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Originally Posted by ShotokanBB'n'MB
Actually I dont give a crap if you trained with Funokoshi himself.If you felt like the techniques were worthless than maybe they were. My school and my sensei are an american branch of shotokan called seiei bujitsu kai. this translates to something roughly along the lines of "Elite Military Way" and it also means that if your dojo cant fight then we dont think your sensei is worth a crap. dont get me wrong. fighting isnt everything. but if your training doesnt prepare you for a fight then what good is it. Our kata, our self defense, our training as a whole is for kumite. and thats why we do reasonably well in it. we dont fight point sparring matches. We fight ippon matches where we try to knock the piss out of our opponent. Body is full contact head shots are good so long as no bleeding or swelling
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You will certainly learn at least some fighting skills if you belong to a school that does a substantial amout of hard sparring. I'm skeptical on the Kata bit. If your school is calling itself Shotokan and requires Kata for belt tests I would think they are requiring all of the traditional ones.
And my experience is that what most traditional Karate (old school style Kyokushin is a notable exception) schools call hard sparring isn't all that hard. I recently had some TMA black belts come to my kickboxing class for a while to work on hands. They said they had done a lot of hard sparring. After several weeks of pad drills, bag work and light sparring we picked it up to what I would consider 50% sparring and it was obvious that none of these guys had ever seen a hook or uppercut at combat speed and none of them had ever been punched hard in the head or taken a full power leg kick. They were really not enjoying themselves.
What kind of head and hand protection are you guys using? No bleeding or swelling from head shots sounds like point fighting to me... Even with 16 ouncers and headgear you are going to get bloody noses and fat lips.