What I am saying is, if all you do is randori, or sparring, you begin to assume that partner practice of more dangerous techniques, is worthless, and you just train for sport.
If all you do is kata, or partner practice and never spar or roll or randori, your techniques become artificial and theoretical, kind of like my arguements. Sportfighting is essential for SD efficacy, but it shouldnt be confused with the actual thing.
Here's a distinction that may be of use: Iain Abernethy distinguishes between what he calls sport-based sparring, kumite of the familiar kind, on the one hand, and what he calls kata-based sparring, which is all-in, CQ simulation of street attacks, on the other. Once you've don bunkai for the kata, you have to train the apps you've discovered, and those apps are very unpleasant, not the kind of thing you want to be uke for. So a certain amount of padding is necessary (not full padding with thick gloves, but some essential padding), and you have to face the possibility of nontrivial injuries. As Abernethy says in his
Black Belt article on this realistic kata-based combat training from this past April issue, `
There are obvious safety issues surrounding kata-based sparring, especially the more extreme variety. I've bled, broken bones and dislocated joints through my own adventures, so I fully appreciate that heavy contact isn't for everyone.' (p.103). This kind of training, which is a standyby not just in IA's dojo but in the British Combat Association crowd generally, has almost nothing to do with sport sparring. So if you're seriously committed to competitive karate, whether of the Japanese or Korean flavors, the more you do this kind of stuff, the less likely you are to train in the hard, street-combat format that guys like IA advocate for SD training. Yes, that makes sense.
But again, sport training can probably be
adapted, to varying degrees, if you do decide you want to start doing SD-specific training. Take competition TKD. It instills some
baaaaaaad habits, especially involving the hands. But what it does give you, or should, are great balance skills for high kicks, Now I don't think high kicks are practical for the great majority of street situations, for the reasons that Geoff Thompson gives in his very practical, rational assessment of the way MAs can be applied to street SD,
The Pavement Arena. But terrific high-kicking balance skills in the very artificial tournament environment, under the very artificial WTF sparring rules, can translate into terrific low-kicking balance skills targeting high value targets on the lower body, and speedy shift to move in on an attacker whose initial attack you've pre-empted and countered hard—
if you know how to do that. So I think that sport techniques mustn't ever be confused with SD techs, but sport
training, if you make up your mind to apply it to realistic CQ applications, can probably give you a serious edge.
I think the mistake people make is in assuming their sport skills will translate automatically to unrestricted violent-conflict skills. That's the big mistake, but one that I think fewer people might be making these days than a few years ago, due to the work of people like Abernethy and the other combat-oriented karate people like the BCA, and the attention that a lot of the MA mags seem to be giving to the difference between competition and survival fighting....
