Social media algorithms are a strange phenomenon. Lately, mine seem to be filled with video clips of karate students, including black belts, spending an extraordinary amount of time perfecting stances, hand positions, hip alignment, and body posture.
The hikite hand placed just so.
The open front hand measured, corrected, and adjusted until it matches someone’s idea of correct.
The body frozen in an immaculate neko-ashi-dachi.
I understand the value of detail and the need for structure. I also understand that in tournament karate, judges are looking for precision, sharpness, line, balance, and presentation. If that is the goal, then those details matter.
But imagine going to a weekend seminar hoping to learn something practical, hoping to answer questions you have been carrying for years, only to spend the time correcting the exact height of your open hand while standing perfectly still.
For some people, that may be exactly what they want.
For others, it is not even close.
And this is where the problem begins.
Not everyone sees karate the same way. People train for different reasons. Some train for competition, tradition, fitness, discipline, movement, or personal enjoyment. There is nothing wrong with any of that.
But when karate is advertised as self-defense, the standard changes.
You can find no shortage of theories in karate. Some are interesting. Some are useful. Some are repeated because they sound traditional. But many of them begin to crumble when pressure, resistance, fear, surprise, and forward aggression are introduced.
That does not mean tournament karate has no value.
I know a number of hugely successful tournament fighters who have worked in the security industry and were very effective, and most importantly, they stayed safe. They understood distance, timing, movement, control, and composure. They also understood that the tournament was not the street, the dojo was not the car park, and a rule-bound exchange was not the same as criminal violence.
But not everyone makes that distinction.
Tournaments can be fun. They can give a sense of achievement, build confidence, and sometimes a little bravado too. But they are not reality. Reality does not agree to fight you. It does not warn you or bow. It does not wait for your preferred distance, your favorite technique, or your chosen moment.
And if those differences are not understood, confidence can become overconfidence.
I sometimes feel that some practitioners, and some instructors, have not yet reached the point where they realize how many gaps exist in their knowledge. Advice is often dismissed as being too cautious, too negative, or too “old school”, when in truth the person offering it may simply have been exposed to a different level of pressure.
When a veteran instructor tells you that your tournament-winning spinning kick may be a liability in a parking lot, it is easy to dismiss them as outdated. But sometimes what looks like caution is experience. Sometimes what sounds like negativity is the result of having seen what happens when training assumptions meet real violence.
Sometimes what looks like caution is experience.
Karate is often criticized for its lack of realism by people outside the art, and to be honest, sometimes it is easy to see why.
Someone recently sent me a message asking if I could teach them online. They had read my articles and thought my approach might be what they were looking for. They told me they had visited several dojo near them, but all they found was similar to what I described above: fixed positions, formal shapes, and training that did not resemble the practical karate they had imagined.
That does not make those dojo wrong.
But it does raise an important question.
What exactly is being advertised?
This is the point I keep coming back to: karate advertised as self-defense needs to be context-driven. Self-defense cannot simply be a convenient phrase attached to a syllabus. It cannot be a marketing term used to get people through the door. If we use the phrase, then we carry a responsibility to understand what it actually means.
There are many approaches to karate, and many competing theories claiming to be the “right” one. From my perspective, the right approach depends on the individual and their training goals.
If someone trains for artistic expression, tradition, or competition, then their standard may be different from mine. I have no issue with that.
But when claims are made about functional self-defense, the discussion moves away from personal preference. At that point, the question is not whether something looks good, feels traditional, or fits a familiar pattern.
The question is whether it works in the context being claimed.
Karate should not carry the blanket label of self-defense.
Much of the time, what is being taught under that label clearly is not self-defense at all. It may be karate. It may be skillful, disciplined, impressive, demanding, and meaningful.
But that does not automatically make it functional.
And if self-defense is what people are looking for, then when something is labeled as self-defense, there is a responsibility to ensure it reflects reality, not choreography dressed up as something else.