nefti,
The reason I'm clearing this up too is because it's a misconception that Kyokushin stands completely alone among Karate systems. There is a pretty wide continuum, and there are plenty of rougher styles, particularly the ones that didn't derive from Shotokan.
When Funakoshi introduced Karate to Japan on a mass scale, he changed a lot of things to make Shotokan more palatable to the Japanese. He chose to stress a lot of the non-combative benefits and got rid of some of the more rigorous practices. The no contact point fighting comes from that.
But Funakoshi did not invent Karate. Karate is really wide and includes a lot of styles that predate him. Kyokushin was created after and is a tough style, but there are plenty of tough styles before too.
Kickboxing itself as an art mostly was developed out of full contact Karate styles. You can see that evolution through the rules. By the time I was doing Karate, we just called our full contact sparring Kickboxing at that point because it was that rule set. But the techniques were no different than what we learned as Karate. It was just semantics.
The reason I'm clearing this up too is because it's a misconception that Kyokushin stands completely alone among Karate systems. There is a pretty wide continuum, and there are plenty of rougher styles, particularly the ones that didn't derive from Shotokan.
When Funakoshi introduced Karate to Japan on a mass scale, he changed a lot of things to make Shotokan more palatable to the Japanese. He chose to stress a lot of the non-combative benefits and got rid of some of the more rigorous practices. The no contact point fighting comes from that.
But Funakoshi did not invent Karate. Karate is really wide and includes a lot of styles that predate him. Kyokushin was created after and is a tough style, but there are plenty of tough styles before too.
Kickboxing itself as an art mostly was developed out of full contact Karate styles. You can see that evolution through the rules. By the time I was doing Karate, we just called our full contact sparring Kickboxing at that point because it was that rule set. But the techniques were no different than what we learned as Karate. It was just semantics.
