Kuma

Body conditioning can help if done intelligently. Start light, keep it moderate, and remember it's a marathon, not a sprint. Talk to your instructor about it. Amongst friends, sparring with only body shots and low kicks is a great way to condition the body as well as work on fighting skills.

Everyone has problems sparring in some way when they first begin practicing it. It will pass as your confidence grows.

That knockout at the end though looked pretty legit to me.

Elliptical machines are pretty easy on the knees. Some interval training on one of those twice a week would be adequate to improve your stamina considerably.

Sosai Mas Oyama was an 8th dan in Goju Ryu and a 2nd dan in Shotokan, if I recall correctly.

Kyokushin has strong influences from both Goju Ryu and Shotokan and emphasizes full contact sparring. Those are the most obvious differences.

"75 Down Blocks" by Rick Clark, which is available on Kindle for 10 bucks nowadays. It's an interesting read and there is some good applications. There's also a few stinkers in there too unfortunately. The main idea is it gets you to look outside the box and see what you can do with a chosen technique.

Tai sabaki (whole body movement). Although technically it can be considered technique, it is a bit cheating though.

They certainly are making a tidy sum off of each student. For our Kyokushin tests, the fee is $5 to replace your belt. That's all we really pay.

Another video posted by the same individual who posted this video is titled "Close Door Challenges - San Shou vs Kung Fu" so I feel the two are related. The male in the grey sweatpants could have been trash talking and got himself into a pickle, and when he saw his opponent was better than him, lost the will to fight. Seen it happen before.

Are we sure this wasn't a challenge match? Schools sometimes get challengers and these types of fights can be pretty brutal. Beautiful side kick in either case.

It's training that is key. I bet the average Sumo wrestler could outwork virtually every single poster on here with their grueling training. Looking at just the cover of the book is a huge mistake. Read Evergrey's blog sometime. She trains pretty dang hard and consistently, far more intensely than some black belts I know who have different body types. Keep it up Ev.

Congratulations!

I read up a bit on it. 1 hour and 40 minutes of hard fighting. Impressive as all get out.

AWESOME.

In Kyokushin we call it "mikazuki geri". It's a hybrid half front kick, half roundhouse kick. Good kick.

A law enforcement related article ya'll might find interesting that is relevant to this topic: http://www.policeone.com/patrol-issues/articles/1877110-Female-suspects-They-CAN-hurt-you/

Many guys mistakenly believe a woman isn't a threat to them, hence part of the problem. Ladies - teach them the hard way!

Congratulation pers.

I actually prefer heavyweights and have used them since I was a yellow belt. Get them whenever you feel you are ready.

I prefer bare feet in the dojo. Outside, I'm either wearing 8" boots for work or low hiking boots when I'm not working. I have practiced in both pairs and have to say the 8" boots are my personal favorite.

Is it really me bashing the Shotokan system? Seems to me if you don't want criticism you're being very hypocritical considering how you started off this thread. Actually we're talking training methods. Is there any Shotokan tournaments that allow full contact bare knuckle strikes to the face during a continuous fight? The JKA video you posted shows virtually all of those same fighters keeping their guard at the same place, so I fail to see how that's a strong argument. Does Kyokushin have tournament formats that allow head strikes? Yes, just not bare knuckle ones. Knockdown fighting is its own sport. Kyokushin created knockdown fighting but does not only fight knockdown. The creator of K-1 started it because he was a Kyokushin fighter and wanted his fighters to help get a start into the kickboxing realm. Many fighters in K-1 are Kyokushin or its offshoots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye_Cq_cNon0 You claim the competition is just one aspect and that I need to look past that. Perhaps you need to do the same.

Please explain the benefits of sparring under a system where you get in trouble for hitting too hard, the referee stops the fight after a strike is delivered, penalties for targeting anything below the waist, disallowing knee strikes, and disallowing the ambiguous "techniques which by their nature cannot be controlled." It's essentially a formalized game of tag.

Kyokushin does train to deliver and defend against head strikes. Many dojos spar with such and light gloves. As I mentioned in another thread, I currently have a split lip from taking a hard right from a sparring partner in my Kyokushin class. Knockdown fighting is a separate issue. Knockdown fighting wasn't always that way either. They used to allow punches to the face, but due to the amount of damage it was causing and the laws against illegal prizefighting, Oyama had to either decide to allow gloves or to ban punches to the head. Since Oyama thought just adding gloves would make it just like kickboxing, he went for the latter. Interestingly enough, in the late 1970s he encouraged one of his students, Takashi Azuma, to develop a new ruleset for Kyokushin. Azuma developed one and presented it to Oyama, but by that time knockdown fighting was so popular Oyama couldn't change it without making major waves. Azuma got permission to go his own path with his new ruleset, and that's how Daido Juku/Kudo was born. Many Kyokushin organizations have been hosting tournaments allowing gloved strikes to the head for years now. Knockdown fighting is still the most popular of the ruleset, and since Kyokushin does not have as much exposure here in the US than it does in Europe and Asia that's typically all people see. Personally I think training to pull your strikes and believe one shot is all you need to win a fight is a far more dangerous mentality to impart in a student. Karate itself technically is not a martial art, as it was never used in war. If you want to explain why you don't feel it's a martial art, you're free to it. However don't be surprised when you find out it's an incorrect assumption.

Actually I take criticism pretty well. I'm just merely pointing out your thinking is flawed. I have stated many times that my opinion of the Kyokushin style of kumite being superior to most other karate styles as such, yet in another thread you immediately jumped in and took great offense to what I said as if it was a personal slight. It wasn't. In my opinion playing tag in a karate dogi creates a very unrealistic expectation of what a real fighting encounter is like. That's all. What you "know" is highly incorrect though, hence why I would encourage you to explore that route again. That's not the goal of Kyokushin either, though. Especially in a tournament where you will have to fight several opponents, you want to beat your opponent as quickly as possible so you are fresh and uninjured for your next bout. They want that one hit stopping power just as much as every other karateka. The problem is we learn that realistically stopping a tough opponent with one hit is quite a difficult task, and is a dangerous assumption to believe that you can always do so. If you don't spar with full contact and without stopping until the other person drops, you won't experience that. You seem to be making an assumption about something that was not said. All I said was "I have trained with several Shotokan folk in my day and though there sanbon and ippon kumite was solid the minute we went to continuous fighting they had a lot of difficulty reacting and coping." Does that address Shotokan as a whole? No. You seem to be accusing me of bashing Shotokan, but that's really not the case and you haven't proven it to be the case. Perhaps you might want to review what has been said, it might cause you to stop making such hasty accusations.