Training in Karate vs combat sports

Training in Karate vs combat sports

When a student starts out in a combat sport they learn the basics and get to practice them right away, hitting bags and sparring with other students pretty much the first day. But their ability to polish and refine those moves is limited by the need to defend themselves and then by the fact that they do not get to work techniques in most cases with people of higher level, on a one on one basis. They are thrown right into sparring and the act of working on techniques is left well behind. They have four or five tools to use and that is about all. Depending on their art they learn a few punches and kicks, strike a bag a few work outs to break a sweat then it is off to the ring to pound on each other.

Sport training also has on added benefit over most traditional martial arts, they get in great shape right away. Karate students will get in fair shape and then kind of slowly build up as they learn they have to do home work and pick up other activities to benefit their training. It seems weird but Karate students will get healthy without injury, but they may not be in the best physical shape compared to a boxer or kick boxer. But even the boxer and kick boxer takes a large chunk of their gym time and does just conditioning…again taking away from technical development. Most people also notice that while they may be getting in shape once they start moving along and get some actual sport fights they are getting injured a lot more and they quit because their body cannot take the damage…and as they get older it takes much longer to heal! That conditioning training that makes them look like they are in great shape is doing its own form of damage to the soft connective tissues and bone!

The benefit of Karate is that while you may progress slower, you are given a much more in depth view of Kihon Waza and encouraged to work on perfecting those movements and learning new angles, how to use movement and more importantly how to block and use distance to NOT get hit. A meeting of combat and sport fighters at the age of 60 or 70 would show you a lot of broken bodies and brain injuries that affect these people. Yes in their youth they had great skills but now they are plagued by injuries and most of those that started dropped out, not out of boredom or family responsibility, but for health reasons. An old Judo coach of mine once said…”Judo players burn brightly then burn out and leave. Only a few can train into their old age.” That does not sound like what I wanted to be part of.

I remember seeing a documentary on Mohammed Ali and his brain injuries made him almost impossible to understand, he used a walking stick to get around or was held up by others and he had the blank look on his face that other brain injury victims had. I was very sad because at one time he was a great fighter and a great speaker, and now he was a shell of his former self. Sugar ray has a bad eye, when I say bad I mean he is blind in one eye. One other boxer that comes to mind is Edward Sanders, a great amateur boxer who was even in the Olympics. He went pro and with in 9 fights was dead. He walked into a ring and was carried out! Doctors later said that he had died from brain injuries caused by contact in training.

Combat sports include a high level of contact in training, they try not to go all out but it is often more contact and cumulative impact that leads to a medical syndrome that was even named after the most prolific contact combat sport “Dementia Pugilistica”. Some of the long time practitioners are seen as Punch Drunk or Punchy after years of taking strikes to the head. It has become such a concern that medical doctors are actually focusing on the syndrome which used to be called chronic Traumatic Brain injury associated with boxing….yah, Demintia Pugilistica does not seem that hard to say anymore does it? Demential Pugilistica has been confused with Parkinsons and Alzheimers for many years, it was not until recently that they have made the distinction. The list of high end boxers that suffered from this disorder is infact very long. Jack Dempsey, Floyd Patterson, Wilfred Benitez, Freddie Roach, sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Frazier, all suffered from it.

Contrast that with Karate were we focus on not getting hit, our training is relatively safe and we frown on excessive contact and we can train for a life time. The benefits are obvious. Mohammed Ali is exactly my instructors age…69. If you were to look at them side by side and ask yourself who is more fit at that age, who can you understand talking, who needs physical help to walk around…only Dingman Sensei can be understood, is in great physical shape and needs no help walking around. Now you can say he is the exeption to the rule, but I look at people like Saeki Sensei, who while not as old as Sensei is a long time student and instructor in Karate. Or better yet, look at Kagawa, Tanaka, Yahara, Kanazawa, Nishyama, Nakayama and Ozawa before the last three passed away they were training in the clubs and walking around healthy, and that after Nakayama Sensei suffered a major injury at his job as a ski instructor. Many of the older Karate instructors say that healthy life style and Karate being a part of their life helped them live a lot longer than their family did and also longer than friends they grew up with.

My history of training includes a few years of Judo, a year of Kickboxing (north American not Thai) , some other grappling arts and Karate. By far the most I have done is Karate. But seeing the amount of training that is done in Judo and kickboxing for Conditioning makes me thing we need a bit more of that in Karate. But I also realize as I look at juniors coming up through Karate that that we need a more effective focus on techniques as well. We need a balance between the conditioning of combat arts and also a solid foundation in Karate technical training as well.

While we can learn from the conditioning training of other sports, like taking Tabata training from a sport as different as figure skating, we also have to be aware of the issues with training in these sports. For instance the impact based arts like Muay Thai and boxing lead to a large amount of head/brain injuries and lots are not diagnosed. Judo, Jujitsu and Wrestling have a large number of neck and spine injuries as well as injuries to internal organize that for the most part are cumulative and go undiagnosed until autopsy!

The major difference after all of this between a combat sport and a martial art is the goals. Martial arts should be long goal oriented, life time based goals while the combat sports are short term and event based goals. Someone training in a true martial art should be looking at the long term availability of training and its effects on the body, were as the combat sport person is more concerned about short term goals and getting ready for the next event only. Neither is bad, you just have to make choices.