Thoughts on Sport Karate

[camotheman]

Hey guys, more of a rambling of my thoughts here than a question, but, I wanted to write a little post about sport Karate and my thoughts and experience with it. I’m specifically talking about WKF / WUKF / AAU style sport karate. 

A little bit of background, growing up, I competed in sport karate until about the age of 18. I trained this alongside traditional karate, at the same dojo. I do believe that sport karate has benefits, it teaches you to be light on your feet, have good footwork for kumite, good distance management, and control of your techniques (power). Sport karateka are also some of the best athletes that I’ve worked with before. 

Now, there are also areas where this falls short. In the kumite of sport karate, the match stops when someone gets a point, this is not realistic whatsoever. If I punch you, and you are still conscious, that does not guarantee that you will stop attacking me. Stopping after the point like this can create some bad habits if you were ever in a real world situation. Now, I’m not saying that if you were in a real world situation, that you would stop after one punch, but it definitely breeds bad habits. 

Another shortcoming of sport karate would be the limited range of techniques and targets. No leg attacks, limited grappling with the opponent, no knees, no elbows, and light contact with your opponent. This limits karate in several ways, but to me it limits how many techniques I can use from kata. Now, I understand that it’s for safety reasons, but I’m sure that there is a good middle ground that could be found with a less limited ruleset and some extra protection. 

I spoke to my Sensei about this a few years ago and he told me that sport karate is for children, and that you learn “real karate” (traditional) as you age into adulthood / teenage years. I think that sport karate can definitely build good skills and coordination for a martial artist, but still has shortcomings for a real confrontation or traditional karate. 

I understand that sport karate is huge, and that it’s not going anywhere, but I wanted to pick your brains.

What do you all think about this? Does modern sport karate have a place in the traditional space, or should it be left behind? 

[aurik]

I train at a fairly traditional Uechi-Ryu dojo.  We use traditional training methods - body conditioning, kata which focus on open-hand techniques, our drills have many open-hand and definitely-not-legal-in-sport-karate techniques.  Sparring in our dojo is usually more of a free-form sequence where most techniques are permitted as long as you take care to not injure your partner.  Grabs are allowed.  Leg kicks are allowed (and encouraged).  Takedowns are allowed, provided you understand that the safety of your partner is your responsibility.  When we spar the goal isn't to win or lose, it's not to get points.  It is to demonstrate competence and confidence, and to show that you can put together combinations, and learn to read your opponents attacks and defenses.

However, our CI and a number of our students do compete in tournaments, both locally and nationally.  If students decide they want to compete, he will work with them on how to modify their kata and sparring techniques to be effective in the sport karate circuit.  Under his guidance, several of our students have been successful both locally and nationally in various competitions.

The way he puts it is if you teach the whole curriculum of our style and a student learns the "correct" way to do kata and spar, then it doesn't take many changes to adapt the sparring techniques and kata for competition.  So I would argue that traditional karate can be adapted to be used in a sport environment.  Kata can be adapted to show the judges what they want to see.  Sparring/kumite can be adapted to fit within the rules of the competition. 

My CI recently competed in a national tournament where he won second place.  The winning karateka knew exactly two kata.  He memorized the moves so he could perform them flawlessly over and over again, and on that day he performed better than my CI.  However the next day my CI ran into one of the judges from that competition and he said "You know, the other guy put on a better show than you did.  But I could tell that you knew the meaning of each of the moves in your kata.  The other guy didn't."

However, if you train with the primary goal of competing in tournaments, you'll leave a lot of what karate has to offer by the wayside.

[sensei8]

My thoughts…

Sport karate is for some and not for others; I’m of the latter.

Albeit, my last tournament was over 30 years ago; I garnered 4 Grand Championships and 2nd place in the Senior Division Kumite.

I think that sport karate and traditional karate is an oxymoron.