body behind the strike is a good way to hide your telegraphing. However in practice, I feel like this way of performing naihanchi is slow and cumbersome and there's simply better ways to illustrate this concept than in naihanchi. I don't knnow, naihanchi is a bit of a mystery to me, I do like that I'm seated in a shiko stance the entire time though, it has a double function as leg training lol.