“Traditional karate is what we learned from the time we started, traditional Okinawan karate. As did our elders. We learned karate that was to be used in real-life situations. If you don’t continue to train with that sense of there being a real opponent, you won’t be able to respond in that kind of situation…….Since the time when weapons were prohibited, Okinawan karate is about fighting where the stakes are life or death. Sensei talked about the pathos of determining life or death, and told us to consider this when practicing. I think that if you don’t do that then it is not traditional karate.” ??
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Takeshi Tamaki 10th dan Shogen-ryu
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One of the things that I believe to be vitally important in our training and teaching is to “clearly define environment”. What I mean by that is to designate in which context any given methodology, technique, tactic, training method, etc is to be utilized.
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The most common failure of this is people mistaking martial arts, fighting, sparring and self-protection to be one and the same. There may be a crossover, but they are very different, and teaching one as the other, can be highly problematic and even downright dangerous.
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Teaching fighting and tournament sparring as self-protection will ignore vitally important things like personal security, awareness skills, the law, escaping, de-escalation, and a host of other things all of which are way more important than fighting or sparring skills when it comes to real self-protection.
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“Remember, fighting skills aren’t the key to self-protection: fighting is what happens when self-protection goes bad.”
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With thanks to Iain Abernethy
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