Practising Kata at Home in a Small Istanbul Apartment

Your sensei says practise at home. Then you look at your living room

Somewhere in your first two months, an instructor will tell you to run through your kata at home during the week. It is good advice, and it quietly assumes a room that most of us do not have.

In Kartal, Yakacık, Maltepe and Pendik, the salon is usually the largest room in the flat, and it already holds a sofa set, a coffee table and a television. Below you there is a neighbour. The floor is laminate, parquet or marble. Nowhere in the building is there an empty space the size of a dojo.

So most students do nothing between classes, feel vaguely guilty about it, and turn up on Tuesday having lost the thread of the kata they were shown on Saturday.

The honest answer is that you can do real kata work in a small flat. Just not the version you are imagining. Full-length, full-speed, full-power kata is not what home practice is for. Almost everything else is.

First, measure what you actually have

Before you plan anything, push the coffee table against the wall and pace out the space.

• Two metres by two metres is enough for stance work, hand positions and slow kata segments
• Three clear metres in one direction covers a full line of most Heian kata at walking speed
• The hallway is usually the longest clear line in a Turkish flat, and it is ideal for straight embusen work

You are not looking for a dojo. You are looking for the biggest rectangle you can clear in under sixty seconds, because any setup that takes ten minutes will not happen a second time.

The neighbour problem is real, and it is solvable

Two things in kata travel straight down through a concrete floor: the stamp and the landing.

• Do not stamp at home. Mark fumikomi by placing the foot down firmly and silently
• Do not jump at home. Step through the jump and carry on with the sequence
• Leave the kiai out, or breathe it out with your mouth closed. A kiai at half past nine in an apartment block is how a club loses a student
• Finish before ten at night, and remember that a neighbour runs out of patience long before the regulations say anything

If the only version of a kata you can do at home is the silent one, that is fine. Silence forces you to control your own landing instead of letting the floor absorb it, which is better training in any case.

Floors injure people at home far more often than technique does

A dojo floor grips. Laminate, parquet and marble do not, and this is the single most common way home practice goes wrong.

• Train barefoot. Socks on parquet are the short road to a turned ankle
• Never practise on a rug or kilim that can slide. Roll it up, or move onto the tiles
• If you slip out of a stance once, stop and change surface. There will be a second time, and your weight will be further forward when it comes

Twelve minutes, three times a week, is enough

A short honest routine beats an ambitious one you abandon in nine days.

• Two minutes of stance holds. Zenkutsu dachi and kiba dachi, thirty seconds each side, watching knee and foot alignment
• Four minutes of your current kata at walking speed with no power, counting the turns out loud
• Three minutes on the one segment you keep getting wrong, slowly, nothing else
• Three minutes of hand work standing still: hikite returning to the hip, the path of the elbow, the preparation before each block

None of that needs more than two square metres. None of it makes a sound.

What home practice cannot do for you

Here is the part nobody says out loud. Repetition without correction does not make you more correct. It makes you more consistent. If your hip is late on the third movement, three hundred repetitions at home will make your hip reliably late.

So work inside sensible limits.

• Only rehearse what you were actually shown in the last class or two
• When you are unsure of a movement, slow it down. Speed sets whatever you are doing, right or wrong
• Film thirty seconds on your phone from the side rather than the front, and bring it to class if something feels off
• Learning a whole new kata from a video you found online almost always creates extra work for your instructor later

If the one practising is your child

Parents who train are rare. Parents who correct are very common. Try not to be the second kind.

• Praise the fact that they practised, not how it looked
• Count out loud for them if they want an audience. Most children under ten do
• Do not correct technique, even when you are certain. You will pass on a detail from a different style or a different grade, and the child ends up caught between two authorities
• Ten focused minutes twice a week is more than most children manage, and it is plenty

When you want a floor that grips and someone watching

Home practice keeps a kata alive between classes. It does not replace an instructor watching your hips, a surface that will not slide, or the space to move at full length.

If you are in Kartal and have been meaning to start, the first class is free. Kartal Karate Academy trains at Yakacık Spor Kulübü, Spor Cd. No:4, Cumhuriyet Mahallesi, 34876 Kartal, İstanbul, Monday to Saturday between 09:00 and 21:00, with Sensei Behzad Yaghoubian and Sensei Homa Yaghoubian, both International Karate Champions. Book a trial class at karatekartal.fit/en/register, or call +90 501 366 56 30.