Basic Kobo Drills

These basic kobo drills are designed to on work on spe­cific weapon deploy­ment and defen­sive response. The drills on this page build on the abil­i­ties to imple­ment unsoku and unshin in rela­tion to your part­ner (these come from prac­tic­ing the Drills for Unsoku and Unshin). You will refine these abil­i­ties as you inte­grate them into your kobo practice.

Basic Kobo Drills

These basic kobo drills are the foun­da­tion of sotai skills. You prob­a­bly already prac­tice some­thing like this (well, occa­sion­ally…). The prob­lem with kobo in its sim­plest form is that it only offers a nar­row foun­da­tion for build­ing skills. By inject­ing a lit­tle cre­ativ­ity, we can build a wider base for jissen.

Slow, Stationary Kobo

Partners face off. One exe­cutes a pre­de­ter­mined attack, and the other exe­cutes and pre­de­ter­mined defense. They repeat this many times, grad­u­ally get­ting faster and stronger. Later on, we add some foot­work. In the­ory (not my the­ory, mind you), this effec­tively teaches the defend­ing part­ner to become almost immune to the prac­ticed attack. Yeah, right.

Most kobo prac­tice begins and ends with this drill style. Pretty lame if you ask me. While it may be OK prac­tice on some lev­els, it is going to con­di­tion habits that may not always be pro­duc­tive unless we exer­cise a lit­tle cre­ativ­ity in our approach. Let’s dis­cuss how.

We learn from all prac­tice, whether we want to, or not. We all know that those who do half-assed prac­tice for hokei end up with half-assed per­for­mance of hokei, even when they try to move cleanly. The stan­dard style of unin­spired kobo prac­tice makes us hyper-suggestible to the attacks prac­ticed. The result is that good play­ers know how to make their oppo­nents jump by pre­tend­ing to do man­jigeri, while they are actu­ally set­ting up a sec­ond attack. This is just the most basic exam­ple of the coun­ter­pro­duc­tive con­di­tion­ing that can occur with poorly con­ceived prac­tice methods.

So, about that cre­ative approach…

Slow, Stationary Kobo - Again

Remember that kobo are not answers. If there are “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” then there are at least 100 ways to respond to sengi (espe­cially, if the per­son attack­ing does hap­pen to be your lover). This time through, we need to come up with some of those other ways. Think of this as exploratory kobo, and you’ll be right on the money.

Let’s take the speed back down and drop the foot­work for now. We’ll start over from the begin­ning, with the pro­vi­sion that the “defender” needs to be cre­ative and come up with a per­sonal favorite few meth­ods of deal­ing with the “attacker’s” movement.

We already know that you can do hien­zuki to defend against man­jigeri. The prob­lem is that every­one doing man­jigeri knows this too, and they adapt their tech­nique accord­ingly. Thus, peo­ple who have prac­ticed defend­ing against manji still get hit with manji. If we want to avoid get­ting hit with adapted tech­niques, we have to adapt our defenses. Keeping with the anal­ogy of man­jigeri, there are lots of ways to defend besides hien­zuki — this drill requires that you find a few of them.

With your part­ner, brain­storm a bit. Look at the motion of the attack and think of where it is strong and where it is weak. Where does it come from, and where does it go? Try to think of ways to use ideas like ohen fubi and rendo rentai to come up with responses (hint: review your seigyo methods).

Repeat this process as many times as pos­si­ble, work­ing slowly and with an open mind — you will never exhaust your options, but any one you dis­cover may save your ass some­day in jis­sen. For each promis­ing appli­ca­tion, build speed grad­u­ally, as you would with your usual kobo practice.

Slow Again with Variable

Now that you have options, you can prac­tice choos­ing the right one on the fly. This is dif­fi­cult to sim­u­late, but every attack, how­ever sim­i­lar is going to be a lit­tle unique. Try and base your defense choice on the spe­cific instinct you have in the moment. Instead of decid­ing before­hand what you plan to do (since real­ity will always devi­ate from your plans), react in real­time with one of your options. At the very min­i­mum, spend some time cycling through your var­i­ous options in var­i­ous orders and speeds. We want to be very care­ful of build­ing set pat­terns, and this is where that hap­pens, so be aware.

As before, build speed and power grad­u­ally. When you can avoid full-speed, full-power attacks by at least three or four dif­fer­ent responses, you are ready to move on to the next drill.

Slow Again with Preset Unsoku

Now take the speed back down, and do the same move­ments after some pre-determined unsoku com­bi­na­tion, for exam­ple ko-soku or hensoku-ka/gen. Build your speed up, and work through each of your vari­able responses indi­vid­u­ally. Change the unsoku pat­tern and do it all again.

You will find that, as attacks from var­i­ous unsoku pat­terns are slightly dif­fer­ent, cer­tain defense vari­a­tions will lend them­selves bet­ter to some than oth­ers. Work with advanc­ing and retreat­ing foot­work on both right and left sides. Get a feel for what works with each of these sub­tle vari­a­tions and you will start to see the util­ity in the pre­vi­ous drill.

Unsoku and Variable

Slow down again, and do the same thing, this time using a free selec­tion of unsoku move­ments and the vari­a­tions you have prac­ticed. Then, build your speed back up gradually.

When you are com­fort­able with all of your vari­a­tions at full-speed, the attacker can begin to vary the speed at will, mov­ing from fast to slow to fast. While the attack tim­ing gets trick­ier here, the attack is still the same, so the defender can choose the appro­pri­ate response. This step is excel­lent prac­tice for match­ing the speed of your defense to the attack as it happens.

Unsoku and Unshin with Variable

This is basi­cally the same s the above drill, but both part­ners are now free to use both unsoku and unshin as they see fit.

Baby Steps

With all of the above drills, speed, inten­sity, and power, are the pri­mary vari­ables for incre­men­tal increase before adding com­plex­ity. Most other fac­tors are going to be fairly con­stant (for exam­ple, which move­ments are being prac­ticed). This allows low-stress grad­u­a­tion to higher lev­els. If you try to get cute and change too many things at one time, you are going to defeat the pur­pose of these drills. Sure, you may over­come and look as if you are get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter at var­i­ous motions, but that’s all you’ll be learn­ing — how to go through the motions.

You will actu­ally be con­di­tion­ing your­self to react in cer­tain pat­terns as a panic response if you don’t progress slowly enough. Instead of flinch­ing, you con­di­tion your­self to jump. This seems like an improve­ment, but the jump is actu­ally just a dif­fer­ent man­ner of flinch­ing, and you are no bet­ter off in the long run. You may feel that you have gone from begin­ner to inter­me­di­ate rather quickly, but you will find your­self hav­ing a hell of a time mov­ing from inter­me­di­ate to advanced.

Go slowly on these lower-level kobo drills. Really take the time and explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties they offer. It doesn’t mat­ter how “advanced” a stu­dent you are; you can get a lot out of the above prac­tices. Allowing your ego to seduce you into attempt­ing prac­tices that are above your level leads to injury in sports train­ing. Kobo is no exception.