Journey to a new style...

[_Simon_]

Do you have large quantities of cotton wool and bubble wrap?

I do not. I do have some nice meditative music, and puppy cuddles from a challenging very bitey puppy?

 

[drop bear]

I mostly agree with this sentiment. Sport requires the bastardization of TMA for safety, entertainment and scoring purposes. This can be (and is) carried to the point that sport ceases to be TMA, but a system unto itself. But there can be, IMO, exceptions to them being completely incompatible.

In some tournaments, kata competition is done traditionally with no favor to non-combat moves as gymnastics, dramatic posing, and throwing or spinning weapons midair. But it's often hard to find judges with enough sense to discount such moves. Strict, knowledgeable, and traditional judges can do much to preserve the traditional aspect.

During rare sparring competition I strove to employ TMA karate kata techniques as much as practical. Nowadays I put this goal equal to that of winning as a personal challenge to demo the effectiveness of TMA, even in a sport environment. It is often effective as the opponent has not experienced such techniques.

But I'll again stress, the premises of TMA and sport MA are mostly at odds with each other.

Not really.

It is dishonest to argue that sport doesn't train fighting because it is not fighting. If what you are training is not fighting also.

So yeah. If say a swordsman who has killed 50 people goes on about realism. Then yeah. Good point. But otherwise no.

So I will expand on this. And it is hard to explain because there is generally a blind spot that supports the general premise.

So the idea is Karate is all of Karate. And sport Karate is some of Karate. Or TMA or whatever. And generally this is attributed to TMA,s focus on self defence or fighting.

But nobody trains TMA and covers all of it. For example. If sport does not allow eye gouging. The TMA also doesn't allow eyegouging.

" Yeah we do. We are super realistic." Right?

Wrong

The TMA might pretend to do eye gouging but will very rarely actually gouge eyes in training.

Both systems don't do all of the system. They just approximate all of the system in different ways.

Let's use kata. Traditional kata is more realistic because it more closely represents a fight. Nobody is throwing backflips in a self defence situation.

But.

Athletic people are just better at fighting. If you did acrobatics you would become better at athletic pursuits.

So again. It is not all the system vs a part of the system.

 

[drop bear]

Jeff chan is a very good example of someone you can drop in to any system and he will do pretty well at.

There is definitely natural ability. But the training he does also makes him increasingly versatile.

So for me there are three major components.

The objective.
The deliver system.
The risks.

To have all of the system you need to address all of those components.

 

[Gyakuto]

I remember an interview with Morio Higaonna, 10th Dan Goju Ryu, who said, ‘…competition and contests are to encourage children…’