With the Mayweather versus McGregor August 26, 2017 fight coming up, there has been increased chatter about point fighting versus full contact as well, but for karate, there are reasons why it is point fighting.
Hi this is Richard Mosdell and this is my daily karate vlog, and today I want to talk about point fighting versus full contact fighting, especially if you talk about being an amateur or being a pro fighter.
So an amateur means you're not going to get paid, maybe on a national team you get some expenses covered, if you're in let's say athletes in 100m sprinting you might get quite a bit of money showing up at an amateur event, but those all become professional players at that point. In fighting, if you're an amateur player there is a say "You're not going to fight if you're going to get injured, if there is the idea that you can get injured on purpose", of course amateur boxing, amateur taekwondo there is the idea of knock out, but you're going into those rules recognizing that a) there is some protection, and b) you've just walked into a situation where with all the safety in the rules there will be a full-contact hit.
But I think what is especially important in the karate world is not to have a romantic notion back 30, 40 years ago everything was done perfect and strong, and we used to knock guys down. There were a lot more injuries. In the rules the way they are now for karate, the safety that was put in the rules to make them point fighting is because of all the injuries of the past, and because people were less trained so that their sparring partners in the dojo in small amateur sport and the fact that the referees had less experience or less training caused more injuries, so the safety is there in the karate competition for sport point fighting.
Here is the other thing we have to remember, if you have soccer mom and soccer dad who are naive to combat sports and they're putting their kids into a combat sport, even if that sport at a high-level allows some sort of full-contact or jujistu or judo allows chokes, the parent has to be made aware of that. If they are not made aware of that and they are naive to what they are getting into, you're going to have a problem.
No matter what you have to make a decision for yourself, if you are a pro fighter being paid to take the risk of being injured, but there are still rules of things that can and can't happen, right in boxing the weight of the gloves.
In karate fighting now especially with the World Karate Federation it is a point fighting exercise and if you are romantically telling your especially younger karate students that in the old days we used to hit really hard and we did it with no gloves and it was a more pure style, you have to be very careful about that because what we're saying is irresponsible, because we don't want someone to think that once we pass the opponent's guard we have to hurt them to prove that we are good at our art.
We shouldn't have to hurt somebody else to make ourselves feel better about anything. This is really important.
It's different in a pro fight because they have to show their technique and they are accepting it, but in the amateur karate world we don't hurt the other person, once you pass the guard you've passed it, and then we pull back the technique, especially in 99.9% of everything we do. So let's think about that, let's not get too romantic about the past because there were a lot of injuries then too and let's make sure we can do a lot more with everyone in the club that's safer today.
I'm Richard Mosdell, thanks for watching my vlog, I appreciate all the comments, I know I put this out on my Facebook page and we got a lot of great feedback, I look forward to talking to you tomorrow.