phoenixzion

Kyokushin is a solid style. I've got an old black and white text that's really really good. Keep training hard and working those kata. Pretty soon the movements and techniques will come naturally and flow.

Working on my Brown Belt right now, and this is the upper level of kumite that I have learned. Called Yakusoku Kumite. This is the exact set we do at my dojo:

Any kumite that involves stepping off the line and forcing an opening. I love retreating hand motions as blocks. We do several that we use to increase our speed and reaction time. Example: Attacker attacks low with a lunge punch. Defender steps back, using the retreating hand to "meet" the punch, in effect, rolling over their punch to back-fist the face. I dunno. It's hard to explain kumite for me in a post

I'm new here but definitely not new to martial arts. I just turned 28 and I started when I was 13ish. Unfortunately, I fell out of love with my Goju dojo and I left for a few years. I dabbled in a few other styles of Karate that never really set with me. I've done a good share of sparring and in the latter years of my Goju days (I was a brown belt) I was doing some heavy contact sparring. As I look back now, I realize that since I was never really taught the body dynamics of making power I never knew how to make power. No matter how many times I would spar. I was focusing on the wrong thing. Technique and "good karate" won't come from endless sparring matches. Speed, conditioning and a faster reaction time come from sparring matches. Now I train in a very traditional style of Shorin Ryu. More roundness to your limbs, more connectedness throughout your body equals more power. Not constant sparring. Training your body to know the motions in your kata as second nature need to be the focus, not sizing yourself up to someone else. I've been training with my Shorin Ryu instructor for three years now and I've learned more from kata, kumite and some light sparring then I ever did from a class that gave me 80% sparring and 20% kata. Kata hold everything that a martial art has. If you ignore that and want to skip to the "good part" aka sparring, then you are completely missing the point. Not trying to bash anyone's thinking here. Just offering my own perspective from a traditional and non competition point of view. Bruce Lee said it himself, "At the beginning competition is healthy, but in the end it only breeds contempt and resentment." EDIT: I also want to add, that the goal of kumite and sparring isn't to injure anyone. It's to use the full force and -not- injure the person. Anyone can throw everything they have into a punch, but it's the martial artist who can control that punch until the moment of impact. It takes years of skill to execute a perfect technique or strike with all your power and stop it before it hits. That's what sparring (to me) is really about. Learning control. If you can learn to control your hit to not hurt, then when you need to you can certainly go all the way.