I’m going to screen the four-dvd set by Lyoto Machida, because, after all, he is a life-long Shotokan student who had done very well indeed in the unbiased, intense experimental training ground of mixed martial arts.
Once I get my dvds, I will screen them, and I will tell you how well I liked them in this very karate blog.
This much, however, is clear.
Not everyone who studies Shotokan Karate is going to be a world-class competitor and tough guy, anymore than a young lady who takes a year of ballet will be a ballerina starring in Swan Lake in a professional ballet company.
Not everyone who studies Shotokan Karate will have the abilities of Sensei Nakayama or Sensei Funakoshi or or Sensei Tanaka or Sensei Koyama (I got to watch Tanaka demonstrate when Sensei Nakayama brought him to our class with Sensei Koyama at Arizona State University; Tanaka’s a pretty serious guy. And that was a more interesting class than the usual class. Kinda like a visit from the Pope, if you’re Catholic).
And that’s just common sense.
If you are a serious practitioner of any martial art, you spend a huge amount of time in training, conditioning and practice; waaaaaaaaaaay more than a recreational practitioner.
One reason boxers are such effective fighters, in general, is that they are filtered at the both the front end and the tail end; those who are not tough enough to endure the training because they have glass jaws and low pain tolerances are shaken out. At the other end, those who want to have what we generally refer to as normal lives, with a predictable paycheck, drop out.
That leave very highly motivated guys with high pain tolerances and cast-iron jaws and guts who run five miles a day and lift weights and do a million sit ups and hit themselves in the face, and you can teach techniques to guys like that, or not, and they’ll still be very tough guys.
But if you take a wimpy little guy who weighs 135 soaking wet, and he trains twice a week in any traditional martial art whatsoever for a period of twenty years, and you toss him in a ring with Mike Tyson or Mourad Oumakhanov, he will become a floor ornament very quickly.
Big, tough guys tend to beat little fragile guys, all other things being equal.
Martial arts in any context are about trying to make things more equal than physics and biology would otherwise dictate.
And you get out of a martial art what you put into it.
So if you practice an esthetically pleasing martial art (Tai Chi as taught most places in the United States) from a non-combative oriented instructor in a Parks and Recreations Class, and you take one class per week for five years, and you become pretty good at the long set, you probably ought not expect to be able to hold your own against a Golden Gloves boxer, who has bled and sweated and suffered several hours a day over a decade for his art.
Getting used to having somebody trying to knock your head off is probably pretty good preparation for a situation where somebody is trying to knock your head off, you know?
In that context, it’s also good to recall that in the good old days, formerly known as “these trying times”, kumite in Shotokan Karate was essentially without rules-that is, one guy said “hajime”, two guys fought like crazy, then everybody went to the hospital. Ditto with matches between Universities in Japan. Made the Japanese hospitals very busy after University Clubs had their gentlemanly matches.
In any case, Lyoto Machida has studied Shotokan Karate for almost the entirety of his life, and he indicates that he worked hard at that, as well as his grappling study. I’ll be interested in what he has to say about karate as an effective martial art.
Because in his hands, it clearly is an effective martial art, you know? And he says that’s because of his discipline. I tend to believe him:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’d be interested to see what you thought of the videos. I’ve long admired Lyoto for his skill and dedication. When you are THAT diciplined in your craft odds are you will become the best.