Solo forms have a bad reputation in the martial arts community. Students often see them as boring and repetitive. Or worse, as an excuse for their instructors to complain about irrelevant minutia. Some instructors even go so far as to withhold information about the second form until the students ‘perfects’ the first form, with perfection being arbitrarily defined.
I attended a school that did this; it was disastrous for our education. To illustrate why, I can compare it to another school about 50 miles away in the same tradition. The instructors of both schools reported to the same regional director and ostensibly teach the same material. But our instructor wanted ‘perfection’ in the first form and their instructor wanted people to experience as much of the tradition as they could handle.
Our students sucked. Even at the form we hyper-focused on, their students we much, much better. Because we never saw the individual movements in other contexts, we never really internalized the techniques.
Only Doing Solo Forms by Yourself is a Mistake
Many people over-correct and say that you should only do solo forms by yourself. Learn it once, then treat it as a purely something to do at home between classes.
This is a wasted opportunity. If someone is watching you doing the solo forms, then they can offer corrections. Incorrectly doing the same drill over and over again is a slow way to learn. Eventually you can figure out the mistakes on your own, but you’ll get there a lot sooner with someone looking over your shoulder. And if that’s not an option, at least videotape yourself so you can look at what you’re doing from the outside.
Solo Forms as a Diagnostic Tool
In partner drills it is often hard to see why something isn’t working for a student. Sometimes it is because their partner is ramping up the difficulty level too much. Or because the partner lacks the skills needed to be a good partner and it making it too easy or inconsistent. Or just because there’s too much going on and you just can’t see what’s happening.
When this happens, have the student perform the action as a solo form. Have them do a few reps while you watch their feet. Then some reps where you watch the torso. Then some reps while you watch the arms and weapon. With a clear view of what’s going on, you can more easily offer advice to your student.
Sometimes you don’t even need to say anything. Just taking away the stressor of having a partner can be enough for the student to spot the flaw on their own. And they can get more reps in solo than with a partner in the same amount of time.
Only Doing Solo Forms Without a Partner is a Mistake
If you only do a solo form solo, you can’t really know if you are doing it correctly. Even with an instructor watching, you can still be making mistakes they can’t see. Or worse, your instructor might misunderstand the form and the whole class is doing it wrong.
Unless the form is too dangerous to perform with a partner, you should be testing them. Make sure they actually work in the context they were created for. As an instructor, it’s your job to prove to yourself and your students that your interpretations are correct.
Failure to do this causes detrimental drift. As each generation passes on the form to the next, it will evolve. No two people do the same form exactly the same. And that’s fine so long as it still remains martially relevant. But you can’t know if that’s true or not if you don’t test it from time to time.
Skill Integration Using Forms
Solo forms are not drills that can only be done solo. Rather, solo forms are drills that don’t require a partner to get started. This distinction is key.
After you have achieved basic competency in a solo form, you need to do it as a partner drill. Note the term “basic competency”. You’ll never get beyond basic competency in a form if you only do it solo. Once you get the gross motor movements down, you need to start working with a partner.
Once you can do the form with a partner, you can start adding complications. The partner can increase the amount of resistance they offer. Or change the way they react. As you progress, you remove the restrictions on your parter’s actions, which in turn forces you to ‘leave the script’ and go beyond the original form.
In this manner what was a highly structured form becomes the starting point for a sparring game. And that’s where skill integration really takes place.
Teaching Concepts with Forms
I love the word Bunkai. It literally means “analysis”, but more broadly it refers to the interpretation and application of a form. It’s when you break down a form piece by piece and ask the question, “Why are we doing this movement?”.
And then you test it. You perform the solo routine as a partner exercise. You test your interpretation to make sure it works. Next you change things to see which elements were essential and which were incidental. You’re not trying to perfect the form; you’re trying to push its limits and uncover the underlying concepts that make it work.
Once you understand the concepts behind the form, you can modify it to suit your temperament and skill set. As Meyer says in his dusack book, the forms aren’t meant to be memorized, they are just examples so that you can develop your own style from a common foundation.
If the Form Lacks Martial Intent, the Form is Misunderstood
For me, this comes up a lot in the Bolognese sword and buckler forms. There is one place where you’re told to hold the buckler like a mirror. There are two ways to interpret this:
- Turn the buckler around so you are looking at the dome, as if using a compact mirror to examine a pimple or check for nose hairs.
- Hold the buckler as far from you as possible, as if using a hand mirror to look at your whole face and head.
In terms of authorial intent, which interpretation is correct? I can’t prove either one. Perhaps the argument that the author wants you to “consider the buckler and thinks about its importance” is true.
In terms of martial effectiveness, which interpretation is correct? Obviously the second one. There is no reason in a sparring match to turn the dome of your buckler all the way around so that it’s facing you.
Yet far too many people still believe the first interpretation is correct because that’s the first one they were taught. And now it’s locked into the living tradition of their school. Don’t be like that. If the form doesn’t make sense for fencing, fix it.
Just Because You Don’t Understand the Martial Intent Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t There
I’m going to contradict myself now. Sometimes the issue isn’t that the form lacks martial intent, but rather we lack the context for it.
All too often we aren’t given the opponent’s actions. This is a problem because if you don’t know what the opponent is doing, then it can be really hard to know why you are doing something. That context is essential for understanding and unfortunately sometimes we have to invent the context.
Right now I’m working on a second edition of my Meyer longsword book because we missed the context for some of the devices. Our interpretations weren’t necessarily wrong, but with this found context our interpretations make a lot more sense. Which makes them more useful to our students as they work through the book.
Was It Meant to Be a Solo Form in the First Place?
Thinking back to the Bolognese forms, something people miss is that they actually were meant to be done in pairs. In at least one of them, you are told how far away to stand from your partner so that you meet up in the center at the right point in the form. That’s easy to overlook when you’re trying to learn a form that has literally dozens of actions.
Another example is Meyer’s Cross. Most people demonstrate it as a solo form, in the air or against a pell. But that’s not really what it’s meant for. If you do the entire form, not just the part in the middle, the actions are done relative to an opponent.
I’m not saying you should never do the Bolognese forms or Meyer’s Cross solo. But you also need to do them as they were intended.
Most Drills Can and Should Be Done Solo
If you are deep into the drills that require responding to someone while in a bind, yeah that pretty hard to do solo. But any of your wide play drills should work just fine as a solo drill, either in the air or against a pell. So use them to for your warmups. Or while your partner needs a break from being a living pell.
Footwork Drills Are Useless, Do Forms Instead
Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. If you are trying to correct a footwork problem, sometimes isolating it with a drill is necessary. But the vast majority of the time, footwork needs to be learned in context. Simply put, people move differently when they are holding a sword. They just do, it’s not even conscious. So your footwork drills need to be done with a sword in hand.
And what’s the best way to do that? The forms. If your upper body isn’t moving as it naturally would in a fencing match, then you aren’t really training your lower body to support it through its movements. And the forms, if interpreted correctly, should be taking you through movements that you would use in sparring.
You’re Probably Doing Solo Forms Anyways
A lot of people think that solo forms are necessarily these long, complicated affairs that test your memorization more than your actual body movements. And they can be, but they don’t have to. For example, some forms in Kenjutsu only have two cuts. The ceremonial parts, such as the precise way you return to the starting position, are just there to keep a crowded class from tripping over each other.
When you teach someone a new technique and have them practice it in the air before working with a partner, that’s a solo form.
That’s it. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. If you (a) have a prescribed set of movements and (b) you can do it without a partner, then you’re doing a solo form.
Ritualizing Forms is a Mistake
Where a lot of schools really mess up is when they stop thinking about forms, solo or paired, as tool and start treating them as a destination.
Again, not all ceremony is bad. I like how Kenjutsu kata always begin and end in the same place. It takes out a lot of variability out of the drills, which is great when you are trying to learn the basics.
But when it comes to developing a personal style, you need to be able to alter the forms to suit your body temperament. And you can’t do that if your school has a taboo against modifying forms.
Good instructors understand this. For example, during school conferences high level kenjutsu instructors will often take struggling students aside and give them personal modifications. For example, they may add or subtract a step based on the length of the student’s legs.
This is all well and good on its own. But when the student returns from the conference to their local dojo, a few things may happen.
- The local instructor scolds the student for ‘misunderstanding’ and forces them to revert to the original version.
- The local instructor tells everyone to adopt the new version, not understanding it was meant to be a change for only that one person.
- The local instructor understands the situation and only offers the modification to students with a similar problem.
Either path is followed in good faith, but they all can lead to bad outcomes. The first path is obviously wrong for the student. The second path will mess up things for the students who were doing well with the old version. And the third path… that’s going to prevent the student from being promoted.
This is where the destination problem comes into play. When the forms are overly ritualized, they become the foundation for rank and status within a school. Which means if you don’t perform the form ‘correctly’ in the eyes of the judges, you can’t advance. That often means you aren’t given opportunities to teach or to learn more advanced material. You’re stuck unless you abandon the modifications need to make the forms meaningful to you.
Forms Exist for the Instructor, Not the Student
The student can learn from any drill. As an instructor, you can invent a new set of drills for every class. But that leads to problems. If you’ve never done the drill before, it may need to be modified during class. This will confuse and annoy students.
It is better to have a catalog of well tested drills. Then you can just pick the drills that best match the concept you want to teach that day. And if you need a break or to focus on one student, you can just tell the rest of the students to do a form they already know.
So if your goal is to create teachers, memorizing the foundational forms of the school is really important. But for the vast majority of your students, the forms themselves don’t matter. Memorizing a specific form won’t help them become a better fencer. What they should be focused on is the individual movements within the form and the tactical concerns needed to apply those movements in other situations.
Grauenwolf's Study of Western Martial Arts 