Is Karate really this useless?

[Homervanderjaz]

 

[Leroy Jenkins]

Yes.


It's only useful when Karate practitioners adapted to MMA and mix boxing/muaythai/etc into it.


But a straight up karate guy would get destroyed by your typical MMA brawler.

 

[Croo67]

I did it for 7 years as a child.

The closest I got to actual physical contact, was mimicking a strike in slow motion, with a partner's hand being the 'pad'.

So in my experience, yes.

 

[sissypunch]

karate guys don't seem to be trying to hard, whats up with that?

 

[leatherneck]

IT IS IF HE KEEPS PULLING HIS KICKS-

he could have dropped boxer multiple times.

 

[Reach4theSky]

When combined with other aspects of martial arts it can be effective.

 

[LiLoMMA]

Love the Russian video there. The second dude's pony tail is epic.
Karate is useful against no training. Against boxing... ouch

 

[BloodBonesNButter]

Kyokushin is a good start

 

[UL]

By itself

Yes

 

[MaDFroG]

well machida and thomson proved it that it s not quite useless( of course while mixing with other things like wreslinh , BJJ ). But their style is based mostly on karate , keepeing distance and scoring... the mobility the kicks offer is something that most fighters cant prepare.

 

[freakyfarley]

Those two absolutely suck. Not representative

 

[freakyfarley]

I did it for 7 years as a child.

The closest I got to actual physical contact, was mimicking a strike in slow motion, with a partner's hand being the 'pad'.

So in my experience, yes.

Haha, what? Not like that when I trained as a kid at all. Which style?

 

[TIMELESS TRUTH]

Karate = Ballet

 

[Lemmy Caution]

Why don't you ask Wonderboy?

 

[Hi-Tech]

I did it for 7 years as a child.

The closest I got to actual physical contact, was mimicking a strike in slow motion, with a partner's hand being the 'pad'.

So in my experience, yes.

I also did some karate briefly before going to boxing. It's different like night and day.

At karate we did some useless katas and there wasn't much strength and conditioning going on. You see a lot of out of shape people, middle aged guys, women, kids... There were some drilling of punches but not any real contact.

Then I went to boxing and it's totally different, you see in shape athletic people, people who compete regularly, extremely intense strength and conditioning, intense heavy bag and speed bag workouts, much more realistic work on pads and of course a lot of sparring.

I'm not saying all of karate is useless, but most karate schools are. It just doesn't have the same reputation like boxing or say wrestling which are trained like sports, with emphasis on real competition and real fighting contests. Maybe there are karate gyms who work like that but they're extremely rare. Probably at least 80% of karate gyms are just some recreational hobby type of thing while in boxing it's likely the opposite, 80% of gyms are sparring oriented.

In the vast majority of cases you can't go wrong with joining a boxing gym, it's a place for real fighters and it can be quite intimidating, it builds character and puts people in real tests, you'll get your ass kicked but you'll also learn a lot. That's why in these stand up fights in case I don't know anything about either of the fighters I'll always pick a random boxer over random whatever else not because boxing is better technically (it's not because it doesn't use kicks) but because it's more likely that the boxer has gone through some serious training and has some hard sparring behind him and is also in great shape while a lot of these karate and kickboxing gyms are mcdojos or cardiokickboxing/boxercise type of things.

That's probably the case in the video posted above, karate guys were probably hitting air most of their training while boxers were sparring and doing push ups, sprints, roadwork skipping rope etc. In the video you can see that the boxers have much better knowledge of range and timing which is a result of more real sparring experience.

 

[The Sausage King]

Karate = Ballet

You got that right !

 

[Hi-Tech]

Love the Russian video there. The second dude's pony tail is epic.

That was Roberto Baggio in the video, doing some boxing for cardio to be in shape for World Cup 1994.

 

[sapporo ichiban]

This was a misrepresentation of what karate should be used like in a real situation. The karate guys were clearly point fighting with the boxer who was full contact fighting with them. I never trained karate but I got my first dan in taekwondo when I was 19. Taekwondo can be comparable to some styles of karate so it applies.

That tippy tappy shit has its place, but putting strictly point fighters in with a different style geared to knock people out is not a real contest. Put the boxer in against a Karate guy with some chops who is trying to take his head off and it would be a more fair demonstration. I have had a fair bit of boxing training also so I know a bullshit contest when I see one.

I think it is unfortunate that there are a lot of schools out there who teach the techniques in a way that is safe and marketable giving students a false sense of security. These point contact heavy schools also give the public the wrong impression.

At my club we did point fighting and understood those drills were meant as a training tool and what the benefits were. We also padded up and did full contact sparring as our instructor wanted to keep it real. He would say if we don't train for reality then we would be unprepared and our skills would not work.

Looking at this video tells me these karate guys have skills they just have never been in a real fight, that is their instructors fault imo.

 

[Tayski]

It depends heavily on the style of Karate and most importantly the instructor and actual individual. Unfortunately there are a lot of McDojos out there especially in USA.

Also, non full contact Karate styles can be effective as self defence but tend to struggle in full contact sport fights.

However when you start looking at full contact Karate styles especially from the Knockdown family (Kyokushin, Ashihara, Enshin, Shidokan, Daido Juku / Kudo), you get some seriously tough fighters.

Kyokushin:



Shidokan:



Daido Juku / Kudo:

 

[spacetime]

1) THE Boxer is wearing gloves. Einsteins. Guess what a MASSIVE advantage that is to someone NOT using them. Not just for defence but also offence.

2). The karate guy is not doing karate. There is nothing about his fighting that even closely resembles Karate. Much more like fake, American MCdojo Karate.