I haven’t done any research on the subject, but here are my general thoughts. I personally don’t believe in regular sparring in the ordinary way, but I do believe in partial kumite training.
Now, there is an injury argument against kumite, and most people would prefer to learn self-defence without loss of brain cells. But for the moment let’s consider this argument indecisive.
The key part of my position is this. Kumite trains you in a certain type of fighting, and you shouldn’t be so conditioned into it that you become less capable of other sorts of fighting. At the same time, the skills you learn from kumite are invaluable. It’s possible to learn such skills outside the ring: there is immense value in visualisation training, and there are limitless possibilities as to what you can do and prepare yourself for in basic partner training. But I believe such skills are much more efficiently acquired through sparring and being tested under that sort of pressure.
What sorts of skills do I mean? Well, for starters: anticipation, deception, reading your opponent, reflex defence, control of movement, and sheer confidence, which includes self-control and collecting yourself. And you also quickly find out more about yourself, what sorts of attacks, counter-attacks and defences work for you, where your strengths and vulnerabilities lie, and you’ve got a situation in which you can experiment and play with different ideas.
But in contrast, consider this. Kumite is a game with defined rules. Now, I’ve done European fencing for a decade and a half; I fence mainly foil; and in foil the target area -- the places where you score a point -- are torso and groin, excluding the head for safety reasons. And if you really concentrate on fencing as a sport, you’ll instinctively find, after a while, that you don’t worry about your head -- you’re happy to take off-target hits on the mask.
Karate kumite has similar shortcomings that it conditions you into. There’s stuff like: you stop after you score a point; you move in a defined open area; you’ve stretched and prepared beforehand; and you do fast bouncy movements instead of hard movements from a steady stance. But the most obvious shortcoming is this: you’re excluded from performing any really damaging movement. I feel cautious about even throwing a front snap kick into someone’s stomach, and only ever do so half-heartedly. But the thing is, in a real fight, there are actually a lot of opportunities to perform really damaging movements. And kumite, full of pulled punches and light contact, can make you casual towards what other people can do to you.
Consider the situation of a no-holds-barred fight, for the sake of the starkest contrast to what you’re allowed to do in sport kumite. In such a fight, if someone grabs you, there’s always the option of twisting off one of their fingers. You can strike at joints, can gouge, can stamp into their shins or knees when they come for you, can break through the skin of throat or armpit. And in such a fight, you’re allowed to go as fast and as hard as you like; and the rules of the game, and the movements that work, change when you up the stakes. I mean, I’m low-level, but I can fairly easily break bones with a punch or a kick.
In response, let it be said for kumite that most “real” fights are not no-holds-barred: real fights do have limitations on how hard you can hit, so kumite does go a long way towards preparing you for actual physical confrontations and controlled force. I mean, if a bouncer is tussling with a drunk patron, the bouncer doesn’t want to actually kill the guy. If someone mugs you in a alleyway, you don’t really want to take out their eyes. And even war time often has implicit rules about what’s fair and what’s not, about sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct.
It’s often said that Gogen Yamaguchi introduced sparring to Goju, and that traditional karate didn’t usually have free sparring. I don’t know if this is true; but if it’s true it’s true in a qualified way. Because the atmosphere in the dojo itself might have been rarefied, but of course students have always sparred amongst themselves anyway.
Back to main page.