Anyone claiming to teach self-defense has a moral obligation to do the research.
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Sport training is created to ensure success in sport. It makes little sense to train to develop one set of skills when they are not the skills you wish to actually attain. If you want self-defense skills, then you should be training those. If you want sporting skills, then train for those.
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Sport karate, no matter what form it is; point karate, full-contact, kick-boxing etc., it is still sport, with some of the practices that are not appropriate for self-defense, and themes that are missing entirely.
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There are many martial arts instructors who don’t care to study the realities of criminal violence and train and teach accordingly. Instead, they assume it’s just how it is when they fight each other in the dojo, hands up, toe-to-toe. You see this all the time.
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However, those who have faced violence, tend to give a very consistent message…… understand the differences and train according to those differences.
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Some practitioners go to a class to learn self-defense, only to be taught art, sport, or competition fighting etc., and the sad thing is, they never realize it because the instructor deludes them into believing it is “self-defense”.
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This is serious stuff, and martial arts instructors putting the “ego of their art” first and foremost, infuriates me.
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Sport is sport and self-protection/defense is just that, and ideally you should train in relation to your objective when taking up the ‘art’ in the first place. There is nothing wrong with sports based karate, if it’s done well. And you’ll certainly be able to defend yourself better than if you had done nothing at all. However…..
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Most people who begin karate have no understanding that karate for self-defense and/or sport, even existed as a separate thing. Most just want to be able to keep themselves active and fit, or to meet new people. And I’m pretty sure the majority of students don’t start out with what they really want out of karate. Perhaps they can learn how to ‘defend’ themselves without really understanding that it can be different depending on the dojo and/or the instructor they train with.
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Context is everything, but if you have no understanding that a context exists, it really is just pot luck.
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The majority of students don’t appreciate the differences, or understand that there are many divergent activities all using the common label of “karate”.
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The problem is that the instructor – who should be well-educated on these matters – often does not understand these issues either. They teach art, sport, fighting (all very important and valuable things) and put the “self-defense” label on it, without ever understanding that true self-defense is a very wide and varied topic, where fighting is the absolute last resort.
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Instructors need to know that skill in a martial art, or competitive success, does not make you qualified to teach self-defense.
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And many of those martial arts instructors often make the worst self-protection instructors. Why? Because they don’t teach actual self-protection; they teach fighting, they have a fight first mentality.
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Even when they come to the physical aspects, they still get it wrong. Because they fail to appreciate the shift in context and objective. They still teach as if it is consensual fighting. They narrow it down to the physical because that is all they know.
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The difference in objective makes a huge difference physically. Two people agreeing to fight for a win creates a very different dynamic to one or more criminals seeking to cause harm, and the target seeking to avoid that harm.
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Students can be forgiven for not understanding the differences. Instructors can not. Because they are obviously not exercising due diligence when claiming to teach something they have never sought to educate themselves about.
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Do the research. Be aware of the differences, and be ever mindful of them.
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With thanks to Iain Abernethy
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