Shiai Karate vs Budo Karate

Shiai Karate vs Budo Karate

I am often finding myself both criticizing Shiai Karate and promoting it at the same time, and confusing my students and fellow Karate-ka at the same time. See I don’t like to teaching tournament or Shiai Karate exclusively to people and I also let my students know that Shiai’s are a good tool to work towards better Karate, but they are not the end all of training. No one should focus so much on Karate tournaments that they miss the other benefits of Karate. In fact tournaments are a fun distraction, but represent a small portion of ones training in Karate.

Shiai Karate focuses on speed, form, and one dimensional sparring and Kata that is a performance. This is fantastic for lower level training and for people that are looking to have some fun, but this is a very shallow well to draw from if you are looking to understand Karate. Only athletes get to the highest level of Shiai Karate and it does not take understanding or character development to get to this place. It takes a young body that is able to perform at a high level, and that fades quickly with age…and leaves us with a work out body that belongs to an athlete that probably does not truly understand Karate to begin with.

Budo Karate on the other hand can be taken up by anyone, of any age or gender! It is a study of Karate on many different levels and more so, it is the application of Karate as a way of getting know know yourself. The other major difference is that in Shiai Karate when a point is earned/scored the fight is called, in Budo Karate it is more like a real fight in that it continues till the instructor lets the communication in the form of Kumite end! And the Kata for a Shiai exchange is polished, worked and hardly understood as anything other than dance. The Budo Kata may not be pretty at all, but you can actually see the practitioner destroying joints, taking out opponents and destroying those in his way.

I don’t want to take away from the value of Shiai Karate at all, and I have to say I enjoyed my share of competitions in the past, but I also don’t want any students I train with to think that this is the goal of Karate. If you turn down that road then you end up with a Karate that is based on Ego and Dojos that focus on past accomplishments that are fleeting instead of the good that they do for the individual, like my instructor focused on.

I know of a few old time Karate instructors who focused so much on what their students and they did in Karate to garner trophies and medals and they are all but dried up people now. Their dojos suffer from trying to repeat the past at every turn and they stop growing when they realize that the final whistle has been blown on their Shiai Career.

Budo Karat has so much more to offer a student! The pursuit of the self for one, the ability to train and find out not only what you are capable of physically but for the pure reason of doing it. The goal is not a shiny medal but a better understanding of who you are. It also provides a more real experience in Karate and self-defense than the techniques used for Shiai Karate.

In Shiai Karate the most used techniques are the front, round kicks and the lunge punch and reverse punch. It disallows many of the more in close techniques and also unique or dangerous techniques. However Budo Karate encourages variety in your techniques and application of them. I have also noted that when some ones goal is a belt rank or a medal they become very myopic in their view. They train for specific situations and use specific techniques over and over again and their Karate becomes a bit of a game of tag! Budo Karate encourages variety, fluidity in techniques and does not focus on the goal of “Scoring a point” but rather putting together a movement pattern that leads to better health, better self-defense and a challenge that is deeper than shiny medals and ribbons….self-improvement.

For those that participate in Karate only to gain medals I fear their existence in Karate after that endeavor has ended will be rather shallow and meaningless. They will lose the passion for training and if they dare become instructors their students will sense the lack of passion and the inability to let go of the past and live and train in the now! It is sad when an instructor is so stuck in the past that they don’t seem to help their current students develop. How often have I seen instructors say….”IN Japan they do (add grandiose statement about training)….while what I am seeing here is (add put down to current students). Its sad that instructors tend to see this as some kind of positive feed back when in truth it’s a statement about past Shiai Karate experiences that are fading distant memories.

For me the pursuit of Budo Karate or Martial training is much more important and will take me to the last breath I take, much after the other instructors have given up trying to develop themselves, I will still be striving ahead to understand the true meaning of Karate…and hoping that like Funakoshi…in my last days…I finally figure out the basis of true Karate!