Breaking Through: The Secrets of Bassai Dai Kata

Book excerpt: Breaking Through is about much more than a single kata. Colin Wee describes his four-decade journey in the martial arts, during which he came to recognize common training deficiencies in traditional hard-style striking arts such as Karate and Taekwondo. His ingenious, multi-faceted solution, dubbed the JDK Method, utilizes the strengths of kata to teach key dynamic combat skills and concepts forgotten and overlooked in modern training. Breaking Through is a case study of the JDK Method as applied to Bassai Dai—a pattern trained across many Karate and Taekwondo styles. In Breaking Through: The Secrets of Bassai Dai Kata, Colin plumbs the depths of Bassai Dai, having returned to it for inspiration time and again to deconstruct it and extract its most valuable lessons. The twelve applications presented herein delve beyond simplistic bunkai and traditional step-sparring. The lessons taught through Bassai Dai—which Master Wee and his students have relentlessly studied, tested and trained—are an effective series of principles and defenses against the most common and frequent attacks one is likely to face. When instructors and students link the applications from Breaking Through to how Colin and his students got there—the logic of why the applications work and how the applications address a dynamic combat situation—they learn to fill in the gaps left by traditional training. This is where the magic of the book truly happens. It is truly the book's subject. Once readers establish the link with the applications and the methodology, they can apply this knowledge to any other form in any other system, and it instantly levels up their understanding of how traditional training can be put to work. Published at a time when many have foregone the practice of patterns, claiming they are outdated and of little use to modern students, Colin unlocks advanced lessons encrypted in Bassai Dai kata and by this demonstrates how to universally apply the JDK Method to patterns in any style of martial art.