Karate: What is it good for?

Video of the 3rd two-person-drill from Cho Chi Zen, a karate based system I taught in the early and mid 90's

I took Shotokan Karate as a kid, and the first system I taught in the early 90's was karate based. I have good memories of karate style training, and enjoyed it very much. At the time I believed the training was realistic and good for self defense. It was certainly hard. I was most often full of lumps and bruises, many torn ligaments, and a couple of broken bones.

But would it really stand up to a skillful attack?

Around the time of the first UFC in 1993 I began to seriously question what I was doing. Although I continued to practice and teach Cho Chi Zen, my primary karate based system, I also started studying other systems. I had no training on the ground, and after ordering the first Gracie Jiu Jitsu series from Black Belt Magazine, I realized I needed some. My initial exposure to Filipino Martial Arts though Jeet Kune Do taught me that my defense techniques for stick and knife attacks would fail against a beginning FMA practitioner. My training partners and I began integrating techniques from other styles and removing more and more karate based techniques.

The problems I ended up finding with nearly all styles of karate were many fold, including deep and relatively immobile stances, hands on hips, and a counter based mentality. When you attack or counter attack someone, they move. They either move away from your attack or they move when they get hit. They not only move on their feet, but also change the position of their hands and arms. The deep, rooted stances in karate don't allow you to follow your opponent fast enough. In my experience you need footwork, not stances.

The hands on the hips postures are very ineffective. If you test it for yourself you'll see you can strike just as hard, if not harder, beginning with your hands up. Having one hand nearly always at the hip just creates serious openings that any good fighter can exploit.

I also found the counter based mentality to be a real problem. If an opponent throws one or even two strikes at you, you may be able to block, block, counter strike. But if you're faced with a barrage of kicks and punches, you'll never get the counter attack in. The opponent will just keep hitting until you miss a block.

Without the classis karate stances, punches with the hands on the hips, and block and counter type techniques, you no longer have karate. After making modification upon modification, my training partners and I realized we were no longer practicing karate anymore, and from that point on never practiced it again.

So what is karate good for? There's no doubt it is excellent exercise if done with intensity. It's great for balance, flexibility, strength, speed, etc. It can also be a lot of fun. However, for self defense, especially against opponents who have grown up in the days of mixed martial arts, it's not likely to stand up to a great many forms of attack.

Can karate evolve so that its techniques and training methods can stand up to MMA, to an FMA stick or knife attack, or a modern day gun threat? I don't think so. Both the techniques and training methods would have to change so dramatically that they would no longer resemble “karate”. The bottom line for me is that karate is fine for exercise and enjoyment, but not for self defense.