Perfectionism of form is a disease

So when I first came to Detroit, I was not thinking about training. I was in a mindset of "I'm no good with karate. I don't know what my goals are with training. I'm done with it." But as I've already written, I did end up starting a training routine. And I basically began by doing everything I could think of that we did in the dojo (warm-up, conditioning, kata) and just doing it outside (the Detroit summer was oppressively humid man....like Okinawa!). The only thing I couldn't practice at first was kumite. And so this was pretty much my initial training routine for the summer. The one thing that I thought would be best to focus on was the kata (of course what would karate be without kata?). Not only so that I would remember the kata, but also I was in a mindset of "I have to keep practicing the kata to understand them". Now, being the perfectionist that I am, I was never happy with my overall kata performances. I just always had this feeling of not doing the kata "good enough". One of the training tips my Sensei gave me a while ago had to do with picking out a certain section of the kata to work on (because it would be a waste of time to keep repeating the entire kata over and over again if I only wanted to improve on a specific portion of it). So that's what I would do. Focusing mainly on the so-called "higher" kata like Passai and especially Chinto, I would work on a sequence of movements within the kata that I thought I needed to improve upon. And I would do that over and over again because that's how I thought I was supposed to improve my karate. And of course, each time I did it I always felt it wasn't sharp enough or smooth enough or whatever. It was always lacking. Here's a video of me doing the kata "Chinto" at the park (taken by my neighbor and training partner Dave):

So yeah. That's what I did 3x a week at the park in the summer. The problem that I'm getting at here is with this "perfectionism". Let me quote you something from the blog of Rory Miller (someone whom I'll mention more often in future blogs):

"But fear of failure leads to a paralysis, sometimes from overthinking.  Sometimes from learned helplessness....I'm of course thinking of martial arts.  The perfectionists overtly try to avoid mistakes, seeking a visible perfection.  'Form.'  And these often divorce form from use.  So things can look perfect and not work.  And I wonder sometimes if the tendency of the perfectionists to avoid rough and tumble testing is just an extension of the fear of making mistakes.  You don't have to count the mistakes you don't know about, right?  And there is a potentially toxic teaching style with this.  If you point out every flaw, if nothing can ever be good or good enough, the student conditions at a very deep level that the safest strategy is to do nothing.  Be passive.  Never take risks.  This is 'learned helplessness' and it is an important aspect of training someone to be a victim."

When I read that I was like "Damn". That's exactly what I've ingrained. I would keep doing the movements in the kata, trying to perfect something I really didn't understand (physical abstraction) until I got sick of it, sick of myself for basically not being "perfect". And I highlighted "toxic teaching style" because that's how I felt we were taught in our dojo. Not on purpose, but it's like, that's just how my Sensei learned and that's how he taught us. I think part of my dissatisfaction with my form wasn't only from my own penchant for perfectionism but from constantly being reminded of every little movement I could be doing better. As if my ability to actually "do it right" was always just out of reach. And that's the thing, NOBODY can reach perfection. I guess what I'm saying is, the pedagogical approach my Sensei and the senior black belts had towards karate had the unintended affect of reinforcing the fear of failure and rigidity. Training sometimes felt like I was being picked at for every little blemish on my face. I would feel so ugly and unhappy afterwards. But it was like, "Dude! This is my face man. It's not gonna look like an airbrushed magazine model. Leave me alone!" But see that's the thing I'm trying to get at here with this post. If you have no understanding of how something functions, all you're told is how it's "supposed" to look, then you spend all your time trying to perfect something that's not even inherently "perfect" to begin with! What you should be spending time "perfecting" is the function of the thing you're doing. That makes more sense. Spending your time perfecting "form" (for me at least) is discouraging. And I had this funny thought that maybe this "perfectionism of form" leads to a sort of sadomasochism in training. Like you keep pounding on that makiwara (which physically hurts) cause you hate yourself for not being perfect. Or maybe you take out your self-hatred on a white belt (in a controlled manner of course, but you let that side kick fly a little bit harder than if you were sparring a senior student). It wasn't until I read some articles by Patrick McCarthy that I began to understand that the kata actually had a functional use. It was a real eye opener. I realized that if I had an understanding of what the movements meant in the kata (bunkai) then I would feel better about my overall performance of it. I don't know what that's comparable to; maybe like teaching an aspiring tennis player how to move their body and hit the ball, but they never actually learn with a real ball or a racket and they never actually play a tennis match...? Yeah I'm sure there's a better example. But my point is, it was liberating to discover that kata wasn't this dead thing that I just had to constantly repeat to infinity and never get right. There can be actual improvement associated with understanding function man! So that's what I'm trying to get a handle on now.

Elbow SMASH!
-Hiji Até