okinawa karate and kumite

[tsuma]

hello friends and sorry for the bad english!

i have a question:

i train japanese karate and i saw some okinawa karate dojos and i readed a lot abaut okinawa karate.

my first question: do the okinawan karate styles practice free sparring? if yes,is it the traditionall way or modern influence?

my second question:

okinawan kumite is with fullcontact or point-kumite?

i saw in the youtube some uechiryu clips- okikukai brasilia- with knokdown kumite like kyokushinkai but i saw some uechiryu dojos who practice pointsystem kumite like shotokan .

what is the typicall okinawan way for doing kumite?

i saw on the internet abaut all okinawan fullcontact tournament 1983. did te fight like kyokushin knockdown or with punches to the face and gloves.

i would like to become answers from people who have experience with okinawan styles or who have been on okinawa!

thank you very much!

[quinteros1963]

Depends on the dojo. We have gone full contact with no face contact and Point sparing. Most seem to prefer the point fighting though.

[Montana]

We do both full contact sparring and light to medium sparring. Our full contact sparring utilizes bogu gear, similar to kendo armor (see link: http://www.kushu.com/bogu.htm for example), but different. Full contact is allowed to the face and sides of the head, and full contact to the torso except the back.

The groin is always a viable target regardless of the type of sparring we do, buut obviously light contact only. The head is also always a target (stupid to not be if you ask me) for both hands and feet, although we never do head kicks in this system.

[Lupin1]

We really don't do too much sparring at my school. When I was a kid we did sparring about once a month once we got to the "advanced" class (6th kyu and above) but that was about it. The adult class, as far as I can tell, doesn't do any sparring. My instructor was talking about when one of the first Isshinryu instructors went to a tournament and did sparring even though he'd never done it before. He said the guy just did the moves he knew from kata and no one could get near him because he was fighting with those strong moves and not like a sparrer. But judging by that story I'm going to say that sparring probably isn't traditional in my system, not that I've researched it personally.

[tsuma]

lupin,isshinryu is the same as shinshinkan? i saw on youtube some nice kumite videos from shinshinkan.

fullcontact sparring with punches to the head is very good but i thing fullcontact without facepunches like kyokushin is very effective method for leartning to fight and very hard sparring too.

not more okinawa karate practicioners here?

[Lupin1]

Isshinryu was created around the time of WWII (a time when many of the traditional arts were starting to seperate into formalized "styles"). The founder Tatsuo Shimabuku studied with both the founder of Goju-ryu and one of the main influences in the founding of Shorin-ryu and basically he took what he considered the "strongest" aspects of both of those systems along with kabudo and created his own system out of that. I googled shinshinkan because I'd never heard of it and it seems it was invented in 2000 by a guy who studied both Isshinryu and Aikijujitsu (which I'm guessing is a combination of Aikido and Jujitsu) and combined them into his own new style. So Shinshinkan has elements of Isshinryu in it, but it's isn't straight up Isshinryu.

[Sokusen]

As said before it depends on the dojo not the style. In my dojo we do both point and continuous sparring. Though the All Okinawan tournament is a point based tournament.

[Kuma]

I know a lot of Goju Ryu schools do free sparring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXY4FgKlLok

[KyuDai]

In our dojo, during the 90's, we do full contact sparing. no gloves or any gears. only waiver. lol. But nowadays, they tend to adapt the WKF rules.

[BDPulver]

we do all forms of sparring in our school. Lite to control contact. Higher ranks do free sparring.

But it is dependant on the instructor more so then the style. A instructor of tang so do I met in the army had some classes and let me practice my style there as long as I would spar his students.

Another instructor I met didnt like his students spar outside practicioners of other styles but his own.