Thief

Hi, it's possible that a similar topic exists already (I would be surprised if it didn't....), but I didn't find it among the more recent discussion, so I would appreciate any advice from you guys. The story: I am 45 y.o. practicing shotokan since the age of 20. I took a longer break (few years) during which I kept quite fit (lots of gym, jogging, soccer) however no karate. Last year I got back into karate, and - funny as it seems - I wanted to do a tournament as well. I jumped right into competition oriented training, drills, etc .., and broke my right knee. The MRI diagnosis gave a complete Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tear, and the doctor also diagnosed a partial inner meniscus tear. Two months later I went for surgery - Arthroscopic Knee Reconstruction, followed by a few sessions of guided physiotherapy. Now I am 5 months after surgery and trying to get back to karate training. I am experiencing the following: - I am still limping when walking - I cannot fully extend the right leg by myself, however if I press it down I reach full extension - I can do light jogging, however with a limp, and it feels difficult overall - I can kick slowly raise and kick with the right leg (the operated one), but in slow, controlled motion only, and the knee feels sort of funny - I cannot kick with the left leg (the healthy one!). the reason is that the left leg / hip seems to have lost it's flexibility, my whole body seems stiffed up when trying to use the left! Of course, I got all the medical advice I could, but I have not yet heard it from an actual karate / martial arts guy who has been there already, and recovered. So my question to you guys: has anybody been thru this? How, and how long did it take to recover? Is it possible to get back to where I was before the accident? It is extremely frustrating, it is the first time that I am experiencing such a physical limitation .... Thanks.

Ouchhh ... yes, I had it once and it was bad, although not as bad as in your case from what you're telling. maybe this topic could open up another discussion: what injuries have you so far suffered in your activity? I had a broken rib on two occasions, a broken toe and of course many minor ones like a dislocated jaw a few times (I had to live on soup and water for a few days as well), etc ... My style is semi-contact Shotokan karate, I guess the kyokushin guys and the kickboxers are probably laughing by now that I call those things injuries ...

Yep. But as I said above, "performance" in tournament is not necessarilty your win\loss record but rather the way you present yourself. Of course, this is a very, very grey zone, and here it comes down to the club/association and if they want to maintain their standards or not. Only as an example, I could lay it out in the following way: say, you're a blue belt in your late teens or in your twenties. You start making 2 or 3 tournaments, can be small local ones, and get some competitional experience (regardless of if you win or lose) before going for brown belt exam. That should be good enough. Now between brown and black you'd have to have some 2 years training time, meaning the chance to go to another 5 - 6 tournaments. By now you would be fighting black belts and fellow brown belts, and by the time you want to go your black belt your coach, as well as the other ones from your association (who would be the jury) would know you and have an idea of what your level is. They would make a judgement of whether they should let you take the exam or not. If in those 6-7 tournaments you sucked at kumite, but were good in kata that's fine (or the other way around). If you sucked at both, then - yes - they may tell you to train harder in order to let you take the exam. So you keep training - at that age training means progress - until you can show some skill in competition first, before going for the exam. Depends for what reason. Age is a factor that changes the criteria. For older people skill and understanding of karate is more important than competitiveness. There may be other factors. Eventually, if you are a trainer yourself and your students are doing well in competitions then obviously this is a good reason for you to be promoted even if you dont compete yourself. As I said, it comes down to what extent your association wants to keep the standards high.

No, of course not. If winning was the criteria it would mean that we could only get our ranks only one person at the time, since there can only be one winner . The idea is to show that you fare better than the lower ranks, and are equal or at comparable level with the ranks you aspire to. If you win matches that obviously proves it. If you lose but you still put up good fights (technically, physically, tactically, emotionally) that should do it as well. Same for kata, you don't necessarily have to win but participate in tournaments and present yourself well. I agree with you, and I do not advocate for setting clear rules. Chess, go, judo, etc ... are good examples for the principles of how ranking can be made meaningful and relevant, but their rules are not tranferable as is. I agree with the post of DWx further below yours ... I guess that says exactly what I had in mind, particularly the sentence: "But maybe if the examiner or whoever was deciding the rank was looking at (...) how they're holding up against competitors of a similar skill level it my be a more valid way of ranking up." - that's exactly my point. Now whether the tournaments should be local, national, international, etc .... that's hard to say. I guess it depends on the club / association and their scale of operation. My answer is that if your club does partcipate in competitions at any level, then they could make it a pre-requisite for their higher belts to compete if they want to go up in rank. Again, it should not be mandatory to win, but if you consistently weasel your way out of it then why would you deserve a black belt? It's also the best way imo to keep the standard of the club/association high. If the club is a McDojo that doesn't do any tournaments and is not associated with any major organization then forget it, but then getting a black belt from such a club is like getting a degree in 6 months from an unaccredited university, what does that show? Nothing imo. Sure, I agree with that. It's not necessarily, and in certain cases it's actually impossible. What I said may apply for most young, healthy, etc ... practioners, who have no excuse of avoiding competition. Older ones, for example, shall be judged by different criteria, basically everybody according to his own circumstances (as long as you don't relax the criteria too much). No, the title and rank are two different things. And as I said before, as you grow older at some point moving up the ranks is based on different criteria (we all know that, don't we).

For b_m96: 1. How bad were those guys going for 3rd - Well, imagine the average green or blue belt doing kihon - ok, they know the form of the techniques, the stances, they understood the principles of karate like contraction/decontraction, kime, etc .. but than they still have that "clumsiness" (sort of, in the absence of a better term), as opposed to the fluency, speed and accuracy that you'd expect to see in a black belt. That's how those two guys were, and they received their 3rd dan. It's hard to describe it in quantifiable terms, but you get the picture. Kumite was sort of the same and the worst came with the kata. One of them got mixed up in the middle of it (I can't remember what it was, maybe bassai-sho, or kanku-sho) and had to stop, the examiner told him to start over. He started over, got stuck again and was standing there clueless trying to remember what to do. The examiner helped him out and told him the next few moves till he caught up with the sequence and finished. I not even going to mention the form and spirit of the kata execution. 2.Relevance of tournament activity when awarding ranks - here I would put it this way:it doesn't have to be a necessary condition, but may be a sufficient one (almost). I mean look at it this way: since there is no objective, universal standard by which to measure your abilities, the only way to do it is by measuring yourself against others. In games like chess and the japanese game of Go (which btw uses kyu and dan ranks) the ranks are given based on the results in tournaments. Makes perfect sense to me. By giving belts/ranks based on examination only, you end up in with situations where a blue belt from one school beats the **** out of a black belt from another school if they meet in tournament. What is the relevance and credibility of the rank in this case? for still kicking: C'mon, of course i didn't get 2 dan in 1.5 years! When I had joined that club i had already been sitting on my 1st dan for 7 seven years, the reason it took longer to move up was that I didn't have any continuity in training since I was moving with my job a lot changing countries, and also I considered it more important to train or compete, and didn't really care about the rank.

I'm glad to see that people still fail exams (I mean, not for their failure, but glad the standards are kept...), after what I've seen in various places I almost got disillusioned with where karate was going. For example there was this guy who had opened a dojo somewhere not far from Toronto, Canada who was asking parents for 2,500$ upfront for a full course with the promise that their child would be a black belt by the end of the course. Myself I took my 2nd dan exam with a dojo in the Toronto area while I was living in CAN, after I had trained with them for 1.5 years, along with me were 2 guys going for 3rd ... sorry for saying this, I don't mean to be neither arrogant nor disrespectful to anyone, but they were ... bad. I mean like, really bad. And still they passed. This is true, and I also liked your observation that exams should be taken only when one is ready for it, makes sense. But for me the true test, that would make me feel proud or humble, has always been the tournament. I started competing in tournaments when I was blue belt, and ever since the rank became almost irelevant. I just went with the flow as far as grading, and that was pretty much the mindset in our school and in our town (back in Romania, back in the days), your trainers and colleagues would look at you (and you would look at yourself) considering your results in competitions, and not the rank. Nevertheless, although I go by the principle that what matters is results and not the formal rank, since ranks and belts are so ingrained in the tradition of karate, I am disppointed whenever I see schools that lower their examination standard to the point that the rank given to someone is actually a far cry from what it should be.

It's my first time here and I don't know if this or similar subjects were already addressed on this forum. It has to do with, in my opinion, the declining "standard" of performance in karate, and with - again, IMO - the transformation of karate, TKD, kick-boxing, from martial arts into a leisure activity for the masses and the kids. The word "McDojo" is something we all probably heard already. Most of this is for commercial reasons, karate clubs taking up everybody, and doing everything to keep everybody they can cash on. anyway, can you guys answer the following, honestly and to the best of your knowledge: 1. throughout your karate "career", did you ever fail a Dan exam? 2. did you ever fail a kyu exam? 3. do you know somebody who did? And for instructors: 4. what is your pass/fail rate when you are giving exams? For colored belts and black belts? I've been around karate clubs in many countries (I keep relocating with my job every 3-4 years) and looking at both the colored belts as well as black belts, whenever there's an exam everybody passes! I've been doing karate since the early 90s, and maybe the old(er)timers could share some of their experience from the 80s or 70s, but for the past 20 years all i've seen is everybody passing everytime.