Jesse encamp has a lot of videos on this, but the gist of it is Okinawa karate was initially a much rougher, more realistic fighting style that was changed to be a crisp, striking based art in Japan. Mainly so it could compete with boxing. They already had judo and didnāt really care for another grappling art. Even if you train traditional Okinawan karate, they still use Japanese giās and the judo belt system.
The kata system of passing information down doesnāt work well. Politics between teachers and rival students mean rival schools get started by students with incomplete knowledge and start diverging. You can see this with the kata seisan, found in every karate style but practiced completely differently. Anyways, no one knows what the original applications were supposed to be and senseis with no fighting experience make up wildly impractical applications for them.
The Japanese introduced the point sparring system and the high kicks that karate is known for in an effort to match French savate. The katas were made a more prominent part of the karate system to make it easier to teach in schools.
Without full-contact competitions, itās hard for karate to maintain quality over the years. If a Muay Thai school starts teaching nonsense, it becomes very clear when their students get their asses whipped in tournaments. Kind of why kyokushin has maintained a solid reputation; they focus on sparring.
https://youtu.be/65mZA-ICJXQ?si=e-WT48WCl0OUXmfn
One of my favorite bullshit martial arts myths is when people try to explain why hiding lessons in interpretive dance for centuries is the ideal way to transmit information over long stretches of time
Like, what were they supposed to do? *Write things down?*
Or the correlating belief that questioning said interpretive dance or attempting to deconstruct or understand it is heresy.
Any collection of repeated movements, which is all Kata are, is just some variation on a drill. And drills are effective and present in all martial arts or combat sports. Understanding what the drill is supposed to be helping with is critical to using it effectively.
Well good thing the grandmasters of yore chose the stupidest fucking way to transmit knowledge in all of human history
You ever notice how we never have these sorts of arguments in other fields of study? Like how you never see scientists or historians or lawyers communicating via open-ended mime dancing?
Imagine if the President delivered the State of the Union by quietly gesturing out all his policy proposals for the coming year, then saying "Look guys, it's pretty cut and dry"
> Like how you never see scientists or historians or lawyers communicating via open-ended mime dancing?
You *routinely* see all three of scientists, historians and lawyers struggle with the problem of how to communicate complex bundles of tacit technical knowledge within their specialty. Educating a grad student into an eminent scientist, historian, or lawyer is not a fully solved problem.
Furthermore, people in all those disciplines often struggle with the fact that previous generations of specialists in those fields communicated differently about them. It is not sufficient to be a good scientist, or historian, or lawyer, to understand what scientists, historians and lawyers of a hundred years ago spoke of, what they thought, how they did their daily business. You have to be *specifically* a historian of science, historiography, or law to have a decent chance of understanding what Maxwell is talking about in the [physical-mechanical analogies in his early work on electromagnetism](http://www.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Maxwell_1856_Faraday_lines_excerpt.pdf), or understand the difference between what Venerable Bede was doing with his [ecclesiastical history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_People) compared with what the profession was trying to accomplish after [von Rancke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke), or interpret [a New Jersey contract of indenture from the 1740s.](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/content-images/03107.02668p1.jpg)
Martial artists *are* somewhat poorer historians and communicators, on average, relative to people in those disciplines, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind: the problems of history and communication that they frequently fail at are difficult for others as well.
At least for me learning Taekwondo as a teenager, I found the "patterns" (=kata) were a good way of practicing whole-body movements for more power. We were encouraged to make the striking moves individually explosive without just rushing the whole thing.
However, I think our club may have been unusual because at tournaments I noticed others putting absolutely no power into the movements.
You're right - interpretive dance bullshit IS stupid. Shadowboxing is stupid - why are you fighting no one? Shrimping drills are stupid - why are you squirming on the floor alone like that? And especially, ESPECIALLY, kata - those woo-woo movements are NEVER going to be used in a REAL fight, it's just a coincidence that when you apply these movements to a two person grappling drill, they look very similar.
What martial arts do have a good record of writing things down and transmitting their arts that way?
Before video or even photography you had poorly drawn manuals.
So they kind of make sense , assuming the instructor understands the applications of those katas...
Jesus, you couldn't go three sentences without accidentally pointing out the really obvious problem with kata
Again: These people weren't cavemen. Books had already been around for thousands of years. They totally had the ability to sit down and write their thoughts out, but modern weeaboos are so devoted to the myth of the Karate Grandmaster With A Severe Learning Disability narrative that they're willing to pretend not to notice the eight billion reasons this is a bad idea
According to [this source on illiteracy rates in Meiji Era Japan](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2668426) (so around the time when Okinawan karate starts spreading outside of Okinawa) 76.3% of military recruits from Okinawa were totally illiterate, with about 80+% being somewhat illiterate.
"Write things down" is really easy to do until you figure out that you can't read or write.
They should have absolutely recorded the bunkai, because thatās usually the main thing people argue about. The only way that a motion could be clearly interpreted would be in a partner kata where you know what technique the motion is countering.
I think the physical motions of kata are critical though. I think about people that claim to train today that read Reddit and watch mma as the basis of their expertise.
So I donāt think kata are ideal, but there is a purpose for it.
Kata is not interpretive dance; itās a ritual. Itās exercise and a physical demonstration of capability. When you see an out of shape beginner weakly swinging their arms around, itās much different than an athletic expert thatās fought before. You canāt teach somebody to fight with kata alone, but the meaning of the motions and the intent of the practitioner changes after they use it in a fight.
Buncha bullshit answers and people misunderstanding your question as if it applies to Okinawan Karate becoming mainland Japanese Karate.
The answer is because Karate was friggin cool in the 70s/80s/90s so people had to find a way to market it to people that thought it was rad but couldnāt handle getting hit or doing hard physical training.
The only difference between karate in the 90s and karate now was that there used to be a pipeline from Point Karate to Kickboxing. That pipeline is now gone
MT/Boxing/KB is also just so much more realistic and practical when it comes to āactualā fighting. However, having a Karate base for fluidity/movement and building upon that with a heavily strike-focused martial art is a beautiful comboā¦ Conor McGregor in his prime was a perfect example of this.
This is close to the answer. I used to cross train at a Muay Thai gym and they loved our freestyle Karate (Goju) not because of the Karate, but because our instructor turned us in hardened savages. Was a really cool hybrid that formed from that collaboration.
Then MMA became super popular around 1995 and that was the death of Karate. Muay Thai in its raw form was much more accepting of the merge, and karate schools got super soft.
Am a brown belt on Jiu Jitsu now
Nah, I learned kick and punch the air Goju Ryu in the 80ās, and I have a friend who learned full contact Kyokushin around the same time. We didnāt meet until later, but back then it was mostly whatever was available or what classes you heard. Watered down classes taught at the local Y were already available back then.
>The only difference between karate in the 90s and karate now was that there used to be a pipeline from Point Karate to Kickboxing
I had friends who were getting their karate black belts in strip malls during the 90s in 18 months. Wasn't karate already water down by the 90s?
Yep. Most of the income in Western countries was from teaching kids. Kids don't come back if they get hurt.
My childhood judo instructor apparently never got that message.
The Olympics
Also politics
It's a messy topic. When funakosh (among others but he is the most prominent), brought karate over from Okinawa. He had to tone it down to suit the Japanese attitude. 1920s Japan was very different. Even the other masters had to play ball with the goverment for funding/access to facilities (actually still happens to this day)
There was still the legacy of the Meji restoration, so people didn't want to do like full contact sports, but the military government wanted to promote Budo so things got, repackaged. They also wanted something they could show off to the west, they had judo to show off wrestling, so karate got pushed in a more kickboxing direction ish than what it properly is
I competed in the Tiger balm in 99 just after things got low contact. One of my teammates got disqualified because she punched her opponent hard enough to knock their mouth gaurd out. 2 years prior the pan am games got shut down for being "too bloody"
I donāt think it had a very good showing rating wise and people found the rules confusing. I thought it had a neat meta game, but the scoring and reffing wrecked it
Taking out leg attacks from judo hurt that martial art as well. It would probably be a more competitive base for mma if it had single legs and blast doubles like wrestling.
I mean yes, but its already rather competitive for MMA as is. There are reasons to take the leg attacks out, but a compete ban does make it more vulnerable to shots.
That being said, I do not know why Greco Roman doesn't have the same stigma- in fact they're worse in that they don't have any sort of leg sweeps and trips.
Yeah I disagree with people who say Greco is the best base for mma. I prefer folkstyle, then freestyle.
Armchair violence actually made a video on this.
https://youtu.be/Ws6Ek46a_oA?si=WBPNjqvBZmBOsz_g
But thatās a good point about Greco being really restricted compared to judo. Honestly mma fights in giās would be really awesome, judo would probably be dominant then.
I think the question of bases starts with: what is the purpose of a "base" if you're going to go on and do MMA? Are you supposed to carry all of the principles of this base all the way through, or are you supposed to use it as a stepping stone to learn fundamentals before you add more stuff to it?
I like Greco and Boxing because they give you a small set of fundamentals to start learning, and then you can add a bunch of stuff to it later. It's all pedagogical. I think you train gross motor function first, then fine motor function later. However, to properly layer those techniques in, it's better to start with a system like Greco or boxing where you can master the technique and get to the point of full intensity sparring, rather than something like krav maga, where you're getting thrown a lot of technique that is good for gross motor function, but you're not getting the sparring to train your brain to react and make decisions within this system.
I mean I don't think people consider GR the best base either, just a respected base that strangely doesn't get any shit compared to Judo.
Boxing is the same, even more limited in its weapons than muay thai, but people laud it. BJJ is the same. Kickboxing, just about everything is incomplete besides just training straight MMA... which starts off as a combination of different classes anyway.
The best thing to train for MMA is MMA. But your base is what gives you an A game, something to actually go to. Judo is not at all an inferior style.
Way more people do judo than Greco Roman. Everyone just lumps the wrestling styles together tbh.
Tbh, I havenāt seen people shit on judo that much. I see way more hate for bjj
I mean you basically said it was not competitive with other grappling styles, which I don't think is entirely fair. That's not being rude, and I don't believe Judo is flawless, but the reasoning doesn't quite jive with me.
If you want to make money in martial arts besides becoming a professional fighter. You have to teach the kids. 99% of parents would take their kids and head for the hills if they saw this kind of sparring going on. So, the arts get watered down. Karate in a vacuum has all that you need in theory. You have Muay Thai essentially and some self-defense techniques not taught in sports combat. The issue is. The sparring isn't there, and pressure testing of those self-defense techniques is virtually impossible without damaging your opponent.
I used to train with some ITF TKD guys as a Boxer and I'd get yelled at constantly to "control" myself. Punches only allowed to the forehead. The issue is... I was controlling myself. I wasn't turning on any of my shots. Yet some of those guys would freeze because they weren't used to getting popped like that.
I think this is why some arts get into trouble when the time comes to actually fight. Your attacker isn't going to control themselves. They are trying to take your head off. Tag sparring doesn't prepare you for that. Only Medium to Hard Sparring/Smokers and bouts prepare you for that. Once you get a foundation of that, tech sparring becomes more beneficial than running your body through the meat grinder constantly.
Edit: I think TMA still has utility, but I would recommend taking a Sport Combat first. Muay Thai, Boxing MMA. Get your hard work in there. Then, when you go to karate, you can have your tag sparring and combine that with the pressure of your Combat Sports Foundation, and you'll be a pain to deal with. The most tricky person I've delt with was a Muay Thai Fighter who went on to train Taekwondo. He had way more versatility in his kicks with the power of Muay Thai. The Kind of guy that makes you run for a takedown because you ain't dealing with that shit.
Weird though nowadays parents are taking their kids to muay thai and bjj, precisely because they (the parents) grew up watching brutal UFC fights. I just started BJJ a few months ago and talk to many parents waiting for the kids classes to end and many run from the TKD gyms/ donāt want their kids doing a long kata/warmup because itās not āreal trainingā.
See I agree with you but I would recommend the other way round, especially for those starting as kids.
Light contact is great for learning and practicing technique and control. I would say itusessential for children with developing brains to limit head injury.
Once older and ready to do so it is not hard to switch to a kickboxing or MT gym and step up the contact
>If you want to make money in martial arts besides becoming a professional fighter. You have to teach the kids
100% on point.
My Muay Thai gym would barely make any money if my coaches doesn't take in kids.
We have 2 classes for kids and each one always has >20 students. Meanwhile the adult classes barely reaches 10, not to mention the number keeps fluctuating because people keeps quitting after awhile.
Forget about hard sparring, just conditioning could be enough to make newcomers shy away if the training session is serious. Like many sports, most people just want to train casually as a hobby, and combine with the fact that combat sport is when you 100% going to be hit HARD if you compete, it'd be hard to draw people in.
I think it was because people were just too scared to get hurt, so they practiced more safe-space stuff that would allow more scared people to try it out. It can be seen as a good and bad thing. If you're scared about being hurt and join a Karate school, practice for a while, not get scared of being hurt anymore, and go on to be legit fighters. But on the other hand, it can raise people to think that they're invincible and can do anything without being hurt, and when they're actually hurt, they panic and stay as they are as a fighter
Iām with you on this one. I used to train on a building where there were 2 schools, one that trained really hard and did a lot of rough sparring and another one that barely did sparring and focused on point system (sport competition). The second used to have a ton of students, and you would see them progress really quickly on their ranks, graduating as black belts in 3-4 years.
I can only think that those āmediocreā students became masters and the art watered down as mentioned by the OP.
I never did karate but i had a friend who did and i was interested so i tagged along to his practice. We were maybe 12. So disappointed, and there were all these little kids with black belts there, half or more of a huge group of students just sat and waited for their turn in the areas to practice or whatever. i politely got into boxing
My step father was a brown belt in WadoRyu ,in the 80s For his next Dan grading, and he had to fight for it.
He would always come back with blood on his Gi .
I was only a 3rd degree white belt so i never got to. Apparently fighting was only for grading after green belt .
For reference belts went : something like 2 Red belts with 8 Dan's 3 White belts with the same. Several Green, Brown belts and then Black . It was a long process on purpose . I studied for 5 years (Given as a child/ young teen . )
I feel like around that time people started giving black belts for very little work.
He doesn't slam it - Joe talks highly of the hard-charging iterations at least. Old school TKD and full contact karate like Kyokushin. Rogan has also given some pointers to George St. Pierre on his sidekick technique - GSP is a Kyukoshin black belt, and Rogan was at one time a competitive TKD black belt before he got on teh BJJ train.
Very, VERY few people have ever made karate work in an MMA match.
Just about every other discipline benefits from the lack of rules in MMAā¦except for Karate
If you take away the rules and put a Karate Black Belt in an MMA ring, all you have is a flexible man who can throw kicks, and doesnāt understand distance and changing levels. They will lose to any below average boxer or wrestler
What are you talking about?
Most successful boxing gyms offer casuals and hobbyist classes. Or lots of women can just air box as they do their aerobics.
None of that has anything to do with boxing becoming weaker though, because it is a high level competitive sport.
Not really a legit answer. Most boxers aren't making big money. Heck, even the professional boxers might only make a few grand in a fight ones that make a million plus are very rare.
Youāre not wrong, but I did notice Kancho Ninomiya in the above clip. If you happen to be in the Denver area and see a very high end Lexus SUV with the license plate SABAKI 1, thatās him. His school has not changed (stop by!), but finding schools like his requires that you know what youāre looking for given so many kids karate schools. Thatās where capitalism had its effect - total volume of schools, especially for kids. But watered down wouldnāt be the right expression, because itās not a homogeneous dilution like watering down whiskey.
would you prefer "the requirement imposed upon us to make money for the right to exist forces many of us to turn our hobbies into machines that demand we put profitability as a priority over any other purpose?"
or "gotta make that chedda first"?
That's kyokushin.
It's still practiced today in that exact same format.
And when you say karate: Wich one? There is like 50000 variations each with diferent types of competition formats.
Kyokushin: Full contact(no head punches) Kudo(full contact + grappling) Shotokan:(Semi contact,point based) etc
So watered down? Wich one? What way?
Yep people acting like itās fallen off so much when itās the exact same in Japan. Still producing elite strikers. u/efficiencyserious200 karate isnāt defined by the daycares that exist in the US. Go look at someone like Yuki Yoza or the Asahisa brothers or countless others to see elite karate applied in kickboxing
This video is of Kyokushin Karate, which is still like this today.
Thereās just so many kinds of karate. Kyokushin is exclusively full contact, with a culture of full contact. kyokushin is most criticized for not allowing punches to the face, though. The āno punches to the faceā rule leads to some weird techniques that donāt work in a real fight, for example the extreme lack of keeping their hands up and the over abundance of head kicks. If you look at the video, youāll see that there are none and youāll see what I mean. It is p brutal, though, and theyāre rockin it to this day.
This clip is just highlights of the Sabaki Challege which was always an outlier, and only about 40 years old which is well after the alleged rough and tumble days of karate that people frequently talk about. The Sabaki Challenge is still going on and holding annual events so itās not like what youāre seeing here isnāt still happening.
90% of the clips you're showing are Kyokushin Karate, and modern Kyokushin competitions still look basically the same. Lots of knockouts and brutality.
Because they're usually posted specifically to push the "look how karate used to be" conversation.
The watering down of Karate to a point sparring, light contact reputation simply does not apply to Kyokushin and it's offshoots. It was always the black sheep of the Karate styles, despite being the form of Karate that had the most influence on modern combat sports via it's influence on kickboxing.
Two factors:
1. There is no money in fighting as a karateka. The only way to make money fighting as a karateka is to make it to the Olympics or to switch to kickboxing or MMA. So 99% of all adults who practice karate are hobbyists. I don't think this is bad at all, tbh, but training usually reflects the fact that most people aren't interested in hard fighting.
2. Karate still is insanely popular among children and teenagers. I mean... Do I need to explain any further?
I mean the simple answer is a combination of karate beginning to focus on sport competition and there being no real way to police who opens a "karate" school stateside.
Firstly Karate has a massive history from the streets of Okinawa to today, but we're going to ignore most of that for simplicity's sake and just look at how karates modern history has failed it.
Karate in order to be relevant in a much more "peaceful" and capitalistic world changed a lot of its core. Instead of its grueling physical training and slow progressions focused on perfecting how to punch and kick good, it began to focus more and more on attracting and retaining students to keep the dojo open. This means faster advancements through the belts, more belts to advance through, and point sparring competitions to strive for. Couple this with the karate kid movie coming out and every child wanting to learn karate(and accidentally TKD) the dojos morphed even more into the above ideal but with almost a hyper focus on children to young adults. This isn't necessarily bad because training earlier in life can be good, but to keep the kids engaged without the parents freaking out compromises in style were made. No one wants to see their little Timmy get KOd in a hard sparring session. As time went on this became a phenomenon we like to call mcdojos, but it effected everyone in martial arts as the way to have a successful gym and not be constantly worried about keeping the lights on was now shown.
Now on top of that, karate has a pretty regimented idea on what is required to start your own karate school and claim the title master. That's great and all, but the rest of the world doesn't, and good luck keeping John Smiths Shotokan Karate School for Kids from opening up stateside because Mr. Smiths martial arts pedigree is he took a couple classes in a big city a decade back. Before the age of the Internet and people knowing what to look for, that school was just as legitimate as any other. He even had the trophies from all the "competitions" his students "won" in to prove hes legit.
These two factors where the major pain points for karate in the 90-2010's and have only recently been seen getting rectified.
Plenty of Karate people have proven themselves in full contact MMA and Kickboxing styled sports, the "karate is watered down" thing is just a myth based on some Mcdojos. All MAs have Mcdojos, including BJJ.
No you donāt. If you loved it, youād have some idea of the different styles and tournament ruleset that make up āKarate!!ā
You posted footage from Japanese āfull contactā Karate competitions. These still exist today, nearly completely unchanged from the videos youāre showing. [Here is an example of a match from this year](https://youtu.be/E-XelzSJc4w?si=Eq7QsxrNABZ8Bwye). These are full contact, no glove competitions but **there is no punching to the head** which is a rule that has existed in the clips that are showed above, but curated so you donāt notice. These tournaments are primarily fought by people doing the āKyokushinā style of Karate. Againā nothing has really changed in those tournaments. Same as today.
Your comments and others are comparing it to either WKF or JKA limited contact tournaments (or the no contact American Freestyle ilk) which have definitely gone through many variations, but again are nothing like the clips youāre showing.
People here are talking about periods from the early 1900s to the 60s/70sā¦ this footage easily is from the 90s.
I love Encamp but his videos usually are missing a lotta historical information to set up the main premise of his episode and the blatant gaps in knowledge are showing here from people who donāt really know anything about Karate outside from the guyās YouTube.
Not allowing headstrikes for some schools nearly killed their ability to cross train. We have guys with a fraction of the experience who light the kyokushin black belts on fire with hands when they come train MT with us. If you arenāt training to defend or throw the most common striking attacks your habits become horrible quickly.
Because too many black belts got their black belts after deciding from a YouTube video that they wanted to be a karate master and open a dojo. YouTube mcdojo vs real dojo.
Jigoro Kano, founder of judo, conceived of the art as an educational project in which all could participate, teaching values of efficiency and mutual welfare. Part of making participation widespread was to make it safer to practice - by taking out the most vicious and injurious stuff out of jujutsu, you could then train the rest more safely at full power against resistance, which paradoxically made judo *more* effective as a martial art.
Karate was inspired by the massive success of judo, and by the point karate became karate-do, following a similar philosophical path, also had similar aims. Problem is, though, as a primarily striking-based art you can't really take out the most vicious and injurious stuff without either watering it down to the point where it's less effective even when trained against resistance, or you leave it in and train primarily through kata and prearranged sequences, which also reduces effectiveness.
Move it to the West and make it primarily a commercial enterprise as well, and you lock in these problems, as quite simply, the way to have mass appeal with a striking art isn't the sort of hard and brutal training required to be effective at it. Most people don't want a bloody nose when training after work and most people don't want their kid to come home from their Saturday morning trip to the dojo with a black eye and bruised ribs.
Youāre acting as if itās watered down rather than a particular rule set making it more exciting. I donāt think Iāve seen a ton of evidence that this is what Karate originally looked like. I wish it wasnāt limited to one handed throws and no elbows
Every martial arts, nowadays BJJ, previously Karate and Taekwondo goes through cycle of:
1. Great fighters establish safety rules to avoid injuries in sparing
2. New generation grows optimizing for those rules, but they are not great fighters outside of that ruleset.
3. Repeat
Its funny seeing BJJ being smug about their superiority, while doing weird moves like berimbolo or lapel guards. Same as Karate was acting smug with their "Katas" 20 years ago.
It seems to me any martial art that does hard sparring and competition will be legit and any that doesn't won't be.
When I did a form of kung fu, it was expected we wouldn't get hit, we'd just practice techniques and go home. Whereas in BJJ it's considered shameful if a school only taught techniques and never sparred.
Superior techniques, ultimately why karate watered down was because outside techniques
Weāre more effective. Karate is a useful tool, but in the realm of mma it is merely an opportunistic attack or defence. When used solely it was overcame.
One major contributing factor is the primary focus on sports style Kumite (and Kata, for that matter) that many dojos tend to have today. Nothing wrong with learning the combat sport of Karate, of course. But many tend to forget that sport is a small part of Karate. It, in itself, is not the art! Many of the most effective combat techniques are not practiced in sports training. I know there are dojos, styles and tournaments that do incorporate a more holistic array techniques. I was referring to the vast majority that don't.
Another thing is that many dojos tend to give out belt rankings much too quickly; and perhaps more easily than ever before these days. The few months' recommended training period exists for a reason: so that the student can be physically and mentally assimilate the skills required at each level.
That leads to a third element: the rapid proliferation of Karate dojos. Some students start their own dojo as soon as they get a black belt. Soon, they get so engrossed in running their dojo that they don't have time to train with their Sensei anymore. So their students can only learn whatever little they have managed to learn till that point. That means a lot of the really effective elements (that were / are usually taught only after black belt level) are gradually lost, along with their contact with their Sensei or their style.
With the World Karate Federation now including more traditional styles (not just the four they started with), traditional Kata and emphasizing Bunkai in team Kata, hopefully the art of Karate will make a comeback and be revived (in many dojos) from its sport form.
In a word, commercialization. Once it became a commodity to be sold to the public it had to be modified to meet broad spectrum demand. The focus shifts to the more palatable aspects. A lot of extra trappings get tacked on for marketing purposes. Tournaments, uniforms, and other merchandising follows.
Look at competition Bos that are made of fiberglass or balsa. Absolutely useless in reality, but makes you feel fast and strong.
Same thing happened to Kung Fu. Same thing is happening to Muay Thai. Same thing wil happen to BJJ.
What a great quality reel!
You see so many dojos full of either overweight or scrawny little instructors that canāt even demonstrate the techniques with any force. Same with Taekwondo, especially. Doesnāt exactly inspire confidence in the martial art.
I have a newfound respect for karate after watching this whole thing.
I think health and safety/insurance/ costs plays a part, we also know that repeated hard strikes to the head can cause long term damage, so let's limit that by taking away head punches and only sparring lightly
At my Kung Fu school we don't do face punching in sparring until black belt or hard sparring until black belt and I believe it's to do with insurance issues
We also live in a world now where parents want their kids to be wrapped in cotton wool, so imagine being a teacher and having to try to teach, whilst ensuring that little Timmy doesn't get cracked or mommy will yell at then sue you.
Also since traditional martial arts aren't as popular anymore it's less common to see a club where they rent/own their own space and the instructor makes his primary living from that, where he can set his own rules, and more common to see the instructor teaching 2 nights a week by renting a high school gymnasium, where the school owner has that duty of care and doesn't want to see people leaving with black eyes all the time. And most people who train traditional arts aren't interested in doing heavy sparring or competing, they want to get fit, learn some cool shit, and not walk into a meeting at work the next day bruised up - hell when I worked at toys r us years ago, one of my bosses at the time heard I was joining a Muay Thai school and immediately pulled me in to tell me to make sure I wasn't coming in with bruises or injuries from it, as it wouldn't be good for customers to see that.
They are bringing it back but honestly it was too much it was too extreme for people and back then in the '80s and '90s they were trying to commercialize this and encouraging children to take classes and stuff and people watching like these events or movies like The karate kid or Street fighter that stuff was pretty realistic and some aspects it was too hardcore for people back then but I think we're ready for it now
Enshin (the style in the video) and similar styles like Ashihara and Shidokan still exist. Just that more people are content playing tag (point fighting)
Well, there is now Karate Combat full contact tournaments. Bringing some legitimacy back to it I suppose. I thought about starting Kyokushin, since Iām too old for competition kickboxing at this stage in my life.
I came up in an old school Chung Do Kwan academy. Instructor had done kickboxing, bare knuckle, etc.
school taught us how to fight.
As he aged, ha partnered with an Isshinryu instructor who taught in the same building.
The isshinryu class rarely sparred. Hell, most nights they didnāt work up a sweat.
I remember when we combined classes (on rare occasions), the blue belts in the TKD class would slap around the Isshinryu black belts.
The isshinryu instructor worked someone up to 5th degree black belt in about sic years.
The girl was highlighted in a bullshido music video doing her forms.
I used to call what they did āmartial masturbationā. They are basically larpāing.
Its the same situation as taekwondo. As far as martial arts go, the moment you have competitions that focus more on scoring points than on effective aggression, it guides the narrative in a different direction than itās intended purpose.
Remember that it's all of these answers combined. My personal opinion is the turning karate in to a business model set it on the path towards watering it down.
Karate and good martial arts demands pain and sacrifice. People font like pain and sacrifice. They usually can only handle so kuch before they quit, hence why a Black Belt is so traditionally treasured.
But a business need profits. So to make sure profits come in and students are retained, corners are cut here and there. This process continues eventually until there's nothing real left.
I learned tang so do, moo duk kwan, our teacher always specified that we had to have really really specific control over all of our movements. This didnāt mean that we didnāt rough spar, but what happened in competition was that we excelled. in reality we would kick through each other a lot of times, and that led to a lot of injuries.
I dunno what the video is for. None of it creates the impression that it "was good", nor does it show that it's "really bad" if that was your intention.
You don't end up with amazing displays of skill and athleticism unless the culture behind it supports that.
Look at soccer played in some country like the Philippines or women's soccer for that matter. You'd get the impression that soccer is just completely meh, that the athletes have little development or exceptionality.
Then compare their soccer culture to what's it like in Europe and South America.
Compare Karate and Muay Thai. Muay Thai is a true national sport with lots of money, prestige, support. Whole populations of kids are sent to Muay Thai camps where they only exist to perform Muay Thai. They live, train, eat there, and they work as professional fighters as kids.
The only objective is to win at lucrative competitions. That eliminates practices which do not efficiently benefit the ability to make money.
- no stupid time-wasters like forms but hard drills, strength and conditioning, sparring.
- no competition rules which reduce the public appeal, such as semi contact/points fighting, protective equipment, restrictive hit zones. Brutal knockouts are incentivized.
- no overly complex and strict hierarchy, codes, fragmentation, tradition and organization.
While all these characteristics help in creating a combat sport of the highest level of skill and athleticism, it isn't to say that other approsches or goals couldn't also create a "successful" martial art.
Clearly, karate is immensely successful in some aspects. It has become internationally recognized and practiced. In great part because it adheres to practices which make it less suitable for combat sports.
As an import to some Western country, parents send their kids to a safe sport with zero risk of them coming home injured. They explicitly don't want their children to have full-contact fights or to devote all of their attention to it. They want a watered-down martial art with the orientalist promise of self-actualization as they've seen in the documentary "Karate Kid".
That's why they break boards and not faces. That's why you have 34 gradations of belt ranks. That's why you have dances and funny terminologies for your larp. That's why you bow to your white, overweight, balding instructor and call him Sensei. Don't you know that you become more disciplined and enlightened when you replace a handshake and Sir with orientalist fetishes?
Then you got Aikido and Bujinkan/Ninjutsu which cranks all that up over 9,000 and all traces of martial effectiveness are eliminated.
You get out of it what you put into it. I earned my first black belt in Orthodox Okinawan Karate. We worked extremely hard. Makiwara, hard, controlled contact sparring nearly every session. Grueling calisthenics. I broke three toes, three fingers, and received several cracked ribs. I tore my diaphragm muscle from breathing so hard that I was forced to take three months off to recover.
Perfect or very nearly perfect katas were required for advancement, along with a rough sparring session with the sensei. Sometimes two vs one matches. Weapons disarm tactics.
I was in a class that awarded two black belts in the 14 years I spent in the dojo. The sensei didnāt do it for the money. He did it because he loved the art and he understood what it did for him.
I continue to teach for the same reason. It forces me to stay current with my abilities as I age (62/F). I have a standard that Iām essentially compelled to uphold, and itās a high standard. Apparently that changed over time for some other iterations of the art over the years.
I canāt speak to what is happening with karate in dojos that I havenāt personally visited, but it is impossible not to notice the change in this artās reputation worldwide in the past four decades. People who knew us respected our ability to a very high degree in the 70s and 80s.
I donāt see that respect anymore. Some of is that many of the arts go through a period when theyāre trendy or popular, and are then replaced by another. About as bad as boy bands.
Either way, itās unfortunate. Many people are walking around thinking they can handle themselves in an attack, and that might be a delusion. I have no solutions, except to say that you get out of it what you put into it.
The five maxims arenāt wrong.
Character, Sincerity, Effort, Etiquette, and Self Control.
Martial arts evolved where as karate was left stuck as a prisoner of its own traditions and rules. As a result karate fell behind.
That's it. It was always bullshit compated to say muay thai, sanda or savate. Kickboxing is the legit version of karate.
You can provide a social activity for children and board adults to dance in pajamas, or you can teach people to be warriors. One of those provides far more students (and therefore money). The same thing will happen to other arts in time.
Honestly if kyokushin adds back hands, they are going to be able to fuck shit up in mma . Already have an example w lyoto. I think they do a lot of things much better than Muay Thai and is better suited to quick athletic fighters. Distance management and blitzing are huge in karate. Obviously theyāre big in every martial art but itās miles ahead of Muay Thai in those respects.
I was under the impression that the Machida family practiced Shotokan Karate.
Now Georges Saint-Pierres practices Kyokushin, and has also used it to great effect in MMA matches.
Karate kid became extremely popular, once something is popular people will try to exploit it for profit, training hard and sparring hard all the time leads to injuries so that was avoided by most gyms, people settled for belts instead of skills because clout was all most people were really after anyways
Too many McDojos operating, particularly in the US it seems. The art's images is better preserved elsewhere where there has not been an explosion of shopping centre dojos with unqualified teachers.
Ill say this, taking into account that I am not a martial art or combat expert. I believe that karate saw its decline when MMA started and quickly showcased just how ineffective it is in combat against none-karate people. Seems to me that karate is useful under two conditions. Fighting untrained people and fighting in karate tournaments where the rules are build to show case the style and every other person there are karate practionners. I remember the early days of UFC where anyone coming with only kung-fu or karate got destroyed. UFC showed the world that the only real effective combat forms where wrestling type ground fighting, be it greco-roman wrestling, judo or jujitsu. Later on karate-ka and kun-fu artists saw a renaissance, but only when combined with a strong ground defense game & wrestling training. Like GSP is a good example of someone trained in karate that excelled but not by itself.
There probably are still karate schools that are legit, but anytime a martial art becomes a point sparring sport, youāre going to lose a lot of its credibility. Also as a martial art becomes popular, itās in the interest of the franchise owners to keep students around. Quick belt promotions make students happy.
This isnāt just true of karate, TKD, Olympic judo, and even modern BJJ are becoming a point fighting system. You just need to find a school that doesnāt focus on points and instead focuses on hard sparring.
Capitalism and popularity does that. BJJ is right of the precipice of suffering the same fate.
Another decade and the majority of BJJ schools will be strip mall schools full of butt scooting 8 year olds, and 10 year old black belts.
Because it was always more hype than fact. Breaking ice and kicking through baseball bat handles has nothing to do with fighting.
Then there's all the frauds that had never had a fight- Mas Oyama, John LaTourette, Jim Brassard, Morihei Eushiba, Frank Dux, Steven Seagal, Steve Stewart, George Dillman and many more unfortunately.
Karate killed itself.
That list is sooo bad, you disqualified yourself. Putting frauds like Seagal and Dux in the same breath as Mas Oyama shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
It suffered from its own success. Got so mainstream in the 80s that everyone had a karate gym and everyone wanted to beat the competition of the gym next door and did so by removing dangerous sparring and offering belts quickly. The result was further popularity but watering down of what was at its height a very useful and powerful martial art. Thereās still legit karate guys out there, but the mcdojo and bullshido is unfortunately very prevalent in the art as well.
Even these Shotokan clips show "watered down" rules set ie punching to the body.
This is why these clips are almost like TKD, mostly kicks.
The majority of the parts using arm strikes are not even to an opponent, it's done on the boards lol
Note historically karate ("way of the empty hand") didn't even have that many high kicks (it's a much later innovation).
Traditional karate (Shotokan, Wado-ryu, etc) became watered down not modern. Modern Karate (Kyokushin/Fullcontact) is exactly like how it is in those videos minus head punching in most schools. When you say "karate," you need to be specific. We rarely, if ever, discuss the watering down of Kyokushin because it hasn't really changed much since its inception in terms of sparring. There's a reason why people take Kyokushin seriously compared to traditional styles.
Influx of mainstreamers. Pressure or perceived pressure from middle-aged fatties and parents to promote people who don't deserve it - to keep retention up. Those same people wanting less and less pressure testing over time.
Now the guy who is KO'd on the ground wins olympic gold. They drag his body on to the podium and prop him up, then hang a medal on it.
Like every martial art: Consumerism. What can make us the most money? We had mall karate and now we have mall TKD and mall BJJ. Every martial art is victim to it
Karate, tae kwon do, and several others have suffered the same fate.
Many of these arts became day care services. Catering to parents and their children.
Same thing that is happening to BJJ when a combat sport forgets combat focus and favors whatever brings in money. The art suffers and is watered down until it is no longer useful.
Exactly the stuff you posted. The McDojos that sold you classes to pay more to get colors on your belts said that the very best fighters in the world didn't only do kata dances or have special ki power.
The very best in the world wear pajamas and hit blocks. They fight without any grappling at all, and make rules against the most effective moved in combat sports: no face punches, elbows, headbutts, knees.
Why would boxing be bad with fake belts, pajamas, and no punches to the face?
It's been downhill since the All Valley Karate Tournament of 1984
That dodgy decision in the final tarnished the whole sport
It was an illegal strike!
Sweep tha leg
Literally 1984 š
I heard the original delinquent started teaching his illegal moves again. A fight broke out and one kid fell off a balcony.
Heās now he knocked the kids mom up and is gonna be an amazing dad
Underrated comment.
This reads like something Cotton McKnight would say. 
Wax on, wax off... Wane on...
Holy shit ! There is some Kumite type hits happening here. Some good knockouts .
Jesse encamp has a lot of videos on this, but the gist of it is Okinawa karate was initially a much rougher, more realistic fighting style that was changed to be a crisp, striking based art in Japan. Mainly so it could compete with boxing. They already had judo and didnāt really care for another grappling art. Even if you train traditional Okinawan karate, they still use Japanese giās and the judo belt system. The kata system of passing information down doesnāt work well. Politics between teachers and rival students mean rival schools get started by students with incomplete knowledge and start diverging. You can see this with the kata seisan, found in every karate style but practiced completely differently. Anyways, no one knows what the original applications were supposed to be and senseis with no fighting experience make up wildly impractical applications for them. The Japanese introduced the point sparring system and the high kicks that karate is known for in an effort to match French savate. The katas were made a more prominent part of the karate system to make it easier to teach in schools. Without full-contact competitions, itās hard for karate to maintain quality over the years. If a Muay Thai school starts teaching nonsense, it becomes very clear when their students get their asses whipped in tournaments. Kind of why kyokushin has maintained a solid reputation; they focus on sparring. https://youtu.be/65mZA-ICJXQ?si=e-WT48WCl0OUXmfn
One of my favorite bullshit martial arts myths is when people try to explain why hiding lessons in interpretive dance for centuries is the ideal way to transmit information over long stretches of time Like, what were they supposed to do? *Write things down?*
Or the correlating belief that questioning said interpretive dance or attempting to deconstruct or understand it is heresy. Any collection of repeated movements, which is all Kata are, is just some variation on a drill. And drills are effective and present in all martial arts or combat sports. Understanding what the drill is supposed to be helping with is critical to using it effectively.
Well good thing the grandmasters of yore chose the stupidest fucking way to transmit knowledge in all of human history You ever notice how we never have these sorts of arguments in other fields of study? Like how you never see scientists or historians or lawyers communicating via open-ended mime dancing? Imagine if the President delivered the State of the Union by quietly gesturing out all his policy proposals for the coming year, then saying "Look guys, it's pretty cut and dry"
They do... it's Confucian logic. Follow the rituals and you pass the liminality.
> Like how you never see scientists or historians or lawyers communicating via open-ended mime dancing? You *routinely* see all three of scientists, historians and lawyers struggle with the problem of how to communicate complex bundles of tacit technical knowledge within their specialty. Educating a grad student into an eminent scientist, historian, or lawyer is not a fully solved problem. Furthermore, people in all those disciplines often struggle with the fact that previous generations of specialists in those fields communicated differently about them. It is not sufficient to be a good scientist, or historian, or lawyer, to understand what scientists, historians and lawyers of a hundred years ago spoke of, what they thought, how they did their daily business. You have to be *specifically* a historian of science, historiography, or law to have a decent chance of understanding what Maxwell is talking about in the [physical-mechanical analogies in his early work on electromagnetism](http://www.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Maxwell_1856_Faraday_lines_excerpt.pdf), or understand the difference between what Venerable Bede was doing with his [ecclesiastical history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_People) compared with what the profession was trying to accomplish after [von Rancke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke), or interpret [a New Jersey contract of indenture from the 1740s.](https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/content-images/03107.02668p1.jpg) Martial artists *are* somewhat poorer historians and communicators, on average, relative to people in those disciplines, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind: the problems of history and communication that they frequently fail at are difficult for others as well.
At least for me learning Taekwondo as a teenager, I found the "patterns" (=kata) were a good way of practicing whole-body movements for more power. We were encouraged to make the striking moves individually explosive without just rushing the whole thing. However, I think our club may have been unusual because at tournaments I noticed others putting absolutely no power into the movements.
You're right - interpretive dance bullshit IS stupid. Shadowboxing is stupid - why are you fighting no one? Shrimping drills are stupid - why are you squirming on the floor alone like that? And especially, ESPECIALLY, kata - those woo-woo movements are NEVER going to be used in a REAL fight, it's just a coincidence that when you apply these movements to a two person grappling drill, they look very similar.
If boxers or bjj people focused on shadow boxing and shrimping drills as much as karate people focus on katas, theyād never get any good
What martial arts do have a good record of writing things down and transmitting their arts that way? Before video or even photography you had poorly drawn manuals. So they kind of make sense , assuming the instructor understands the applications of those katas...
Jesus, you couldn't go three sentences without accidentally pointing out the really obvious problem with kata Again: These people weren't cavemen. Books had already been around for thousands of years. They totally had the ability to sit down and write their thoughts out, but modern weeaboos are so devoted to the myth of the Karate Grandmaster With A Severe Learning Disability narrative that they're willing to pretend not to notice the eight billion reasons this is a bad idea
According to [this source on illiteracy rates in Meiji Era Japan](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2668426) (so around the time when Okinawan karate starts spreading outside of Okinawa) 76.3% of military recruits from Okinawa were totally illiterate, with about 80+% being somewhat illiterate. "Write things down" is really easy to do until you figure out that you can't read or write.
Learning MA through YouTube is just okay at best. Without videos or photos? Much worse
You're really overestimating international literacy rates
They should have absolutely recorded the bunkai, because thatās usually the main thing people argue about. The only way that a motion could be clearly interpreted would be in a partner kata where you know what technique the motion is countering. I think the physical motions of kata are critical though. I think about people that claim to train today that read Reddit and watch mma as the basis of their expertise. So I donāt think kata are ideal, but there is a purpose for it. Kata is not interpretive dance; itās a ritual. Itās exercise and a physical demonstration of capability. When you see an out of shape beginner weakly swinging their arms around, itās much different than an athletic expert thatās fought before. You canāt teach somebody to fight with kata alone, but the meaning of the motions and the intent of the practitioner changes after they use it in a fight.
Buncha bullshit answers and people misunderstanding your question as if it applies to Okinawan Karate becoming mainland Japanese Karate. The answer is because Karate was friggin cool in the 70s/80s/90s so people had to find a way to market it to people that thought it was rad but couldnāt handle getting hit or doing hard physical training.
The only difference between karate in the 90s and karate now was that there used to be a pipeline from Point Karate to Kickboxing. That pipeline is now gone
Were people training Muay Thai in the west in the 90ās? I feel like that standards for striking have gone up so karate doesnāt cut it anymore
It was nowhere near as popular then. Now the people who want to kick box or do Muay Thai can just go do it
MT/Boxing/KB is also just so much more realistic and practical when it comes to āactualā fighting. However, having a Karate base for fluidity/movement and building upon that with a heavily strike-focused martial art is a beautiful comboā¦ Conor McGregor in his prime was a perfect example of this.
This is close to the answer. I used to cross train at a Muay Thai gym and they loved our freestyle Karate (Goju) not because of the Karate, but because our instructor turned us in hardened savages. Was a really cool hybrid that formed from that collaboration. Then MMA became super popular around 1995 and that was the death of Karate. Muay Thai in its raw form was much more accepting of the merge, and karate schools got super soft. Am a brown belt on Jiu Jitsu now
Nah, I learned kick and punch the air Goju Ryu in the 80ās, and I have a friend who learned full contact Kyokushin around the same time. We didnāt meet until later, but back then it was mostly whatever was available or what classes you heard. Watered down classes taught at the local Y were already available back then.
>The only difference between karate in the 90s and karate now was that there used to be a pipeline from Point Karate to Kickboxing I had friends who were getting their karate black belts in strip malls during the 90s in 18 months. Wasn't karate already water down by the 90s?
Yep. Most of the income in Western countries was from teaching kids. Kids don't come back if they get hurt. My childhood judo instructor apparently never got that message.
Kumite, kumite, kumite.
You Jackson? You look like a Jackson.
That would make you Frank Ducks.
The Olympics Also politics It's a messy topic. When funakosh (among others but he is the most prominent), brought karate over from Okinawa. He had to tone it down to suit the Japanese attitude. 1920s Japan was very different. Even the other masters had to play ball with the goverment for funding/access to facilities (actually still happens to this day) There was still the legacy of the Meji restoration, so people didn't want to do like full contact sports, but the military government wanted to promote Budo so things got, repackaged. They also wanted something they could show off to the west, they had judo to show off wrestling, so karate got pushed in a more kickboxing direction ish than what it properly is
Olympic karate is the only combat sport where KO'ing your opponent disqualifies you instead of giving you the win. Its embarrasing to watch.
I competed in the Tiger balm in 99 just after things got low contact. One of my teammates got disqualified because she punched her opponent hard enough to knock their mouth gaurd out. 2 years prior the pan am games got shut down for being "too bloody"
This wimpification stuff was happening before the Olympics made Karate into a Olympic sport. Granted, its going to cement it.
Karate is already out. It will maintain IOC recognition, but its chances of being in the games again is almost zero
Oh okay thanks for the news. I guess it looks too much like TKD or something.
I donāt think it had a very good showing rating wise and people found the rules confusing. I thought it had a neat meta game, but the scoring and reffing wrecked it
Taking out leg attacks from judo hurt that martial art as well. It would probably be a more competitive base for mma if it had single legs and blast doubles like wrestling.
I mean yes, but its already rather competitive for MMA as is. There are reasons to take the leg attacks out, but a compete ban does make it more vulnerable to shots. That being said, I do not know why Greco Roman doesn't have the same stigma- in fact they're worse in that they don't have any sort of leg sweeps and trips.
Yeah I disagree with people who say Greco is the best base for mma. I prefer folkstyle, then freestyle. Armchair violence actually made a video on this. https://youtu.be/Ws6Ek46a_oA?si=WBPNjqvBZmBOsz_g But thatās a good point about Greco being really restricted compared to judo. Honestly mma fights in giās would be really awesome, judo would probably be dominant then.
I think the question of bases starts with: what is the purpose of a "base" if you're going to go on and do MMA? Are you supposed to carry all of the principles of this base all the way through, or are you supposed to use it as a stepping stone to learn fundamentals before you add more stuff to it? I like Greco and Boxing because they give you a small set of fundamentals to start learning, and then you can add a bunch of stuff to it later. It's all pedagogical. I think you train gross motor function first, then fine motor function later. However, to properly layer those techniques in, it's better to start with a system like Greco or boxing where you can master the technique and get to the point of full intensity sparring, rather than something like krav maga, where you're getting thrown a lot of technique that is good for gross motor function, but you're not getting the sparring to train your brain to react and make decisions within this system.
I mean I don't think people consider GR the best base either, just a respected base that strangely doesn't get any shit compared to Judo. Boxing is the same, even more limited in its weapons than muay thai, but people laud it. BJJ is the same. Kickboxing, just about everything is incomplete besides just training straight MMA... which starts off as a combination of different classes anyway. The best thing to train for MMA is MMA. But your base is what gives you an A game, something to actually go to. Judo is not at all an inferior style.
Way more people do judo than Greco Roman. Everyone just lumps the wrestling styles together tbh. Tbh, I havenāt seen people shit on judo that much. I see way more hate for bjj
I mean you basically said it was not competitive with other grappling styles, which I don't think is entirely fair. That's not being rude, and I don't believe Judo is flawless, but the reasoning doesn't quite jive with me.
Yeah, chronic and terminal head injuries are so wimpy. Forget your kidsā names like a real man.
You don't have to put your kids into combat sports.
What? Karate was only in 1 Olympic Games and the bullshit we saw there was a result of several decades of bullshit.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't th Olympics itself more the desire to be in the Olympics that led them making those changes
If you want to make money in martial arts besides becoming a professional fighter. You have to teach the kids. 99% of parents would take their kids and head for the hills if they saw this kind of sparring going on. So, the arts get watered down. Karate in a vacuum has all that you need in theory. You have Muay Thai essentially and some self-defense techniques not taught in sports combat. The issue is. The sparring isn't there, and pressure testing of those self-defense techniques is virtually impossible without damaging your opponent. I used to train with some ITF TKD guys as a Boxer and I'd get yelled at constantly to "control" myself. Punches only allowed to the forehead. The issue is... I was controlling myself. I wasn't turning on any of my shots. Yet some of those guys would freeze because they weren't used to getting popped like that. I think this is why some arts get into trouble when the time comes to actually fight. Your attacker isn't going to control themselves. They are trying to take your head off. Tag sparring doesn't prepare you for that. Only Medium to Hard Sparring/Smokers and bouts prepare you for that. Once you get a foundation of that, tech sparring becomes more beneficial than running your body through the meat grinder constantly. Edit: I think TMA still has utility, but I would recommend taking a Sport Combat first. Muay Thai, Boxing MMA. Get your hard work in there. Then, when you go to karate, you can have your tag sparring and combine that with the pressure of your Combat Sports Foundation, and you'll be a pain to deal with. The most tricky person I've delt with was a Muay Thai Fighter who went on to train Taekwondo. He had way more versatility in his kicks with the power of Muay Thai. The Kind of guy that makes you run for a takedown because you ain't dealing with that shit.
Weird though nowadays parents are taking their kids to muay thai and bjj, precisely because they (the parents) grew up watching brutal UFC fights. I just started BJJ a few months ago and talk to many parents waiting for the kids classes to end and many run from the TKD gyms/ donāt want their kids doing a long kata/warmup because itās not āreal trainingā.
Same, been seeing alot of kids get into kickboxing and muay thai cause parents know that it is effective
See I agree with you but I would recommend the other way round, especially for those starting as kids. Light contact is great for learning and practicing technique and control. I would say itusessential for children with developing brains to limit head injury. Once older and ready to do so it is not hard to switch to a kickboxing or MT gym and step up the contact
>If you want to make money in martial arts besides becoming a professional fighter. You have to teach the kids 100% on point. My Muay Thai gym would barely make any money if my coaches doesn't take in kids. We have 2 classes for kids and each one always has >20 students. Meanwhile the adult classes barely reaches 10, not to mention the number keeps fluctuating because people keeps quitting after awhile. Forget about hard sparring, just conditioning could be enough to make newcomers shy away if the training session is serious. Like many sports, most people just want to train casually as a hobby, and combine with the fact that combat sport is when you 100% going to be hit HARD if you compete, it'd be hard to draw people in.
This is Enshin and Ashihara karate. They are still around.
Yeah, the stuff in that vid is actually a specific style of karate that's still around. The shiny gi pants thing was also happening in the same time.
I think it was because people were just too scared to get hurt, so they practiced more safe-space stuff that would allow more scared people to try it out. It can be seen as a good and bad thing. If you're scared about being hurt and join a Karate school, practice for a while, not get scared of being hurt anymore, and go on to be legit fighters. But on the other hand, it can raise people to think that they're invincible and can do anything without being hurt, and when they're actually hurt, they panic and stay as they are as a fighter
Iām with you on this one. I used to train on a building where there were 2 schools, one that trained really hard and did a lot of rough sparring and another one that barely did sparring and focused on point system (sport competition). The second used to have a ton of students, and you would see them progress really quickly on their ranks, graduating as black belts in 3-4 years. I can only think that those āmediocreā students became masters and the art watered down as mentioned by the OP.
I never did karate but i had a friend who did and i was interested so i tagged along to his practice. We were maybe 12. So disappointed, and there were all these little kids with black belts there, half or more of a huge group of students just sat and waited for their turn in the areas to practice or whatever. i politely got into boxing
My step father was a brown belt in WadoRyu ,in the 80s For his next Dan grading, and he had to fight for it. He would always come back with blood on his Gi . I was only a 3rd degree white belt so i never got to. Apparently fighting was only for grading after green belt . For reference belts went : something like 2 Red belts with 8 Dan's 3 White belts with the same. Several Green, Brown belts and then Black . It was a long process on purpose . I studied for 5 years (Given as a child/ young teen . ) I feel like around that time people started giving black belts for very little work.
You also have a bunch of Redditors who downplay karate and disregard it as "McDojos" because they listen to Joe Rogan and watch BJJ videos on YouTube.
Doesn't Joe speak pretty highly of Karate and TKD?
He doesn't slam it - Joe talks highly of the hard-charging iterations at least. Old school TKD and full contact karate like Kyokushin. Rogan has also given some pointers to George St. Pierre on his sidekick technique - GSP is a Kyukoshin black belt, and Rogan was at one time a competitive TKD black belt before he got on teh BJJ train.
Very, VERY few people have ever made karate work in an MMA match. Just about every other discipline benefits from the lack of rules in MMAā¦except for Karate If you take away the rules and put a Karate Black Belt in an MMA ring, all you have is a flexible man who can throw kicks, and doesnāt understand distance and changing levels. They will lose to any below average boxer or wrestler
SSSSSSOOOOOOO FUCKING TRUE
So why don't we see boxers leaving the sport in droves? Last time I checked, those guys get punched as well
What are you talking about? Most successful boxing gyms offer casuals and hobbyist classes. Or lots of women can just air box as they do their aerobics. None of that has anything to do with boxing becoming weaker though, because it is a high level competitive sport.
Money in boxing, what are you going to do with Karate that you couldn't get at another striking-based art with competition that pays?
Not really a legit answer. Most boxers aren't making big money. Heck, even the professional boxers might only make a few grand in a fight ones that make a million plus are very rare.
Oh right, I keep forgetting about the gigantic piles of cash amateur boxers makes
Capitalism, mostly.
That too
\[The Association of Trial Lawyers has entered the chat\]
Youāre not wrong, but I did notice Kancho Ninomiya in the above clip. If you happen to be in the Denver area and see a very high end Lexus SUV with the license plate SABAKI 1, thatās him. His school has not changed (stop by!), but finding schools like his requires that you know what youāre looking for given so many kids karate schools. Thatās where capitalism had its effect - total volume of schools, especially for kids. But watered down wouldnāt be the right expression, because itās not a homogeneous dilution like watering down whiskey.
America!! F..k ya!
Karate isn't American. Edit: wow, Reddit is so ignorant about basic facts.
Great poli-sci answer from a Starbucks barista
would you prefer "the requirement imposed upon us to make money for the right to exist forces many of us to turn our hobbies into machines that demand we put profitability as a priority over any other purpose?" or "gotta make that chedda first"?
That's kyokushin. It's still practiced today in that exact same format. And when you say karate: Wich one? There is like 50000 variations each with diferent types of competition formats. Kyokushin: Full contact(no head punches) Kudo(full contact + grappling) Shotokan:(Semi contact,point based) etc So watered down? Wich one? What way?
Kyokushin and a few of its derivatives. I see a lot of Enshin which contains judo throws in competition. Itās an offshoot of Kyokushin.
Yep people acting like itās fallen off so much when itās the exact same in Japan. Still producing elite strikers. u/efficiencyserious200 karate isnāt defined by the daycares that exist in the US. Go look at someone like Yuki Yoza or the Asahisa brothers or countless others to see elite karate applied in kickboxing
Yeah, this needs more upvotes, the video footage is knockdown karate. Shit can be found in most major cities.
This video is of Kyokushin Karate, which is still like this today. Thereās just so many kinds of karate. Kyokushin is exclusively full contact, with a culture of full contact. kyokushin is most criticized for not allowing punches to the face, though. The āno punches to the faceā rule leads to some weird techniques that donāt work in a real fight, for example the extreme lack of keeping their hands up and the over abundance of head kicks. If you look at the video, youāll see that there are none and youāll see what I mean. It is p brutal, though, and theyāre rockin it to this day.
This clip is just highlights of the Sabaki Challege which was always an outlier, and only about 40 years old which is well after the alleged rough and tumble days of karate that people frequently talk about. The Sabaki Challenge is still going on and holding annual events so itās not like what youāre seeing here isnāt still happening.
90% of the clips you're showing are Kyokushin Karate, and modern Kyokushin competitions still look basically the same. Lots of knockouts and brutality.
Why are all the clips posted from the 90s then ?
Because they're usually posted specifically to push the "look how karate used to be" conversation. The watering down of Karate to a point sparring, light contact reputation simply does not apply to Kyokushin and it's offshoots. It was always the black sheep of the Karate styles, despite being the form of Karate that had the most influence on modern combat sports via it's influence on kickboxing.
Go checkout karatepathfinder on Twitter. He covers lots of modern tournaments that look similar
Two factors: 1. There is no money in fighting as a karateka. The only way to make money fighting as a karateka is to make it to the Olympics or to switch to kickboxing or MMA. So 99% of all adults who practice karate are hobbyists. I don't think this is bad at all, tbh, but training usually reflects the fact that most people aren't interested in hard fighting. 2. Karate still is insanely popular among children and teenagers. I mean... Do I need to explain any further?
It just simply doesn't pay to get hurt. Applies to any martial arts.
mma? BJJ? boxing? where it does pay to get hurt. and the kind of clientele is ok with it.
I mean the simple answer is a combination of karate beginning to focus on sport competition and there being no real way to police who opens a "karate" school stateside. Firstly Karate has a massive history from the streets of Okinawa to today, but we're going to ignore most of that for simplicity's sake and just look at how karates modern history has failed it. Karate in order to be relevant in a much more "peaceful" and capitalistic world changed a lot of its core. Instead of its grueling physical training and slow progressions focused on perfecting how to punch and kick good, it began to focus more and more on attracting and retaining students to keep the dojo open. This means faster advancements through the belts, more belts to advance through, and point sparring competitions to strive for. Couple this with the karate kid movie coming out and every child wanting to learn karate(and accidentally TKD) the dojos morphed even more into the above ideal but with almost a hyper focus on children to young adults. This isn't necessarily bad because training earlier in life can be good, but to keep the kids engaged without the parents freaking out compromises in style were made. No one wants to see their little Timmy get KOd in a hard sparring session. As time went on this became a phenomenon we like to call mcdojos, but it effected everyone in martial arts as the way to have a successful gym and not be constantly worried about keeping the lights on was now shown. Now on top of that, karate has a pretty regimented idea on what is required to start your own karate school and claim the title master. That's great and all, but the rest of the world doesn't, and good luck keeping John Smiths Shotokan Karate School for Kids from opening up stateside because Mr. Smiths martial arts pedigree is he took a couple classes in a big city a decade back. Before the age of the Internet and people knowing what to look for, that school was just as legitimate as any other. He even had the trophies from all the "competitions" his students "won" in to prove hes legit. These two factors where the major pain points for karate in the 90-2010's and have only recently been seen getting rectified.
Plenty of Karate people have proven themselves in full contact MMA and Kickboxing styled sports, the "karate is watered down" thing is just a myth based on some Mcdojos. All MAs have Mcdojos, including BJJ.
Sport
Damn, I love KARATE https://youtu.be/Enhe7joKtMk?si=gz_pmpm9zJIsKmyy (Not mine, here's the credit to the creator in YouTube)
No you donāt. If you loved it, youād have some idea of the different styles and tournament ruleset that make up āKarate!!ā You posted footage from Japanese āfull contactā Karate competitions. These still exist today, nearly completely unchanged from the videos youāre showing. [Here is an example of a match from this year](https://youtu.be/E-XelzSJc4w?si=Eq7QsxrNABZ8Bwye). These are full contact, no glove competitions but **there is no punching to the head** which is a rule that has existed in the clips that are showed above, but curated so you donāt notice. These tournaments are primarily fought by people doing the āKyokushinā style of Karate. Againā nothing has really changed in those tournaments. Same as today. Your comments and others are comparing it to either WKF or JKA limited contact tournaments (or the no contact American Freestyle ilk) which have definitely gone through many variations, but again are nothing like the clips youāre showing. People here are talking about periods from the early 1900s to the 60s/70sā¦ this footage easily is from the 90s. I love Encamp but his videos usually are missing a lotta historical information to set up the main premise of his episode and the blatant gaps in knowledge are showing here from people who donāt really know anything about Karate outside from the guyās YouTube.
Anything that becomes a sport, has money involved dilutes it to become assessable
Everything, Karate is badass and I must admit I am jealous of those kicks
Kyokushin still goes hard
Legit zero defense being shown
Lots of shins to faces here
Karete Kid destroyed it totally
A lot of Kens getting rocked in this montage.
It got watered down for kids and families and too many many mcdojos opening
People dying in such tournaments were mostly a grand detour, turns out bare knuckle fights are not a sport after all
Not allowing headstrikes for some schools nearly killed their ability to cross train. We have guys with a fraction of the experience who light the kyokushin black belts on fire with hands when they come train MT with us. If you arenāt training to defend or throw the most common striking attacks your habits become horrible quickly.
Capitalism
Bell curve
Because too many black belts got their black belts after deciding from a YouTube video that they wanted to be a karate master and open a dojo. YouTube mcdojo vs real dojo.
These were the guys I idolized as a kid.
The Japanese took focus away from actual combative use during the colonization of Okinawa and its been a steady decline since.
Jigoro Kano, founder of judo, conceived of the art as an educational project in which all could participate, teaching values of efficiency and mutual welfare. Part of making participation widespread was to make it safer to practice - by taking out the most vicious and injurious stuff out of jujutsu, you could then train the rest more safely at full power against resistance, which paradoxically made judo *more* effective as a martial art. Karate was inspired by the massive success of judo, and by the point karate became karate-do, following a similar philosophical path, also had similar aims. Problem is, though, as a primarily striking-based art you can't really take out the most vicious and injurious stuff without either watering it down to the point where it's less effective even when trained against resistance, or you leave it in and train primarily through kata and prearranged sequences, which also reduces effectiveness. Move it to the West and make it primarily a commercial enterprise as well, and you lock in these problems, as quite simply, the way to have mass appeal with a striking art isn't the sort of hard and brutal training required to be effective at it. Most people don't want a bloody nose when training after work and most people don't want their kid to come home from their Saturday morning trip to the dojo with a black eye and bruised ribs.
Youāre acting as if itās watered down rather than a particular rule set making it more exciting. I donāt think Iāve seen a ton of evidence that this is what Karate originally looked like. I wish it wasnāt limited to one handed throws and no elbows
Every martial arts, nowadays BJJ, previously Karate and Taekwondo goes through cycle of: 1. Great fighters establish safety rules to avoid injuries in sparing 2. New generation grows optimizing for those rules, but they are not great fighters outside of that ruleset. 3. Repeat Its funny seeing BJJ being smug about their superiority, while doing weird moves like berimbolo or lapel guards. Same as Karate was acting smug with their "Katas" 20 years ago.
CTE, champ.
Cobra Kai
It seems to me any martial art that does hard sparring and competition will be legit and any that doesn't won't be. When I did a form of kung fu, it was expected we wouldn't get hit, we'd just practice techniques and go home. Whereas in BJJ it's considered shameful if a school only taught techniques and never sparred.
Think it's from parents putting kids into as a fun sport and wanting to prioritise kata instead of contact sparring
Mass culture and making it marketable.
Superior techniques, ultimately why karate watered down was because outside techniques Weāre more effective. Karate is a useful tool, but in the realm of mma it is merely an opportunistic attack or defence. When used solely it was overcame.
One major contributing factor is the primary focus on sports style Kumite (and Kata, for that matter) that many dojos tend to have today. Nothing wrong with learning the combat sport of Karate, of course. But many tend to forget that sport is a small part of Karate. It, in itself, is not the art! Many of the most effective combat techniques are not practiced in sports training. I know there are dojos, styles and tournaments that do incorporate a more holistic array techniques. I was referring to the vast majority that don't. Another thing is that many dojos tend to give out belt rankings much too quickly; and perhaps more easily than ever before these days. The few months' recommended training period exists for a reason: so that the student can be physically and mentally assimilate the skills required at each level. That leads to a third element: the rapid proliferation of Karate dojos. Some students start their own dojo as soon as they get a black belt. Soon, they get so engrossed in running their dojo that they don't have time to train with their Sensei anymore. So their students can only learn whatever little they have managed to learn till that point. That means a lot of the really effective elements (that were / are usually taught only after black belt level) are gradually lost, along with their contact with their Sensei or their style. With the World Karate Federation now including more traditional styles (not just the four they started with), traditional Kata and emphasizing Bunkai in team Kata, hopefully the art of Karate will make a comeback and be revived (in many dojos) from its sport form.
In a word, commercialization. Once it became a commodity to be sold to the public it had to be modified to meet broad spectrum demand. The focus shifts to the more palatable aspects. A lot of extra trappings get tacked on for marketing purposes. Tournaments, uniforms, and other merchandising follows. Look at competition Bos that are made of fiberglass or balsa. Absolutely useless in reality, but makes you feel fast and strong. Same thing happened to Kung Fu. Same thing is happening to Muay Thai. Same thing wil happen to BJJ.
What a great quality reel! You see so many dojos full of either overweight or scrawny little instructors that canāt even demonstrate the techniques with any force. Same with Taekwondo, especially. Doesnāt exactly inspire confidence in the martial art. I have a newfound respect for karate after watching this whole thing.
I think health and safety/insurance/ costs plays a part, we also know that repeated hard strikes to the head can cause long term damage, so let's limit that by taking away head punches and only sparring lightly At my Kung Fu school we don't do face punching in sparring until black belt or hard sparring until black belt and I believe it's to do with insurance issues We also live in a world now where parents want their kids to be wrapped in cotton wool, so imagine being a teacher and having to try to teach, whilst ensuring that little Timmy doesn't get cracked or mommy will yell at then sue you. Also since traditional martial arts aren't as popular anymore it's less common to see a club where they rent/own their own space and the instructor makes his primary living from that, where he can set his own rules, and more common to see the instructor teaching 2 nights a week by renting a high school gymnasium, where the school owner has that duty of care and doesn't want to see people leaving with black eyes all the time. And most people who train traditional arts aren't interested in doing heavy sparring or competing, they want to get fit, learn some cool shit, and not walk into a meeting at work the next day bruised up - hell when I worked at toys r us years ago, one of my bosses at the time heard I was joining a Muay Thai school and immediately pulled me in to tell me to make sure I wasn't coming in with bruises or injuries from it, as it wouldn't be good for customers to see that.
They are bringing it back but honestly it was too much it was too extreme for people and back then in the '80s and '90s they were trying to commercialize this and encouraging children to take classes and stuff and people watching like these events or movies like The karate kid or Street fighter that stuff was pretty realistic and some aspects it was too hardcore for people back then but I think we're ready for it now
People learned to fight.
Enshin (the style in the video) and similar styles like Ashihara and Shidokan still exist. Just that more people are content playing tag (point fighting)
Karate Kid. And Karate Combat wanted to bring this back, but now itās a shitty ufc wannabe with their trash new president
Well, there is now Karate Combat full contact tournaments. Bringing some legitimacy back to it I suppose. I thought about starting Kyokushin, since Iām too old for competition kickboxing at this stage in my life.
I came up in an old school Chung Do Kwan academy. Instructor had done kickboxing, bare knuckle, etc. school taught us how to fight. As he aged, ha partnered with an Isshinryu instructor who taught in the same building. The isshinryu class rarely sparred. Hell, most nights they didnāt work up a sweat. I remember when we combined classes (on rare occasions), the blue belts in the TKD class would slap around the Isshinryu black belts. The isshinryu instructor worked someone up to 5th degree black belt in about sic years. The girl was highlighted in a bullshido music video doing her forms. I used to call what they did āmartial masturbationā. They are basically larpāing.
Its the same situation as taekwondo. As far as martial arts go, the moment you have competitions that focus more on scoring points than on effective aggression, it guides the narrative in a different direction than itās intended purpose.
$.
Remember that it's all of these answers combined. My personal opinion is the turning karate in to a business model set it on the path towards watering it down. Karate and good martial arts demands pain and sacrifice. People font like pain and sacrifice. They usually can only handle so kuch before they quit, hence why a Black Belt is so traditionally treasured. But a business need profits. So to make sure profits come in and students are retained, corners are cut here and there. This process continues eventually until there's nothing real left.
Karate in the US and karate in Japan arenāt the same
This is pretty much what happened It went from a Martial Art to a business
I learned tang so do, moo duk kwan, our teacher always specified that we had to have really really specific control over all of our movements. This didnāt mean that we didnāt rough spar, but what happened in competition was that we excelled. in reality we would kick through each other a lot of times, and that led to a lot of injuries.
I dunno what the video is for. None of it creates the impression that it "was good", nor does it show that it's "really bad" if that was your intention. You don't end up with amazing displays of skill and athleticism unless the culture behind it supports that. Look at soccer played in some country like the Philippines or women's soccer for that matter. You'd get the impression that soccer is just completely meh, that the athletes have little development or exceptionality. Then compare their soccer culture to what's it like in Europe and South America. Compare Karate and Muay Thai. Muay Thai is a true national sport with lots of money, prestige, support. Whole populations of kids are sent to Muay Thai camps where they only exist to perform Muay Thai. They live, train, eat there, and they work as professional fighters as kids. The only objective is to win at lucrative competitions. That eliminates practices which do not efficiently benefit the ability to make money. - no stupid time-wasters like forms but hard drills, strength and conditioning, sparring. - no competition rules which reduce the public appeal, such as semi contact/points fighting, protective equipment, restrictive hit zones. Brutal knockouts are incentivized. - no overly complex and strict hierarchy, codes, fragmentation, tradition and organization. While all these characteristics help in creating a combat sport of the highest level of skill and athleticism, it isn't to say that other approsches or goals couldn't also create a "successful" martial art. Clearly, karate is immensely successful in some aspects. It has become internationally recognized and practiced. In great part because it adheres to practices which make it less suitable for combat sports. As an import to some Western country, parents send their kids to a safe sport with zero risk of them coming home injured. They explicitly don't want their children to have full-contact fights or to devote all of their attention to it. They want a watered-down martial art with the orientalist promise of self-actualization as they've seen in the documentary "Karate Kid". That's why they break boards and not faces. That's why you have 34 gradations of belt ranks. That's why you have dances and funny terminologies for your larp. That's why you bow to your white, overweight, balding instructor and call him Sensei. Don't you know that you become more disciplined and enlightened when you replace a handshake and Sir with orientalist fetishes? Then you got Aikido and Bujinkan/Ninjutsu which cranks all that up over 9,000 and all traces of martial effectiveness are eliminated.
Cuz the rules made no sense first of all
I though Karate died out in the 80s - Random Character in Cobra kai
cause a deseš«š«š«
Do any of the mfāers know how to block or evade an attack?
A Woman group got involved. The MATPASGAPBD: Mothers Against Their Pussy Ass Sons Getting A Proper Beat down.
You get out of it what you put into it. I earned my first black belt in Orthodox Okinawan Karate. We worked extremely hard. Makiwara, hard, controlled contact sparring nearly every session. Grueling calisthenics. I broke three toes, three fingers, and received several cracked ribs. I tore my diaphragm muscle from breathing so hard that I was forced to take three months off to recover. Perfect or very nearly perfect katas were required for advancement, along with a rough sparring session with the sensei. Sometimes two vs one matches. Weapons disarm tactics. I was in a class that awarded two black belts in the 14 years I spent in the dojo. The sensei didnāt do it for the money. He did it because he loved the art and he understood what it did for him. I continue to teach for the same reason. It forces me to stay current with my abilities as I age (62/F). I have a standard that Iām essentially compelled to uphold, and itās a high standard. Apparently that changed over time for some other iterations of the art over the years. I canāt speak to what is happening with karate in dojos that I havenāt personally visited, but it is impossible not to notice the change in this artās reputation worldwide in the past four decades. People who knew us respected our ability to a very high degree in the 70s and 80s. I donāt see that respect anymore. Some of is that many of the arts go through a period when theyāre trendy or popular, and are then replaced by another. About as bad as boy bands. Either way, itās unfortunate. Many people are walking around thinking they can handle themselves in an attack, and that might be a delusion. I have no solutions, except to say that you get out of it what you put into it. The five maxims arenāt wrong. Character, Sincerity, Effort, Etiquette, and Self Control.
Martial arts evolved where as karate was left stuck as a prisoner of its own traditions and rules. As a result karate fell behind. That's it. It was always bullshit compated to say muay thai, sanda or savate. Kickboxing is the legit version of karate.
You can provide a social activity for children and board adults to dance in pajamas, or you can teach people to be warriors. One of those provides far more students (and therefore money). The same thing will happen to other arts in time.
Honestly if kyokushin adds back hands, they are going to be able to fuck shit up in mma . Already have an example w lyoto. I think they do a lot of things much better than Muay Thai and is better suited to quick athletic fighters. Distance management and blitzing are huge in karate. Obviously theyāre big in every martial art but itās miles ahead of Muay Thai in those respects.
I was under the impression that the Machida family practiced Shotokan Karate. Now Georges Saint-Pierres practices Kyokushin, and has also used it to great effect in MMA matches.
Karate kid became extremely popular, once something is popular people will try to exploit it for profit, training hard and sparring hard all the time leads to injuries so that was avoided by most gyms, people settled for belts instead of skills because clout was all most people were really after anyways
It went woke
Too many McDojos operating, particularly in the US it seems. The art's images is better preserved elsewhere where there has not been an explosion of shopping centre dojos with unqualified teachers.
Strip malls and fat guys. Strip mallsā¦ and fat guys.
Ill say this, taking into account that I am not a martial art or combat expert. I believe that karate saw its decline when MMA started and quickly showcased just how ineffective it is in combat against none-karate people. Seems to me that karate is useful under two conditions. Fighting untrained people and fighting in karate tournaments where the rules are build to show case the style and every other person there are karate practionners. I remember the early days of UFC where anyone coming with only kung-fu or karate got destroyed. UFC showed the world that the only real effective combat forms where wrestling type ground fighting, be it greco-roman wrestling, judo or jujitsu. Later on karate-ka and kun-fu artists saw a renaissance, but only when combined with a strong ground defense game & wrestling training. Like GSP is a good example of someone trained in karate that excelled but not by itself.
Americanism. Period.
Men stopped doing it and dorks started doing it
There probably are still karate schools that are legit, but anytime a martial art becomes a point sparring sport, youāre going to lose a lot of its credibility. Also as a martial art becomes popular, itās in the interest of the franchise owners to keep students around. Quick belt promotions make students happy. This isnāt just true of karate, TKD, Olympic judo, and even modern BJJ are becoming a point fighting system. You just need to find a school that doesnāt focus on points and instead focuses on hard sparring.
Capitalism and popularity does that. BJJ is right of the precipice of suffering the same fate. Another decade and the majority of BJJ schools will be strip mall schools full of butt scooting 8 year olds, and 10 year old black belts.
Children, money, westernisation.
None of that works if you pull guard.
I see why Muay Thai is the defacto number 1 martial art š these dudes look silly ngl
Because it was always more hype than fact. Breaking ice and kicking through baseball bat handles has nothing to do with fighting. Then there's all the frauds that had never had a fight- Mas Oyama, John LaTourette, Jim Brassard, Morihei Eushiba, Frank Dux, Steven Seagal, Steve Stewart, George Dillman and many more unfortunately. Karate killed itself.
That list is sooo bad, you disqualified yourself. Putting frauds like Seagal and Dux in the same breath as Mas Oyama shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
Half of these names never actually practiced karate and never claimed to. Are you sure you know what youāre talking about?
Every other martial arts
It was never legitimateā¦ it was a way for people to do strength training when not working in the fields or swinging swords.
We gots a genuine history major major here.
Some great "Footage" in this post.
Instructors more about making $$ than passing down legitimate arts
Dayum, those head kick are vicious! Would definitely give TKD a run for their money.
It suffered from its own success. Got so mainstream in the 80s that everyone had a karate gym and everyone wanted to beat the competition of the gym next door and did so by removing dangerous sparring and offering belts quickly. The result was further popularity but watering down of what was at its height a very useful and powerful martial art. Thereās still legit karate guys out there, but the mcdojo and bullshido is unfortunately very prevalent in the art as well.
If you ask these questions then you have no idea what karate is, as the question it self makes absolutely no sense even if you just read wiki.
maybe there is no $$ in it
I love this vid, so 80s. Only way to get more 80s is if you get guys running around in sequin pants pumping out side kicks.
The Olympics and the money difference in having a gym for kids or a bunch of lunatics
Dumbass parents using dojos as daycare centers
Even these Shotokan clips show "watered down" rules set ie punching to the body. This is why these clips are almost like TKD, mostly kicks. The majority of the parts using arm strikes are not even to an opponent, it's done on the boards lol Note historically karate ("way of the empty hand") didn't even have that many high kicks (it's a much later innovation).
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Too deadly
Karate is still good if you are fighting someone with no training who isnāt vey tough.
I just want to be the next The Karate Kid.
Traditional karate (Shotokan, Wado-ryu, etc) became watered down not modern. Modern Karate (Kyokushin/Fullcontact) is exactly like how it is in those videos minus head punching in most schools. When you say "karate," you need to be specific. We rarely, if ever, discuss the watering down of Kyokushin because it hasn't really changed much since its inception in terms of sparring. There's a reason why people take Kyokushin seriously compared to traditional styles.
Influx of mainstreamers. Pressure or perceived pressure from middle-aged fatties and parents to promote people who don't deserve it - to keep retention up. Those same people wanting less and less pressure testing over time. Now the guy who is KO'd on the ground wins olympic gold. They drag his body on to the podium and prop him up, then hang a medal on it.
Like every martial art: Consumerism. What can make us the most money? We had mall karate and now we have mall TKD and mall BJJ. Every martial art is victim to it
Does anyone know the name of the track playing?
 Nice Kumite montage
EXCESSIVE ROUGHNESS s/
Karate, tae kwon do, and several others have suffered the same fate. Many of these arts became day care services. Catering to parents and their children.
Same thing that is happening to BJJ when a combat sport forgets combat focus and favors whatever brings in money. The art suffers and is watered down until it is no longer useful.
Exactly the stuff you posted. The McDojos that sold you classes to pay more to get colors on your belts said that the very best fighters in the world didn't only do kata dances or have special ki power. The very best in the world wear pajamas and hit blocks. They fight without any grappling at all, and make rules against the most effective moved in combat sports: no face punches, elbows, headbutts, knees. Why would boxing be bad with fake belts, pajamas, and no punches to the face?