Quote:
Originally Posted by NinjaKilla187
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.
|
maybe i keep meeting the exception to the rule; but all of the tma guys i know PERSONALLY, train very hard and spar harder...lots of contact, bruises, swollen lips, etc. i sparred them, an i was pretty impressed w/the contact and speed; an i have been in w/boxers-kickboxers (pro/amateur) b4. An im including kenpo, shotokan and so on; not saying everyone in the world is realistic in their training, but thhe guys i know go hard. Hell my dad trained tkd in korea, an his instructor did continuous/heavy contact sparring and my dad had seperated shoulders, broken fingers, and ko's; cus they didn't just stop if someone got dropped, they were allowed and encouraged to kick and stomp people..not to mention punch them. My dad also had a bit of a boxing and judo background; but often refers to his tkd training as brutal,
all the guys i know may not have had all the tech expertise; but none of them had issues w/the speed or level of contact when sparring diff stylist.
like i said maybe i have met the exceptions to the rules; but all the kenpo shotokan american karate guys and tkd guys i have known were very hard contact in regards to what they took and dished out.
but that is just my exp