Dive into the heart of a living, breathing traditional martial art with Colin Wee's award-winning book Breaking Through: The Secrets of Bassai Dai Kata. This is not just a kata manual-it's a practical guide to understanding combative principles encoded in traditional forms.
If your training feels like it's missing tactical clarity, kinetic power, or logical flow, this book offers a framework to bridge the gap. Rooted in the JDK Method, each technique is designed to address attacks from both left and right sides-because in real combat, you can't predict where the strike will come from. And since every opponent's job is to oppose, Breaking Through emphasizes counters and workarounds, preparing practitioners for the moment their initiative is stopped.
With twelve combative lessons and over 200 annotated photographs, Breaking Through reveals traps, angles, takedowns, and transitions that challenge assumptions baked into modern hard-style training. Wee's approach blends hard-style efficiency with soft-style adaptability, helping instructors and students move beyond rote choreography to real-world application.
While centered on Bassai Dai, the book isn't Karate-centric-its insights apply across styles and forms. As martial arts historian Ørjan Nilsen notes, it's "the best Bassai book ever written," recommending it even to Taekwondo practitioners.
Whether refining your own practice or guiding others, Breaking Through equips you to explore structure, mechanics, and the logic of application-bringing tradition to life under pressure.
