Kyokushin

[Kuma]

If you allowed head punches, the high kicks would be seen a whole lot less. Allow full contact groin kicks (street fighting) and the high kicks would undoubtedly disappear.

Back in the earlier days, both were allowed during jissen kumite. However, their main problem was keeping students after those kind of sessions. According to Shihan Hiroshige you'd have a school of 100 drop to less than 10 students after one such session, and Shihan Okazaki used to say his job during jissen kumite matches was to collect teeth during matches so they would not be lost. You still saw plenty of high kicks during that time. Just like a Thai boxing match, they allow head punches yet have plenty of high kicks as well.

Kancho Royama has brought back both into certain types of kumite. However, any kind of groin kicking in my opinion should be avoided. You'll either have guys wearing cups to protect themselves, thus minimizing the impact and causing them to ignore it, or you'll lose a lot of students quickly and the few you keep will be facing serious injury. That's like saying they need to incorporate eye gouges too. No matter what you do, there always has to be some kind of rules to protect students from serious bodily injury.

[brickshooter]

In the 80s the open tournaments allowed groin kicks. And the result was that people were more conservative with kicks. But it didn't disappear. Participants started to set up their kicks instead of throwing them out there without thinking. I suspect that if groin kicks were applied in Kyokushin tournaments, the same would result.

In other words, they'd change their strategy to punch someone in the head first before kicking him in the head to finish him off. This is because it's fairly difficult to try and groin kick after taking a punch in the face.

[evergrey]

In my dojo we sometimes put on MMA gloves and punch to the head and face.

Well, at this point in my martial arts career, what that really translates to is that I eat a lot of knuckles, lol!

But yeah, people often mistake the strict tournament rules as the whole of the style. In the dojo we do head punches, we do grabs, sweeps, throws, armbars, and stuff like that too. :}