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Not All Karate Style are Suitable for Mixed Martial Arts

Category Fusion Genesis Karate
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With all these crazy front kick ko’s, sidekicks and hook kicks making their way back into MMA, i’ve come to the conclusion that Muay Thai striking in MMA has become as stale as the TUF tv show. It’s predictable and boring. Strong wrestling with kyokushin striking is the future. Do you guys agree?

I like the 50/50 stance of karate. Enables both quick attack and retreat and as it is a lower stance, it allows for TD stops. End of the day, there are great facets to reap from many different combat sports. Always a fan of Karate though.

But theres a lot of good styles of karate that are very effective and offer stuff that Muay thai and kickboxing dont.

-Anderson KO Vitor with a very basic snap front kick
-Jones use a side kick to check Shogun (they always told us the side kick was worthless in MMA)
-Machida’s crane kick on Randy
-John Makdessi’s variety of hook kicks, axe kick and side kicks he used in his two fights
-A bunch of fighters including GSP use the spinning back kick

You guys need to remember Karate wasn’t invented by a bunch of strip mall TKD chain school instructors. It was developed by some bad asses that could actually fight and sprang from a warrior culture. We in the west have bastardized it to the point of being useless, in the interest of appealing to the masses for money.

Karate, like ALL martial arts, were not meant for the masses. Your six year old black belt is not doing karate. He is doing some pseudo karate like dance and getting some multi colored belts at a very high cost. Karate, and just about any martial art, works if trained properly and with the right intention.

Karate includes a lot of styles, all of which are different.
Kyokushin and goju-ryu may be related but they are not the same, and they are both different from shitoryu and from all those McDojo styles that are so common in the US.
There is even big variations between different dojos training the same style, especially when they train for different purposes.
People training shotokan karate under Machida in Brazil is not training the same as the guys training shotokan in a child-student dominated dojo in the US where sparring is hardly ever done and hard contact is forbidden. And what sparring there is is “first touch wins”.
And then we have the “too lethal to hit each other at all” karate guys. The less said about them the better.

Trying to judge all karate as one single entity is pointless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QG2wnfvtdE&feature=player_embedded

Me, I like full contact karate like kyokushin. Not because it is inherently better technically than light-contact first-touch karate like MOST shotokan, goju, shito etc, but because continuous full contact breeds tough fighters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IetAhImUfk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye_Cq_cNon0

Lotta truth in this thread. Asian MA in the US is basically like cardio boxing.

Imagine if boxing did not have it’s rich history here, and only was “discovered” about 50-60 years ago. Some real boxers came over and started opening up gyms. At first, it was all the naturally tough, aggressive guys that were attracted to it, and they helpede develop boxings reputation. People looked at those guys and thought, wow, boxing turns you into an ass-kicking machine! So it’s popularity grew. But, as it became more popular, it attracted less and less (naturally) tough and athletic people. It also attracted people who wanted to “train” it, but didn’t actually want to fight or compete.

So, gyms started offering more and more training geared to those people. They began to focus more on conditioning and drilling. They offered “group” training, rather than the more traditional one on one type. And the, as they saw the money making potential, they started advertising more and more towards “average” people, families and kids.

Pretty soon 9/10 “boxing” gyms would be really just be teaching cardio-boxing and fitness. You’d have to search pretty hard to find the ever elusive “real” boxing, where they actually fought and trained in the “old school” ways.

This is exactly what happened to TMA’s here in the States. The first UFC exposed TMA’s. But in the long run, that also saved them. Because MMA has brought TMAs back to their real roots of actually fighting and training to fight.

Mind you, all of this only applies to the US. There are plenty of kickboxers and full contact karate/kung fu guys all over the rest of the world for whom TMA’s “working” is nothing new.

Lotta truth in this thread. Asian MA in the US is basically like cardio boxing.

Imagine if boxing did not have it’s rich history here, and only was “discovered” about 50-60 years ago. Some real boxers came over and started opening up gyms. At first, it was all the naturally tough, aggressive guys that were attracted to it, and they helpede develop boxings reputation. People looked at those guys and thought, wow, boxing turns you into an ass-kicking machine! So it’s popularity grew. But, as it became more popular, it attracted less and less (naturally) tough and athletic people. It also attracted people who wanted to “train” it, but didn’t actually want to fight or compete.

So, gyms started offering more and more training geared to those people. They began to focus more on conditioning and drilling. They offered “group” training, rather than the more traditional one on one type. And the, as they saw the money making potential, they started advertising more and more towards “average” people, families and kids.

Pretty soon 9/10 “boxing” gyms would be really just be teaching cardio-boxing and fitness. You’d have to search pretty hard to find the ever elusive “real” boxing, where they actually fought and trained in the “old school” ways.

This is exactly what happened to TMA’s here in the States. The first UFC exposed TMA’s. But in the long run, that also saved them. Because MMA has brought TMAs back to their real roots of actually fighting and training to fight.

Mind you, all of this only applies to the US. There are plenty of kickboxers and full contact karate/kung fu guys all over the rest of the world for whom TMA’s “working” is nothing new.

I feel like if you’re already a good kickboxer, then you can start integrating more low percentage moves from the TMA’s. When you think about it it’s really no different then a guy like Jake Shields hitting a flying triangle. You can’t develope a whole game/style around flying submissions, just like you can’t build a whole game/style around things like spinning back kicks. Someone like Anderson Silva though? Sure he can get away with doing whatever he wants.

Machida though still remains ‘the black swan’ in that the majority of his striking ability is karate and it looks like he’s doing karate. GSP does a lot of karate stuff but he doesn’t take the stance, have the footwork, etc. Machida with everything he does, looks like he’s doing karate.

Thank you for your imput sensei, and quoted for truth.
It is amazing how many people close their eyes to the fact that there are plenty of accomplished karate-ka in the top level of MMA. Just because it does not fit in with their personal view on MMA and TMA.
It will probably not be long until some guy claims that you do not train REAL karate, because in their narrow view or limited experience karate does not work, what you do DOES work and therefore cannot be karate -it must be MT in disguise.

GSP does not take the typical point-karate shotokan fight stance. But his fight stance would look right at home in kyokushin or shidokan karate tournaments -which just happens to be the two karate styles that GSP has a black belt in.

editing require

http://www.mixedmartialarts.com/mma.cfm?go=forum_framed.posts&forum=1&thread=1811202&page=1
xxxx

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