Driving past a martial arts school yesterday, I noticed some of the students leaving – children barely three or four years old.
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Personally, I have never taught children this young. In my opinion, karate for this age group is little more than structured play and games. If this is your income source and it works for you, I have no reason to discourage it. It’s simply not my preference, nor what I choose to teach.
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Within karate itself, there is a distinction that often causes controversy and misunderstanding, so let me be very clear – karate trained for sport is not better or worse than karate trained for practical application. The two approaches simply have different intentions and serve different purposes. As with most things, it comes down to what you want, or what you need.
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Karate for sport has rules, referees, and time limits. Safety is paramount. Matches can be won, lost, or drawn according to points scored or knockdowns achieved, and despite the physical nature of competition, a great deal of care is taken to protect the health and safety of the participants.
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Real violence has no rules, no referees, and no safety net. That said, many practitioners of sport-focused karate train far harder and push themselves much further physically than many practitioners of non‑competitive karate will.
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Karate trained for practical application, when taught correctly, reveals the full range of possibilities in unarmed conflict. Karate for sport teaches you how to perform and succeed within a clearly defined rule set. Both use the tools of the human body, but they use them in different ways and with a different focus.
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Recognizing that sometimes you need to avoid violence, and sometimes you may need to cause harm, is central to practical self‑protection.
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Karate is not about recreating the past of another culture, dressing up in white uniforms, or bowing at every opportunity. It’s not calling each other by traditional titles, worshipping a master, or offering unquestioning obedience to ancient rituals.
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It’s not lines of students endlessly drilling techniques, or performing beautiful movements purely for aesthetics, or defeating multiple imaginary attackers in choreographed sequences.
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Those things may have their place, but they are not the heart of the art.
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Training for real-world self-defense requires an honest understanding of violence, and that necessarily leads karate in a more pragmatic direction.
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Karate is a category of martial art, just as sneakers are a category of shoe.
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Just as there are many different designs of shoe, there are many different types of karate. The styles.
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Every manufacturer has their own ideas about how a shoe should be built, which is why the designs vary so widely. Some are cheap, some expensive, some basic, and some built to very high specifications.
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In the same way, every instructor, school, dojo, and organization has their own approach to karate. This has led to many different schools of thought within practice.
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However, just as most shoes share certain features, most styles of karate share common characteristics. Whilst my own approach is practical in nature, what karate becomes for you is shaped by how you train and why you train.
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And perhaps at the age of three, what those young students get out of karate has very little to do with pragmatism at all, and everything to do with movement, confidence, social interaction, and enjoyment. That may not be what I teach, but it certainly has its place.
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Written by Adam Carter – Shuri Dojo