Why do so many top martial arts, as for example Shotokan Karate, focus so strongly on kata, pre-set sparring exercises, and a little punches-pulled sparring?
The senseis are totally focused on their art, and have thought long and hard, and trained for decades, to make it as good as possible.
Possibly it is because they have goals for the practitioners beyond winning a MMA fight, like personal development, but I’m not sure that is the answer.
I can identify three fairly significant issues at fault here, all stemming from the fact that the original senseis actually fought and most of their successors don’t:
Many martial arts—despite originally being optimized for keeping you alive in combat—have since been optimized for being accessible and easy to learn, in some cases for preteens. Accessibility and effectiveness are in many cases at cross purposes.
Many martial arts, without actual combat to point to as a metric of success or failure, have instituted systems of “point sparring” and so on in order to run tournaments. Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, many of these martial arts have then become diluted by techniques and training optimized for scoring points in tournaments rather than defending yourself.
Many techniques that were once very practical are no longer so, and out of respect for tradition or simple lack of constant reevaluation are still being taught.
For instance, many traditional martial arts focus a lot on defending yourself against wrist grabs. I am told that this is because hundreds of years ago in Japan, wrist grabs were actually a common means of attack and important to know how to protect yourself against—if someone walked up to you and grabbed your wrist, you couldn’t draw your sword, which often meant you were about to die.
Nowadays, of course, people don’t often initiate attacks by walking up and grabbing your wrist, so there is much less utility in such movements, but the curriculum of many traditional martial arts has not been updated to compensate.
When I was practicing a (relatively new—think 1970s) form of karate, I discovered that there was a near-religious fervor surrounding the art. While I did see a lot of competent martial artists at the higher levels, they continuously insisted on the infallibility of the kata, slow-speeds sparring, and “situationals” that made up the bulk of their practice. I was repeatedly informed that the art was self-defense oriented, but was rarely subjected to any realistic practice. They claimed that they removed a lot of their sparring early on because it incited competitiveness, and there were strict rules about questioning the senseis. I ended up leaving my local school for a number of reasons, the most relevant being a desire for more realistic instruction in self-defense.
I did see a lot of value in this particular martial art, but none of that was in its ability to foster combat skills. Sure, the members who had been there ten years and gotten their black belts were better fighters than your average guy on the street. But at the lower levels, the value lay more in the discipline and personal development aspects than anything else. I would have stayed longer, probably, if the other practitioners had just admitted that, rather than insisting on complete infallibility in combat. Their cult-like devotion drove me away faster than mere honesty would have.
Judo is said to quite definitely a sport rather than a street-fighting art. And the Shoshin Shotokan karate I did was aimed at self-discipline, fitness, and a clear mind on Zen principles. It may well be that an alert mind will help you avoid combat and maximize your chances better than pure MMA- type fighting ability. Or maybe not.
One thing that MMA has going for it as a competitive art is that it’s well optimized for the specific type of fighting that takes place in an MMA ring. Some advocates will insist that the types of confrontations which take place in the ring are “real fighting,” and anything which less effectively prepares one for the ring is not as effective in a “real fight,” but it would be more accurate to say that MMA matches are a certain kind of fight, one which approximates only a certain subset of encounters one might have outside the ring.
For example, if one is hired as a bouncer at a club, it’s certainly probable that one will eventually be involved in “real fights,” where a person is seriously trying to hurt you without any rules to hold them back. But they’ll overwhelmingly be untrained people with a lot of alcohol in them, who, at the very least for the sake of your job if not out of ethical concern, you should try to avoid injuring too badly. MMA training would be poorly optimized for these sort of encounters, as it’s stripped of a lot of pain compliance techniques which would be handy in such a situation, and emphasizes many techniques which could result in your getting fired or possibly being sued or serving jail time.
If you’re mugged, you’d be facing a violent encounter where your assailant almost certainly has a weapon, there may be multiple assailants involved, and facing you in a fight is not their top priority. Generically speaking, the standard advice for these situations is “give them your money,” in which case no sort of martial arts training would leave you more prepared than any other, but some schools will teach not just techniques, but tactics for defending oneself in such a situation. An MMA school is unlikely to offer students such preparation, since that’s time they could be spending learning to better kick the ass of one guy in the ring.
A law enforcement officer, again, is likely to face “real fights” with people who may be high on drugs, wielding weapons, in large groups, or some combination of the above, where the objective is generally to restrain and arrest, or if their own lives are threatened, to respond with lethal force using deadly weapons.
And so on and so forth. One on one brawls of the sort that MMA training optimizes for actually form a fairly small and avoidable portion of all violent encounters, but it’s hard to arrange realistic comparative tests between martial artists of ability in any other kind of fight.
The human species is full of folly, but no. Rowers didn’t try to invent a way to navigate lakes, failed, and ended up in those paper-thin useless boats. Rowing is a sport, like judo, and Shoshin Shotokan karate is a self-improvement practice with the goals I mentioned, only touching on sport and street-fighting.
Practitioners do claim that their style is effective in real fighting, though they recognize that styles without the layer of traditional Japanese discipline, like Krav Maga, have their own advantages (and disadvantages).
But avoiding a street fight is the best way to win it. The inspirational stories told among Shoshin Shotokan karate practitioners about the lineage of masters, people like Gichin Funakoshi and Hirokazu Kanazawa, tell not how they bloodied a roomful of thugs, but how they scared thugs off with self-confidence, or at most, restrained them with a testicle squeeze.
As far as I know, karate originated as unarmed fighting techniques used because possession of weapons like swords by ordinary people was very much illegal. So the beginning was quite practical.
However Shotokan is a bit of a special case because its founder was of the opinion that competitions and contests were the wrong approach and the point of karate was, basically, self-improvement. I don’t know whether the founder tried and failed (at effective combat) or just didn’t try.
In the West there is considerable social pressure to restyle martial arts as a non-aggressive system of exercises which aim to teach discipline (in particular, obedience to authority), provide some strength and aerobic training, and make you look cool.
Most judo is quite definitely taught as a sport rather than a street-fighting art, yes, but this is not strictly a fact about the art of Judo. Such is Kodokan Judo, which is by far the most common form, focused almost entirely on Judo as a grappling sport (to the point where many judoka don’t even know that atemi-waza (striking techniques) exist, despite the fact that they’re in the kata).
it’s certainly possible to teach Judo as street-fighting, but most people who want that will go for jiu-jitsu. Judo is (deliberately) ‘tamer’ than jui-jitsu, so as street-fighting, it’s really best suited for limited self-defense. It was quite common in police work in Japan, not sure if that’s still true.
(This makes it very useful in situations where your response to assault is legally limited, which IIRC is why it was popular for police. It is much less natural to respond with excessive amounts of force when using judo)
Judo’s kind of an interesting case, in that most of what calls itself “judo” in the modern day comes from a single lineage of Japanese grappling that was designed as a competitive martial art. The scope of Japanese grappling arts is much broader, and includes several less competitive and more self-defense oriented styles that could accurately have been called judo, but the Kodokan lineage has come to so dominate the field that anything not related to it now uses a different name (usually some form of “jujutsu”), to avoid confusion.
Judo is said to quite definitely a sport rather than a street-fighting art.
Judo is explicitly a sport version of jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is a street-fighting art and judo was created from it expressly to make it a sport. The major distinction is that a lot of dangerous techniques (e.g. strangulation) are outright forbidden in judo.
I’ve done Judo for several years, and yes it is a sport and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. A very fun sport that helps keep me physically fit to be sure, but in a hypothetical fight situation my best tactic remains “run away screaming”.
Why do so many top martial arts, as for example Shotokan Karate, focus so strongly on kata, pre-set sparring exercises, and a little punches-pulled sparring?
The simple answer is that kata develop muscle memory and submerge proper responses below the consciousness level. In a high-level fight you don’t have time to think what to do—you have to react “on instinct” and your instinct comes from (among other things) doing katas. Pre-set sparring does the same—develops muscle memory and makes proper reactions “instinctive”.
And sparring is “punches-pulled” because concussions, internal bleeding, and broken bones are bad for keeping and attracting students :-)
One other thing is that martial arts are quite different. The major relevant distinction here is between external and internal martial arts. Crudely speaking, external arts (e.g. taekwondo) focus on fairly straightforward application of physical force. Internal arts (e.g. tai chi) usually use less obvious and more complicated whole-body techniques but also stress the general energy/health aspect. It is often said that internal-arts masters live longer than external-arts masters.
Oh, and suburban-mall martial arts studios are generally a bad joke.
The simple answer is that kata develop muscle memory and submerge proper responses below the consciousness level. [...] And sparring is “punches-pulled” because concussions, internal bleeding, and broken bones are bad for keeping and attracting students :-)
That’s accurate, but I’d like to note that an earlier focus on sparring will drill in working responses just as well or better. The problem is that they’re usually not the optimal responses, and it’s harder to train out an existing response than it is to train one in from nothing.
There’s a quick-versus-good tradeoff here. If you start unstructured sparring early, your students will be able to adapt to serious self-defense correspondingly earlier; military-derived or highly self-defense oriented styles, like sambo and krav maga, usually take this approach. On the other hand, if your early focus is on kata, set self-defense techniques, and proper form, then your students won’t be ready for serious self-defense for much longer—possibly not until the early dan ranks—but in theory they’ll be better fighters after serious study. This approach is more common to traditional systems, especially those predating the Second World War.
Which one’s better depends on what your goals are.
Yes, very much so. This is another thing the correlates well with the external vs. internal martial arts difference. External arts usually pick quick and internal arts usually pick good.
In Tai Chi, for example, you start by doing the form v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and it may take people years to get to the point where they can do the form quickly and correctly.
What criteria are you using her for “top martial arts?”
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
It would not necessarily be correct to assume that the manner in which traditional martial arts are practiced today strongly reflects the training methods used by the traditional masters; the forms might be the same, but the emphasis on different types of training has shifted.
Non-alive training methods may be preferable when the techniques can’t be practiced in alive training without an unacceptably high rate of injury, or when one is practicing basic movements at high levels of repetition to ingrain them into muscle memory, and involving a partner to use as a target would, even if it helped refine the movements, impose a great deal of boredom on the partner.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
Some of these exercises are also oriented towards muscular conditioning rather than technique practice.
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
A common adaptation seems to be to decouple the more painful and dangerous parts of practice from the less. I’ve studied a couple of arts where the harder forms of practice were taught in separate classes, at different times and not required for advancement in rank.
In both cases these were labeled “sparring class”, but that’s a little misleading; it seems common for them to incorporate more intense and painful conditioning techniques, or forms of partnered practice that aren’t strictly sparring.
Why do so many top martial arts, as for example Shotokan Karate, focus so strongly on kata, pre-set sparring exercises, and a little punches-pulled sparring?
The senseis are totally focused on their art, and have thought long and hard, and trained for decades, to make it as good as possible.
Possibly it is because they have goals for the practitioners beyond winning a MMA fight, like personal development, but I’m not sure that is the answer.
I can identify three fairly significant issues at fault here, all stemming from the fact that the original senseis actually fought and most of their successors don’t:
Many martial arts—despite originally being optimized for keeping you alive in combat—have since been optimized for being accessible and easy to learn, in some cases for preteens. Accessibility and effectiveness are in many cases at cross purposes.
Many martial arts, without actual combat to point to as a metric of success or failure, have instituted systems of “point sparring” and so on in order to run tournaments. Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, many of these martial arts have then become diluted by techniques and training optimized for scoring points in tournaments rather than defending yourself.
Many techniques that were once very practical are no longer so, and out of respect for tradition or simple lack of constant reevaluation are still being taught.
For instance, many traditional martial arts focus a lot on defending yourself against wrist grabs. I am told that this is because hundreds of years ago in Japan, wrist grabs were actually a common means of attack and important to know how to protect yourself against—if someone walked up to you and grabbed your wrist, you couldn’t draw your sword, which often meant you were about to die.
Nowadays, of course, people don’t often initiate attacks by walking up and grabbing your wrist, so there is much less utility in such movements, but the curriculum of many traditional martial arts has not been updated to compensate.
huh I always wondered why we had so many techniques to get out of wrist grabs
When I was practicing a (relatively new—think 1970s) form of karate, I discovered that there was a near-religious fervor surrounding the art. While I did see a lot of competent martial artists at the higher levels, they continuously insisted on the infallibility of the kata, slow-speeds sparring, and “situationals” that made up the bulk of their practice. I was repeatedly informed that the art was self-defense oriented, but was rarely subjected to any realistic practice. They claimed that they removed a lot of their sparring early on because it incited competitiveness, and there were strict rules about questioning the senseis. I ended up leaving my local school for a number of reasons, the most relevant being a desire for more realistic instruction in self-defense.
I did see a lot of value in this particular martial art, but none of that was in its ability to foster combat skills. Sure, the members who had been there ten years and gotten their black belts were better fighters than your average guy on the street. But at the lower levels, the value lay more in the discipline and personal development aspects than anything else. I would have stayed longer, probably, if the other practitioners had just admitted that, rather than insisting on complete infallibility in combat. Their cult-like devotion drove me away faster than mere honesty would have.
Judo is said to quite definitely a sport rather than a street-fighting art. And the Shoshin Shotokan karate I did was aimed at self-discipline, fitness, and a clear mind on Zen principles. It may well be that an alert mind will help you avoid combat and maximize your chances better than pure MMA- type fighting ability. Or maybe not.
One thing that MMA has going for it as a competitive art is that it’s well optimized for the specific type of fighting that takes place in an MMA ring. Some advocates will insist that the types of confrontations which take place in the ring are “real fighting,” and anything which less effectively prepares one for the ring is not as effective in a “real fight,” but it would be more accurate to say that MMA matches are a certain kind of fight, one which approximates only a certain subset of encounters one might have outside the ring.
For example, if one is hired as a bouncer at a club, it’s certainly probable that one will eventually be involved in “real fights,” where a person is seriously trying to hurt you without any rules to hold them back. But they’ll overwhelmingly be untrained people with a lot of alcohol in them, who, at the very least for the sake of your job if not out of ethical concern, you should try to avoid injuring too badly. MMA training would be poorly optimized for these sort of encounters, as it’s stripped of a lot of pain compliance techniques which would be handy in such a situation, and emphasizes many techniques which could result in your getting fired or possibly being sued or serving jail time.
If you’re mugged, you’d be facing a violent encounter where your assailant almost certainly has a weapon, there may be multiple assailants involved, and facing you in a fight is not their top priority. Generically speaking, the standard advice for these situations is “give them your money,” in which case no sort of martial arts training would leave you more prepared than any other, but some schools will teach not just techniques, but tactics for defending oneself in such a situation. An MMA school is unlikely to offer students such preparation, since that’s time they could be spending learning to better kick the ass of one guy in the ring.
A law enforcement officer, again, is likely to face “real fights” with people who may be high on drugs, wielding weapons, in large groups, or some combination of the above, where the objective is generally to restrain and arrest, or if their own lives are threatened, to respond with lethal force using deadly weapons.
And so on and so forth. One on one brawls of the sort that MMA training optimizes for actually form a fairly small and avoidable portion of all violent encounters, but it’s hard to arrange realistic comparative tests between martial artists of ability in any other kind of fight.
That sounds very suspicious. Are they sure they didn’t try to invent a combat art, fail, and invent that excuse afterward for continuing?
The human species is full of folly, but no. Rowers didn’t try to invent a way to navigate lakes, failed, and ended up in those paper-thin useless boats. Rowing is a sport, like judo, and Shoshin Shotokan karate is a self-improvement practice with the goals I mentioned, only touching on sport and street-fighting.
Practitioners do claim that their style is effective in real fighting, though they recognize that styles without the layer of traditional Japanese discipline, like Krav Maga, have their own advantages (and disadvantages).
But avoiding a street fight is the best way to win it. The inspirational stories told among Shoshin Shotokan karate practitioners about the lineage of masters, people like Gichin Funakoshi and Hirokazu Kanazawa, tell not how they bloodied a roomful of thugs, but how they scared thugs off with self-confidence, or at most, restrained them with a testicle squeeze.
As far as I know, karate originated as unarmed fighting techniques used because possession of weapons like swords by ordinary people was very much illegal. So the beginning was quite practical.
However Shotokan is a bit of a special case because its founder was of the opinion that competitions and contests were the wrong approach and the point of karate was, basically, self-improvement. I don’t know whether the founder tried and failed (at effective combat) or just didn’t try.
In the West there is considerable social pressure to restyle martial arts as a non-aggressive system of exercises which aim to teach discipline (in particular, obedience to authority), provide some strength and aerobic training, and make you look cool.
Most judo is quite definitely taught as a sport rather than a street-fighting art, yes, but this is not strictly a fact about the art of Judo. Such is Kodokan Judo, which is by far the most common form, focused almost entirely on Judo as a grappling sport (to the point where many judoka don’t even know that atemi-waza (striking techniques) exist, despite the fact that they’re in the kata).
it’s certainly possible to teach Judo as street-fighting, but most people who want that will go for jiu-jitsu. Judo is (deliberately) ‘tamer’ than jui-jitsu, so as street-fighting, it’s really best suited for limited self-defense. It was quite common in police work in Japan, not sure if that’s still true.
(This makes it very useful in situations where your response to assault is legally limited, which IIRC is why it was popular for police. It is much less natural to respond with excessive amounts of force when using judo)
Judo’s kind of an interesting case, in that most of what calls itself “judo” in the modern day comes from a single lineage of Japanese grappling that was designed as a competitive martial art. The scope of Japanese grappling arts is much broader, and includes several less competitive and more self-defense oriented styles that could accurately have been called judo, but the Kodokan lineage has come to so dominate the field that anything not related to it now uses a different name (usually some form of “jujutsu”), to avoid confusion.
Judo is explicitly a sport version of jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu is a street-fighting art and judo was created from it expressly to make it a sport. The major distinction is that a lot of dangerous techniques (e.g. strangulation) are outright forbidden in judo.
I’ve done Judo for several years, and yes it is a sport and doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. A very fun sport that helps keep me physically fit to be sure, but in a hypothetical fight situation my best tactic remains “run away screaming”.
I don’t have any experience with judo. But this particular branch of karate (kokondo) advertised itself as strictly defense-oriented.
The simple answer is that kata develop muscle memory and submerge proper responses below the consciousness level. In a high-level fight you don’t have time to think what to do—you have to react “on instinct” and your instinct comes from (among other things) doing katas. Pre-set sparring does the same—develops muscle memory and makes proper reactions “instinctive”.
And sparring is “punches-pulled” because concussions, internal bleeding, and broken bones are bad for keeping and attracting students :-)
One other thing is that martial arts are quite different. The major relevant distinction here is between external and internal martial arts. Crudely speaking, external arts (e.g. taekwondo) focus on fairly straightforward application of physical force. Internal arts (e.g. tai chi) usually use less obvious and more complicated whole-body techniques but also stress the general energy/health aspect. It is often said that internal-arts masters live longer than external-arts masters.
Oh, and suburban-mall martial arts studios are generally a bad joke.
That’s accurate, but I’d like to note that an earlier focus on sparring will drill in working responses just as well or better. The problem is that they’re usually not the optimal responses, and it’s harder to train out an existing response than it is to train one in from nothing.
There’s a quick-versus-good tradeoff here. If you start unstructured sparring early, your students will be able to adapt to serious self-defense correspondingly earlier; military-derived or highly self-defense oriented styles, like sambo and krav maga, usually take this approach. On the other hand, if your early focus is on kata, set self-defense techniques, and proper form, then your students won’t be ready for serious self-defense for much longer—possibly not until the early dan ranks—but in theory they’ll be better fighters after serious study. This approach is more common to traditional systems, especially those predating the Second World War.
Which one’s better depends on what your goals are.
Yes, very much so. This is another thing the correlates well with the external vs. internal martial arts difference. External arts usually pick quick and internal arts usually pick good.
In Tai Chi, for example, you start by doing the form v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and it may take people years to get to the point where they can do the form quickly and correctly.
What criteria are you using her for “top martial arts?”
If we’re talking in terms of “widely practiced,” there’s a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don’t impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn’t work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don’t demand much of their students.
That’s not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they’re practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.
It would not necessarily be correct to assume that the manner in which traditional martial arts are practiced today strongly reflects the training methods used by the traditional masters; the forms might be the same, but the emphasis on different types of training has shifted.
Non-alive training methods may be preferable when the techniques can’t be practiced in alive training without an unacceptably high rate of injury, or when one is practicing basic movements at high levels of repetition to ingrain them into muscle memory, and involving a partner to use as a target would, even if it helped refine the movements, impose a great deal of boredom on the partner.
Some of these exercises are also oriented towards muscular conditioning rather than technique practice.
A common adaptation seems to be to decouple the more painful and dangerous parts of practice from the less. I’ve studied a couple of arts where the harder forms of practice were taught in separate classes, at different times and not required for advancement in rank.
In both cases these were labeled “sparring class”, but that’s a little misleading; it seems common for them to incorporate more intense and painful conditioning techniques, or forms of partnered practice that aren’t strictly sparring.