DSKI PHILOSOPHY

Excerpts from Karate Fighting Techniques, by Shihan Ali Darwish.

Fighting Strategies

It is important to exercise awareness of timing, distancing and speed in performing Karate techniques. Use feints to entrap your opponent, drawing a reaction that exposes weak spots, adjust your distance, and launch a flurry of consecutive attacks.

Always remember the following three gaps you can create in your opponent's defences to seize the opportunity and gain the advantage.

Psychological gap
Physical gap
Temporal gap

The Psychological Gap

You can create a psychological gap by instilling fear in your opponent. Project a strong fearsome image by sharply looking into your opponent's eyes and beyond into his heart and by assuming a strong posture. When you sense that your opponent is frozen or hesitant to launch and attack, seize the opportunity to launch your attack.

The Physical Gap

You can create a physical gap by forcing your opponent to make a move that exposes a target in his defences. To begin with, you might notice a physical gap that already exists in his defences, such as a faulty fighting stance, faulty guard (gamae), too much bouncing and prancing. Waste no time. Check his guard (gamae) and his distance, especially, placement of feet and position of the lower body (tachi kata).

The Temporal Gap

A temporal gap refers to distance, time and space. You can create a temporal gap by adjusting your distance and by timing your moves. Move to your opponent's rhythm, becoming one with him, and then suddenly break it with rapid, precise attacks.

Adjusting Your Distance

In adjusting your distance, remember that you must be within a neutral range where neither you nor your opponent can reach the other with an offensive technique. Mastering techniques and developing power only may prove ineffective in combat without mastering distancing and timing (ma-ai). Effective application of technique greatly depends on instantaneous reaction to a given combative situation. To achieve this, you must also master distancing and timing.

SHOTOKAN KARATE

SHOTOKAN KARATE belongs to the hard style of linear Karate. While its roots go back 15 centuries to Bodhidrama, it is arguably about 150 years old. Incredibly, in less than 200 years, Shotokan Karate has developed at an accelerated rate and has become established as a strong and effective style of fighting. In the last fifty years, it has rapidly spread throughout the world becoming the daily regimen of hundreds of thousands of practitioners and a Way of Life for many individuals. In the 1950s, Yoshitaka Funakoshi, the son of Master Gichin Funakoshi, introduced new methods of kicking, including mawashi geri, yoko geri kekomi, yoko geri keage, fumikomi, and ushiro geri. Kizami ura mawashi geri and ushiro mawashi geri were unheard of or not publically practiced. Various forms of kumite were later developed in the 1960s and 1970s, informed by scientific methods of analysis, and Shotokan Karate is still developing. Yet Shotokan Karate is still partly shrouded in mystery and only recently has it been scientifically examined.

Karate is a four-stage maturation process: acquisition, imitation, consolidation and synthesis and innovation. The ultimate goal of this process is to reach a stage where the technique is both efficient and effective. By studying Karate through biomechanics, Karate performance can be improved. As an art of self-defence, Karate is designed to suit all people of all varying abilities and capacities. Consequently, it is technique that is the dominant factor in Karate performance rather than the physical structure or physiological capacity of the Karate-ka. Biomechanics is the science of movement technique and knowledge of biomechanics helps the assessment of a technique in order to improve it.

Excerpts from Contrast and Energy Transfer in Karate, by Shihan Ali Darwish