When first learning karate at a local dojo, many people are afraid of the kumite (sparring) and some people go to karate classes ONLY for the kumite!
But whether you enjoy the sparring, or are petrified, there are certain basic principles that can ease the pain for the people who find the sparring difficult and dramatically increase the fighting effectiveness of the people who are more at ease with this area of the martial arts.
We could go a lot deeper with this, but this is where it all starts.
1. Attitude
2. Reactions
3. Explosiveness
4. Target
5. Impact
6. Distance
7. Control
1. Attitude. When practicing at full intensity, your attitude should be as if your life depended on every karate move.
2. Reactions. Your reactions need to be lightning fast. Reaction training exercises are great for helping in this area.
3. Explosiveness. The start of each karate move should be Shocking! Explode into the move, DO NOT start slowly, then try and gather speed.
4. Accuracy. Obviously, you need to hit the target! Try some target training under pressure.
5. Impact. It is good to hit things! Make sure you have power in your strikes, punch bag, striking pads or makiwara are excellent training devices. There are people learning karate and never hit anything, DO NOT be one of these people.
6. Distance. If your distance is wrong, your karate techniques will be ineffective. Think of a magnifying glass, the sun and a piece of paper. If the sun, magnifying glass and paper are in aligned correctly, the paper WILL burn. So in karate, if your distance is good, your counter attacks and attacks will be effective. Karate classes are great for working on distance, concentrate on the basic sparring exercises, these will give you a good foundation for having correct distance later on.
7. Control. Attacks in the street can be vicious, people can and DO die! Most of the people (animals) who attack innocent people, DO NOT care if their victim lives or dies, in fact, most of these animals will continue attacking until their victim looks dead! This is something that nice people struggle to understand. So if you have been training correctly in the martial arts and some idiot decides to attack you, you may soon find yourself beating the attacker, if this happens, you must know when to stop, or pretty soon they may be locking you up and throwing away the key. Then of course, a nice lump of tax payers cash will be handed to your poor attacker, who will say he was the innocent person and you just started doing all this weird karate stuff, for absolutely no reason at all!
So when you are at the karate dojo next, work on these basic areas in your kumite training and stay safe!
