When we here the words, Karate, Martials arts, or something similar, we immediately think of self defense. For years, we have grown to think those terms are synonymous. However, over the years, Karate and other martial arts have moved away from teaching self defense, but still say that self defense is taught.
What changed? Over years, martial arts schools slowly have slowly moved away from teaching the essence of self defense. This happened through a number of ways. One is due to the fact that the age of martial arts students have decreased drastically over the years.
In the 70s and 80’s, the youngest martial arts students were teenagers and that was rare. In the 90’s, that dropped to older elementary age like 10. In the 2000’s, the youngest students were around 4 years old. Today, some teach as young as 2, even though I’m not sure that is really martial arts training. Instructors teach to their audience therefore, kids prefer games rather than sparring. Very few enjoyed being punched, so instructors stopped because they didn’t want to lose students.
Second, students want to learn more. They grow tired of doing simple but effective drills. Instructors would create complex techniques so they students could learn something new. Unfortunately, these new complicated techniques rarely work in self defense applications.
So how do we still incorporate self defense in the changing times? No, we don’t just teach easy techniques and let them punch each other hard. We have definitely changed many things we do, but self defense application is still very important.
First, we reduced the amount of striking sparring in our programs like many others have. However, we didn’t just replace it with static solo drills. We replaced it with other forms of dynamic training(sparring) like clinch wrestling and ground fighting. A crazy thing happened that we didn’t expect.
Females, overwhelming, enjoy the clinch wrestling more than any other aspect of karate. When I polled female students, traditional sparring(kicking and punching) was very low on what they enjoy doing. Stand up wrestling was one of the highest.
It is important to change with the times but we must still provide a high standard of what is expected.
Shawn Vicknair