Breaking Through

Breaking Through: The Secrets of Bassai Dai Kata is an award-winning exploration of martial arts application and pedagogy by Master Colin Wee. Drawing from more than four decades of training, Wee presents twelve progressive combative lessons inspired by the Bassai Dai kata—a form that transcends styles from Okinawa to Japan to Korea. With over 200 full-color photographs, this book reveals both hard-style striking and soft-style adaptability, including traps, angles, takedowns, and transitions often overlooked in modern Karate and Taekwondo training. 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. Wee's insights challenge assumptions baked into modern hard-style training and help instructors and students move beyond rote choreography to real-world application. While centered on Bassai Dai, the book isn't Karate-centric—its principles apply across styles and forms. As martial arts historian Ørjan Nilsen notes, it's "the best Bassai book ever written," and he recommends it to his own Taekwondo students. Breaking Through was officially launched at the American Karate and Taekwondo Organization's Annual Seminar Event in Dallas, Texas on March 23, 2023. It went on to win the 2025 Literary Global Awards (Non-fiction: Sport), the 2023 Best Indie Book Award in the Non-Fiction: Martial Arts category and was named a Finalist in Sports at the 2023 International Book Awards. Whether refining your own practice or guiding others, this book equips you to explore structure, mechanics, and the logic of application—bringing tradition to life under pressure.