Bruises that were the size of a nickel would grow and become lighter as they grew. If I took my shirt off at the swimming pool, people would be shocked to see the bruising. There was one lady who believed I was a torture victim.
Haha I had a similar experience a few years ago. I once walked into the office in only a t-shirt during a very hot summer day and had been doing quite a lot of Knockdown sparring that week. I walked through the marketing department (which had a majority of women) limping and full of bruises on my arms. They asked me if I was OK with really concerned tones and looks. They thought I had been in a car crash or had been jumped by a group of thugs the night before. For me that was just regular weekly Kyokushin training at the time, it was making me laugh. Looking back at it now I think it was probably a bit too much, but it does make you mentally and physically strong though.
I will say though that Kyokushin training is generally much more intensive/debilitating than MT sessions. I think though MT seems to do a better job of not emptying your cup so much that you miss the next training session whereas in Kyokushin training it's not out of the ordinary to see miss sessions because the last session fucked you up.
I have to agree with that, having trained in both. I have never been as physically spent and broken as after a solid Kyokushin training session - which I really enjoyed. The upside of that is that it makes you very mentally and physically strong and resistant, nothing scares you or hurts you anymore. The downside however is indeed that your body is all destroyed the next day and you might at times miss some training sessions because of accumulated damage / injuries. I tried to do 4-5 training sessions a week in Kyokushin sometimes by going to different dojos in the same week but found it very difficult to do for more than a few weeks because of how much body damage you accumulate.
In Muay Thai you still get some proper good training sessions that really drain you physically, but it's usually not as hard on the body so that you're able to train 5+ times a week if you want to and also not get injured so you're able to fight regularly.
So yeah if you only want to train like 2 times a week Kyokushin is fine, but if you want to train 4-5 times a week or more it can be difficult unless you have a dojo which offers "rest" days during which the focus is around kihon/kata/Goshin-Jitsu rather than hard body conditioning and sparring.
I remember asking about the drop out rate to either you or another KK poster, to which the reply was that it has the highest dropout rate in all combat sports. For the rough gym-wars-on-the-reg, Is that a KK thing or rather a east euro gym culture thing?
Kyokushin tends to have a very high drop out rate when it's a real tough dojo indeed. That's the mentality behind Kyokushin though and how Mas Oyama the founder of Kyokushin was running his first ever dojo.
There are several reasons behind that I believe:
- First of all that's how Oyama did it. He only wanted to keep the toughest of the toughest and weed out the weak. Quote from a website:
"The Oyama Dojo members took their Kumite seriously, seeing it primarily as a fighting art, so they expected to hit and to be hit. With few restrictions, attacking the head was common, usually with the palm heel or towel-wrapped knuckles. Grabs, throws, and groin attacks were also common. Kumite rounds would continue till one person loudly conceded defeat. Injuries occurred on a daily basis and the dropout rate was high (over 90%).".
- So still today one of the reasons is probably to weed out the weak minded. If people can't handle pain or getting beat up they will simply won't come back. Only the persistent ones will come back. Certainly that was how our head instructor at my dojo viewed things.
- There doesn't tend to be several groups by level in most dojos; like beginners, general, intermediate etc. unlike some of the Muay Thai or Kickboxing gyms. In Kyokushin everybody trains in the same class, so you could easily end up sparring a black belt as a white belt etc.
- Most Kyokushin dojos and instructors aren't here to make money but rather to teach their art as a hobby and make people tough, so they aren't necessarily trying to get a big number of students. So for them it doesn't matter if a lot of students decide not to come back because it's too tough. They'd rather make sure the training is real and hard rather than trying to soften the training to accommodate the weaker students. You're thrown into the deep water and you just gotta swim. At least that was my experience when I first started it, but also why I absolutely loved it. On the contrary a lot of MT, KB, Boxing gyms etc. are at the end of the day a business where the gym owners and coaches are doing that as a full time job and therefore having a lot students who pay regularly is important, so they prefer having a lot of students and then maybe breaking them into groups. That's also why those gyms usually want their fighters to compete and fight and represent the gym, giving it a reputation and in return bringing new students. It's a different focus in Kyokushin Karate.
Have you noticed that trolls now expose themselves as such with more or less the first post? I gotta say I still refuse to acknowledge spacetime posts
It's just a shame that the newer readers and posters on this forum wouldn't necessarily be able to tell who's full of shit and they might actually take those trolls' words on some of the non sense
as for pros for kyokushin over MT? how about not getting punch drunk?
Getting punch drunk in MT is not nearly as common as in Boxing or Kickboxing. Mostly Because the scoring doesn't put emphasis on the punches but also because clinching is allowed, so when you get within that range you can just clinch.
The punch-drunk syndrome also seems to be more present in the heavier weight divisions regardless of the sport, as they hit harder with more weight behind their punches. And in Muay Thai the majority of the fighters are towards the lighter weight classes.
I can think of a tons of MMA, Boxing, and Kickboxing fighters who are punch drunk, but can't really think of many Muay Thai fighters who are punch drunk.