My Karate Ahhh Ha! moment

Haven't been on here in a while school, work, and other schmit gettin in the way. Anyway,I've been doing Shotokan karate for bout 12 yrs.( since was 11) I've recently started taking formal Brazilian Jujitsu classes this semester and "MMA" classes. For a couple of weeks I've been exclusively been doing boxing, and I had the mentality of, "Ok I have 14oz gloves on I can't do any Karate techs., and would sometimes cover up and just take hits. However I had an "AHH HA!" moment. As I was sparing with my instructor the other day I let go of that perception and just did what I was use to do, sit back in my stance, slow down, etc: low and behold I was boxing better but I was doing Karate stuff that I already knew. I wanted to be like its not the same but it actually kinda was. I couldn't exactly do all the blocking stuff pre-say, but I had to change it a lil just so it would work. Actually would work even better going back to 6 and 4 oz. Even that nonsense kata stuff that I stopped doing bout 4 yrs ago, I could actually see how some of the movements in it are what I should have been doing in my sparing session. I had to share that cheers, and yea I'll probably be practicing kata a lil bit more now.

Good to hear you got your insight!
Try to see that 'kata' isn't synonymous to 'solo'-drill.

Everything gets connected sooner or later.

Very true.
Many years ago, I added a speed bag, a double ended striking bag and a heavy bag to the home gym I had then. As I didn't know boxing, I just trained my hand techniques the same way I was taught in my Shotokan dojo. So, for example, when striking the speed bag, I'd hit it with two kisame-tsuki and one ura-ken uchi, switch sides and hit with two gyaku-tsuki and one ura-ken uchi, then switch again. I don't know if regular boxing drills would've been better at developing hand speed, but my Karate techniques sure got one whole heck of a lot faster.
As it turns out, there was this kid in the neighborhood who boxed. He saw me training one day, came over and introduced himself and we became friends. Every so often, we'd spar in the park across the street. I never used anything but Karate when we did. We discovered that each had vulnerabilities to the other's art. But my Karate stood up well to his boxing. And that was good enough for me!